Profile
| Keywords: | algorithms; ethnography; Big Data; routines; organizational chan |
I am an Associate Professor in the Strategic Management and Organization Department at the University of Alberta. I study the question, How do organizations strategically change practices and culture? Most of my research involves understanding how organizations use analytics, arguments, and analogies to change routines and to create new capabilities.
Theoretical topics of interest include:
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Strategic Management
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Organization Theory
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Culture and Social Cognition
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Strategy-as-Practice
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Family Business
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Institutional Logics
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Performativity and Rationality
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Strategic Change
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Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship
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Routines and Capabilities
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Framing, Arguments, and Analogies
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Algorithms and Analytics
I primarily use qualitative research methods, and have conducted studies in the predictive analytics and online display advertising industries. I have also conducted ethnographic work with an entrepreneurial start-up in the analytics industry. AI4Society Funded ProjectsOutputs
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| Finding Theory –Method Fit: A Comparison of Three Qualitative Approaches to Theory Building, issn= 1056-4926This article, together with a companion video, provides a synthesized summary of a Showcase Symposium held at the 2016 Academy of Management Annual Meeting in which prominent scholars—Denny Gioia, Kathy Eisenhardt, Ann Langley, and Kevin Corley—discussed different approaches to theory building with qualitative research. Our goal for the symposium was to increase management scholars’ sensitivity to the importance of theory–method “fit” in qualitative research. We have integrated the panelists’ prepared remarks and interactive discussion into three sections: an introduction by each scholar, who articulates her or his own approach to qualitative research; their personal reflections on the similarities and differences between approaches to qualitative research; and answers to general questions posed by the audience during the symposium. We conclude by summarizing insights gleaned from the symposium about important distinctions among these three qualitative research approaches and their appropriate usages. University of Alberta | Publication | 2017-05-01 | | | Making Snowflakes Like Stocks: Stretching, Bending, and Positioning to Make Financial Market Analogies Work in Online Advertising, volume= 27Analogies to financial markets have proven powerful in establishing novel or potentially controversial business concepts, even in contexts that deviate significantly from financial markets. This phenomenon challenges theory that suggests analogies work best when elements from a source and target domain map closely to each other. To develop a theory that explains how organizations make initially imperfect analogies “work,” we use a case study of online advertising exchanges, a market-inspired model for buying and selling online advertising space. We find that as organizations stretch an initially misfitting exchange analogy from financial markets to online advertising, they iteratively bend their activities in superficial, structural, and generative ways to match the analogy and position themselves for advantage in the new space being created. Whereas prior studies emphasize shared cognition about familiar domains as the reason why analogies work, our study offers a dynamic account in which stretching, bending, and positioning combine to not only establish the financial market analogy but also subtly change the understanding of markets. University of Alberta | Publication | 2016-07-01 | | | Design Performances : How Organizations Inscribe Artifacts to Change RoutinesOrganizations often create and employ artifacts to intentionally change their routines, but these changes often produce unintended consequences. In this paper, I explore how organizations design artifacts to intentionally change routines by analyzing a series of design performances—organizational actions intended to create an artifact to change a routine. I study this phenomenon by conducting an inductive, ethnographic study that investigates how a law enforcement agency uses a game-theoretic artifact to modify its patrolling routine. I develop a theoretical model that shows how organizational actors use a series of iterative design performances to develop a new sociomaterial assemblage that influences routine dynamics through mechanisms of abstracting grammars of action, exposing assumptions, distributing agency, and appraising outcomes. By empirically studying the practices organizations use to inscribe artifacts to change routines, I introduce theoretical insights that reveal the generativity of design performances and sociomaterial assemblages. University of Alberta | Publication | 2018-01-01 | | | Enchanted Algorithms : The Quantification of Organizational Decision-Making, journal= Dissertation, Marshall School of Business University of Alberta | Publication | 2014-01-01 | | | Topic Modeling in Management Research: Rendering New Theory from Textual DataIncreasingly, management researchers are using topic modeling, a new method borrowed from computer science, to reveal phenomenon-based constructs and grounded conceptual relationships in textual data. By conceptualizing topic modeling as the process of rendering constructs and conceptual relationships from textual data, we demonstrate how this new method can advance management scholarship without turning topic modeling into a black box of complex computer-driven algorithms. We begin by comparing features of topic modeling to related techniques (content analysis, grounded theorizing, and natural language processing). We then walk through the steps of rendering with topic modeling and apply rendering to management articles that draw on topic modeling. Doing so enables us to identify and discuss how topic modeling has advanced management theory in five areas: detecting novelty and emergence, developing inductive classification systems, understanding online audiences and products, analyzing frames and social movements, and understanding cultural dynamics. We conclude with a review of new topic modeling trends and revisit the role of researcher interpretation in a world of computer-driven textual analysis. University of Alberta | Publication | 2019-05-01 | Timothy R. Hannigan, Richard F. J. Haans, Keyvan Vakili, Hovig Tchalian, Vern L. Glaser, Milo Shaoqing Wang, Sarah Kaplan, P. Devereaux Jennings | | Performing Theories, Transforming Organizations: A Reply to Marti and Gond University of Alberta | Publication | 2019-07-01 | | | Goal-Based Categorization: Dynamic Classification in the Display Advertising Industry University of Alberta | Publication | 2019-12-01 | | | Goal-Based Categorization: Dynamic Classification in the Display Advertising Industry University of Alberta | Publication | 2019-12-01 | | | Macrofoundations: Exploring the Institutionally Situated Nature of Activity University of Alberta | Publication | 2020-01-01 | |
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