For additional information about the M&O Seminars, please contact Shelly Whitmer at [email protected].
Monday, February 2
Dashun Wang, Northwestern
Title: Partisan disparities in the use, trust, funding, production, and uptake of science
Abstract: Scientific knowledge plays a central role in addressing societal challenges, from public health and economic growth to climate change and national security. At the same time, science is embedded in political institutions that shape which research is funded, how evidence is mobilized in policy, and how scientific knowledge reaches the public. Despite the growing importance of science for governance, our understanding of how political institutions and polarization shape these interactions remains limited. In this talk, I present a research agenda that examines partisan disparities across multiple interfaces between science and society, spanning the public funding of research, the use of science in policy, trust of science among political elites, and the production and uptake of scientific knowledge. Drawing on large-scale data linking scientific publications, policy documents, appropriations, campaign contributions, and voting records in the United States, this work documents systematic and persistent partisan differences in the amount, content, and character of science that is funded, cited, and engaged with across the political spectrum and across the sciences. Together, these findings point to a set of fundamental tensions in contemporary science–policy relations. Amidst rising political polarization and science’s growing role in society, this research uncovers systematic partisan disparities in the use, trust, funding, production, and uptake of science, which may have wide-ranging implications for science and society at large.
Time: 11:30 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.
Location: B1590 Corner Commons
Monday, February 9
Ya-Ru Chen, Cornell
Title: What influences leaders’ effectiveness in multicultural teams: Effects of leaders’ global identity, relative national status, warmth, and competence
Abstract: In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s continuing war in Ukraine, recurrent instability in the Middle East, intensifying U.S.–China strategic competition, and renewed protectionist pressures associated with tariff and sanctions politics, scholars and policymakers have increasingly questioned whether the world economy is entering a period of deglobalization. Yet the emerging evidence points to a more qualified pattern: rather than a wholesale reversal of globalization, global interdependence appears to be reconfigured through “derisking,” supply-chain diversification, and geopolitical realignment, while cross-border flows of goods, services, capital, people, and data remain substantial. Accordingly, a central strategic challenge for multinational firms is less whether globalization is ending and more how to capture the benefits of global interconnection under heightened geopolitical constraints, sanctions exposure, and recurring regional disruptions. To navigate this evolving global landscape, multinational firms increasingly rely on multicultural teams to deploy talent and resources across borders. However, culturally diverse team dynamics often generate disagreement and mistrust as a consequence of disruptive social categorization processes and hierarchical dynamics derived from identity and cultural status differences. Effective leadership can minimize these potential conflicts and collaboration losses, allowing firms to reap the benefits of multicultural teams. However, despite the important role of effective leaders in multicultural teams, empirical and theoretical research on antecedents of leadership effectiveness in multicultural team contexts is scarce. Our research studies were designed to redress this deficiency in the literature. Specifically, integrating identity-based leadership research (Lord & Hall, 2005; Lisak, Erez, Sui, & Lee, 2016) and social evaluation literatures (e.g., Abele, Ellemers, Fiske, Koch, & Yzerbyt, 2020), we predicted and found support from two field studies for the positive effects of leaders’ global identity and relative cultural status on their leadership effectiveness (as evaluated by their multicultural team members), which was mediated by their perceived competence and warmth. In particular, relative cultural status of the leader had a positive effect on perceived competence, which in turn led to perceived leadership effectiveness. Moreover, relative cultural status moderated (strengthened) the positive impact of warmth on perceived leadership effectiveness.
Time: 11:30 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.
Location: B1590 Corner Commons
Monday, February 16
Tiffany Trzebiatowski, Colorado State
Title: Social Capital Under Gendered Constraint: Push, Pull, and the Unequal Conversion of Networking into Opportunity
Abstract: Women professionals in male-dominated occupations face persistent challenges in accessing and converting social capital critical for career success. Extant research emphasizes strategic networking and access to high-status ties yet largely overlooks the agentic social capital strategies women develop under conditions of constrained professional legitimacy. Drawing on interview data from associates and partners in AmLaw 200 firms, this study theorizes how unequal professional legitimacy shapes the emergence of distinct social capital strategies. We show that men experience pull-based opportunity access as a default, interpreting subsequent returns through individualized attributions such as personality, ability, or luck. In contrast, women, particularly racialized women associates, encounter constrained legitimacy that compels push-based activation of opportunities through asking, rendering access contingent and discretionary. Our findings identify five distinct social capital strategies used by women that emerge under constraint and further differentiate those strategies that facilitate legitimacy accumulation and indirect access to business opportunities from those that fail to convert into career-relevant returns. We further show how race, organizational role, and context shape whether social capital efforts compound into advantage or remain blocked. By theorizing social capital strategies under constraint, this study advances research on gender inequality and social capital, explaining when and why strategies translate into career success.
Time: 11:30 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.
