research
I'm a graduate student in the Strategy and Organization Area of the PhD Program at the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University. My supervisor is Samer Faraj.
I'm fascinated by knowledge - how it manifests, evolves, is marshalled, and how we talk about it. I have three intertwined programs of inquiry related to organizational knowledge and expertise: First, I'm interested in how organizations inscribe expertise and tacit knowing in socio-technical systems, and how digital technologies in turn produce new forms of knowing and expertise. Second, I am interested in exploring the role of expertise enactments in organizational primitives such as innovation, coordination, decision-making, and control. Third, I'm interested in expert discourse and how vocabularies and grammars can shape expertise at a societal level. I like to explore questions related to these programs of inquiry using a variety of empirical methods, usually in healthcare or other public sector settings.
Please see my Google Scholar page for recent publications. My current research is organized into the following projects:
The knowing that matters: Entangling expertise and AI development for healthcare coordination
My doctoral dissertation research monograph is based on a qualitative comparative field study of OR scheduling and AI technology development at two hospitals. Preliminary findings suggest a crucial role of local expertise arrangements in shaping early instantiations of "expert" technologies, and highlight the challenges of articulating tacit knowledge in the context of developing emerging technologies. This project has produced two conference proceedings and is featured in a symposium on AI and Expertise I helped organize at the 2024 Academy of Management annual meeting.
Coordinating the frontline in a multi-front crisis
This project is based on a qualitative field study of how a frontline hospital coordinated an organization-wide response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Preliminary findings reveal how coordinators enact the conditions for emergent, interdependent work during extended and evolving crises. This project has produced two conference proceedings. I'm currently preparing two manuscripts based on this study for submission to journals.
An ecology of knowledge in expert communities
This early stage project explores how knowledge emerges, is inherited, and evolves across a dynamic expert community. The source of the analytic metaphor driving this project is the single stranded RNA virus, the only category of life where ecological and evolutionary processes unfold at similar timescales.
This project is associated with the knowledge artifact JRNLS. Prototypes of this artifact have been used by senior scholars and students to conduct machine-assisted literature analyses, including one featured in Faraj, S., & Leonardi, P. M. (2022). Strategic organization in the digital age: Rethinking the concept of technology. Strategic Organization, 20(4), 771-785. JRNLS will be added to my existing open-source contributions.