Research
I study the dynamics of funding and working in prosocial organizations, including how people sustain careers that attempt to address fundamental societal problems and how funders influence the topography of the field. I design, collect, and analyze rich multi-method field studies that iterate between ethnographic engagements that identify detailed processes to generate theory and large-scale data that help to test and illustrate broader patterns. Insights gleaned from this approach offer explanations for neglected or misunderstood dynamics and allow me to contribute new theoretical insights to positive organizational scholarship and the study of meaningful work, work-family research, nonprofit studies, and organizational theory, moving these fields forward.
work and employment
Social inequities are pervasive throughout our country and globe. Simultaneously, numerous individuals in mission-driven organizations are working to ameliorate suffering and make institutions more equitable. Increasingly, there is a socio-cultural expectation that mission-driven work will simultaneously help others, serve as an outlet for value expression and identity affirmation, and provide a career and income. While that is a tall order for any workplace, my research examines the tensions that arise for workers who hold these expectations and the resulting implications for their wellbeing, their non-work relationships, their careers, and their clients to understand the unique nature of human resource dynamics in meaningful, mission-driven work, where employee well-being can also affect some of the world’s most vulnerable people. My scholarship in this stream overhauls dominant frameworks that identify altruism as the ideal driving force behind prosocial work and disrupts theories that assume that ambitious perceptions of power and agency will fuel greater change.
Philanthropy
The field of mission-driven work is shaped by philanthropic donors’ decisions regarding which organizations receive money and which do not. Moreover, they are also very difficult to study, due to their secrecy and power. I develop long-term relationships with funders and their communities and leverage those relationships to develop datasets that enable me to examine the internal organizational dynamics and grant making decisions of private philanthropy. I investigate these questions in order to understand how they shape the creation, disruption, and maintenance of nonprofit organizations, social movements, and civil society.
professionalization
I study the dynamics of professionalization within the nonprofit sector, examining both organization and field-level focus on monitoring and measuring “social impact” and individual-level shifts in motivational work values and the resultant impact on workforce dynamics.