Location: B1590 Corner Commons
Monday, March 30
Lakshmi Ramarajan, HBS
Title: Compartmentalizers, Lucky Men and Tough Women: How Professionals Disappear or Keep Visible Gender Discrimination and Advantage in Their Own Careers
Abstract: Discrimination against women remains common in male-dominated professions, yet people tend not to acknowledge its impacts for career inequality. Analyzing interviews with 125 journalists, we develop novel theory on how people disappear or keep visible gender discrimination and advantage in their own career accounts. We show how most participants (102/125) recognized the existence of gender discrimination in the profession, and perceived it as threatening professionals’ competence and belonging. Yet, people varied in how they defended against these threats when accounting for their own career progress. Discrimination and advantage and their real and potential harms, slipped in and out of people’s career accounts: some women and men compartmentalized discrimination, some men substituted luck for advantage, and some women centered discrimination-countering practices. Further, all accounts attributed career progress to merit (skills and performance). This variability in professionals’ inclusion of discrimination and advantage in attributions for their own career progress contrasted with their recognition of discrimination’s presence in the profession. Moreover, discrimination’s inconsistent presence contrasted with the consistency of merit across accounts. We theorize these contradictions as evidence of an individual-level process of disappearance of gender discrimination, and specify contextual conditions that shape people’s accounts (employment structure and close personal relationships). (With Erin Reid)
Time: 11:30 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.
Location: B1590 Corner Commons
Monday, April 6
Yonghoon Lee, Texas A&M
Title: Creative Identity, Network Brokerage, and Success in Perilous Careers
Abstract: In the project-based perilous careers of creatives, what helps people to survive in the career may not help them succeed. I explore how developing a more generalist creative identity through a diversified portfolio of prior works can have an opposite effect on survival (as continuing a career) and success (as getting hits) depending on creatives’ network brokerage. Specifically, I argue that developing a diversified portfolio makes creatives’ survival more challenging, but when it is built with network brokerage it increases their chance of success in the ever-changing creative markets through shrewd creativity. Supporting evidence comes from examining the careers of Korean popular music songwriters, freelancers who need to find and select projects and collaborators. I find that songwriters with a diversified portfolio of prior work are less likely to have a new release. However, the likelihood of a market hit increases with the diversity in their work portfolio when their network is less constrained. This evidence is supplemented with additional findings: the effect of a diversified portfolio with network brokerage is more pronounced during the time when the market experiences great shift. Delving into the mechanism, songwriters with a more diverse portfolio and network brokerage write songs that differ from current hits, although writing novel songs to current hits tend to lower the chance of success, in general, suggesting that they have a shrewd creativity that captivates the market audience. Finally, I find that songwriters with a more focused portfolio and network closure can also be successful but most at a later stage of their career, suggesting that resilient survival can be an alternative path to success in a perilous career.
Time: 11:30 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.
Location: B1590 Corner Commons
Monday, April 13
Ben Quist, MO
Title: Life Happens to Everyone: How Normalizing Our Experiences Affects Our Emotions
Abstract: Dealing with difficult life experiences and emotions is a universal challenge. Normalization - the process of viewing one’s experiences as typical - is commonly assumed to be an adaptive regulatory process. However, little research has directly tested this notion. Across three pre-registered experiments, we examine whether normalization reduces negative emotions. In Study 1 (N = 249), participants assigned to the normalization condition reported lower negative emotion than those in the relive condition. Study 2 (N = 784) replicated these effects and tested vulnerability to negative emotion as a moderator. Study 3 (N = 568) extends this work by addressing whether normalizing positive experiences makes them any less positive. The findings across all three studies indicate that normalizing one's emotional experience is a process that reliably attenuates negative emotions linked to difficult experiences. The findings also suggest that normalization may have a role to play in decreasing feelings of loneliness.
Time: 11:30 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.
Location: B1590 Corner Commons
Monday, April 20
Sridhar Polineni, MO
Title: A Luddite in the Age of Prometheans: AI, Occupational Closure, and the Erosion of Jurisdictional Wage Premiums
Abstract: The original Luddites were skilled workers who opposed the deployment of technology in ways that undermined craft protections, displaced skilled workers, and reduced the returns to expertise. Today, the growing use of AI technologies has revived similar concerns. Recent research identifies simplification, i.e., the reduction of skill requirements for task performance, as an important channel for AI’s effects on wages and employment. However, these effects are far from uniform. Yet it remains unclear why some occupations are buffered against these effects while others are not. I address this question by integrating two literatures that have developed largely in isolation: the economics of AI-driven labor market change and the sociology of occupational closure. Drawing on Abbott’s (1988) theory of professional jurisdictions and Weeden’s (2002) closure framework, I argue that AI erodes wage premiums by simplifying expertise that sustains jurisdictional claims, and that closure mechanisms such as credentialism, licensing, and certification buffer this erosion. Using panel data on 771 occupations spanning 1999 to 2024 and three identification strategies (differences-in-differences, shift-share instruments, and time-varying AI exposure), I find that simplification drives the negative wage effect of AI exposure, and occupations with stronger institutional protections experience less wage erosion. Occupations more exposed to simplification show rising employment alongside declining wages, with wage declines concentrated at lower levels where new entrants crowd in. The effects of AI exposure intensify over time, fall disproportionately on female-dominated occupations and entry-level positions, and are buffered when tasks involve tacit knowledge that resists codification. Data from Indeed job postings provide additional support for these findings, and the results replicate across nine countries. These findings offer an institutional account of the heterogeneous effects of AI exposure and identify occupational closure as a moderator of how AI reshapes professional labor markets.
Time: 11:30 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.
Location: B1590 Corner Commons