Alan Zhang

I am an Assistant Professor in the Management Division of the Columbia Business School at Columbia University, teaching Foundations of Entrepreneurship. My research seeks to advance organizational theories of work in an era of unrelenting digital, environmental, and social change. My interests revolve around an issue typical of contemporary production processes: many long-standing goods and services have become familiar and recognizable, despite actual production methods having changed substantially from the past and no longer matching what most audiences would expect.

Using primarily qualitative methodologies (e.g., ethnographic observations, interviews, archival analyses), I study the discrepancies between internal and external understandings of production, and specifically the influence this has on internal production work. So, while my research attends to production insiders and the changing nature of production work, my focus is on identifying the influence that outsiders have (e.g. prevailing audience beliefs, broader social norms, existing category definitions and representations) on internal production practices. To date, I have investigated a broad range of production sites—including fine wine, nuclear energy, emergency services, and geospatial analytics—where production processes have been affected as much by the lay understandings of outsiders as by the expertise of insiders.

My research has won several distinctions and awards, including the Grigor McClelland Doctoral Dissertation Award, Best Student Paper at the Academy of Management, and runner-up (2nd place) for both the Industry Studies Association Dissertation Award and the Louis Pondy Best Dissertation Paper Award.