How do you know these are all chairs?

We make judgments like this constantly: deciding what kind of thing something is, where the boundaries are, and what distinctions matter. Organizations and industries face similar problems. When do new technologies coalesce into a new technological era? How do those understandings shape what organizations do: what research they fund and what strategies they pursue?

 These are the kinds of questions that animate my research.

I study how organizations and industries make sense of and coordinate around technological and institutional change. I am particularly interested in how categories, narratives, and systems of social evaluation shape collective understandings of innovation, adaptation, and entrepreneurship.

My research examines how these shared understandings influence organizational strategy, identity, and industry evolution. I use historical and qualitative methods to study how these dynamics unfold over time.