OS Seminar

Brian Lucas,  Cornell University ILR School

Details forthcoming.

Rachel Arnett, Wharton

Details forthcoming.

Adina Sterling, Columbia Business School

Details forthcoming.

Aaron Kay, Duke Fuqua

Details forthcoming.

Dan Wang - Columbia Business School 

How Immigration Status Shapes Entrepreneurial Strategy and Ambition 

 How does entrepreneurial strategy vary by a founder's immigration status?  Immigrants are often touted as more entrepreneurial than their non-immigrant peers, but heterogeneity in immigrant status creates variation in access to resources and networks that can factor into venture success.  Immigration status is also a reflection of one’s social position in a host society, permitting some immigrants access to more lucrative economic opportunities and better social services while excluding other immigrants.  With a sample of 1,000 immigrant founders, 65% of whom are undocumented, DACA recipients, or awaiting immigrant status adjustment, I analyze applications they each submitted to a California state-administered program that distributes grants to support the growth of their ventures.  Findings reveal that undocumented immigrants — who represent the group with the most vulnerable immigration status — are most likely to plan for the expansion of their businesses, with a higher proportion of their projected spending devoted to capital expenses (CapEx) relative to operating expenses (OpEx).  Furthermore, from a natural experiment, wherein some applicants received a higher grant amount than they expected, undocumented immigrants were more likely to invest the unanticipated surplus into CapEx (versus OpEx) than immigrants with other status.  These results chart a novel theorization that reveals how immigration status shapes an immigrant founders' critical agency, which in turn, manifests in their decisions about entrepreneurial strategy. 

Nathanael Fast - USC Marshall School of Business 

Purpose-Driven AI: Why it Matters and How Psychology Can Help 

 This talk will examine a) how a purpose-driven approach to designing and deploying AI differs from the current industry approach, b) why a clear focus on purpose is critical for realizing long-term productivity gains from AI, and c) how psychological research can offer needed guidance to stakeholders seeking to advance a purpose-driven approach. I will share recent adoption data from a longitudinal representative study in the U.S. as well as experimental studies examining psychological factors – including identity, perceptions of fairness, and changes in perceived status – that influence employee adoption of AI-driven HR algorithms and algorithmic management in the workplace. 

Jessica Reif - Fuqua School of Business 

Space and structure: The interplay between proximity, unit boundaries, and supervision in shaping workplace interactions 

 Organizations commonly co-locate employees in the same office to foster collaboration, yet spatial interventions often fail to deliver their intended benefits. Conflicting evidence in the proximity and office design literatures highlights the need for a better understanding of when and how physical space shapes workplace interactions, particularly across organizational units. Drawing on theories of attention, we theorize that spatial arrangements and organizational structures intersect to influence employees’ bottom-up and top-down attentional processes. We predict that (1) proximity effects on work-related interactions are stronger for same-unit dyads than cross-unit dyads because organizational relationships determine who is most likely to “stand out” in a busy office environment, and (2) proximity to supervisors reduces cross-unit interactions as employees focus on demonstrating unit-focused productivity to nearby authority figures. This paper reports the results of a field study in which employees were quasi-randomly assigned to desks following a headquarters relocation, creating exogenous variation in proximity between employees from different units and between employees and their supervisors. Results support both hypotheses: proximity had stronger effects on interactions within units than across units, and supervisor proximity constrained cross-unit interactions. This research contributes to the literatures on boundary spanning, physical space, and organizational attention by demonstrating that office design’s impact on collaboration depends critically on the organizational relationships among the employees within the space. 

Priyam Saraf - Stanford Graduate School of Business 

Searching for a Confidant: How Do Family Firms Hire a Professional CEO in Emerging Markets 

Scholars have long puzzled over what appears to be the “inefficient” professionalization of developing economy firms. Family firm owners resist relying on professional, non-family CEOs, leaving much productivity unclaimed. I revisit this puzzle by collecting new data on owners’ subjective evaluations and theorizing the unexamined role of weak legal institutions in shaping their search for non-family CEOs. Drawing on a 20-month field study of Bangladeshi garment exporters—including interviews, ethnographic observations of hiring debriefs, and archival data—I find that the search for a non-family CEO is more than just a process of seeking competence; it is crucially also a process of seeking comfort. Owners recognize external pressures to hire non-family CEOs but fear employee deviance amidst weak contract enforceability. Since a comforting confidant like the outgoing family CEO is hard to find, they seek controllability—a lower likelihood of deviance and greater ease of sanctioning—which mitigates discomfort. Owners see competence as important but delegable to consultants and subordinates (much like their approach with family CEOs), and in many cases, concerns about controllability outweigh concerns about technical and cognitive competence. In the absence of strong legal institutions, I show how owners rely on heuristics—salaryman motivations, structural isolation, and emotional neutrality—to locate controllability in the social category of strangers, whom they hire as non-family CEOs, over sufficiently competent and known locals. I discuss implications for research on professionalization, economic development and entrepreneurship, and hiring.  

Alan Yan - University of California, Berkeley 

The Partisanship of Labor Union Officers 

Labor unions and the Democratic Party have long been allies, yet the share of rank-and-file union members who are Democrats has steadily declined over the past fifty years. Have labor leaders followed suit? I assemble several novel administrative datasets linking over 200,000 unique union officers to voter records from 2014–2023. I find that labor leaders are becoming less Democratic, though Republicans remain underrepresented relative to member partisanship. Local union officers more closely align with members' political affiliations than higher-level officers. Using California teacher and police employment data, I further show that local officers generally mirror their members’ partisanship. I suggest a potential institutional explanation for these trends. Specifically, local union officers are more likely to reflect members’ political views than higher-level officers because federal law only requires local unions to hold direct elections. These findings suggest that union leaders may become less dependable Democratic coalition partners as union members become less Democratic. 

Elena Ayala-Hurtado - Princeton 

Not as Expected: How Struggling College Graduates Navigate Insecurity 

 In this talk, I will be discussing my book project (in progress), which builds on my paper, “Qualities and Configurations of Insecurity in the United States and Spain.” I will present an extension of this analysis and further examine the cross-national consequences of young college graduates’ insecurity. In recent decades, insecurity—that is, employment precarity and economic instability—has become widespread. How do people interpret the conditions of insecurity within their own contexts? Drawing on 164 cross-national interviews with young college graduates in the U.S. and Spain, most of whom were facing insecurity (e.g. unemployment, non-standard employment, low pay, high levels of debt), I analyze how respondents make sense of insecurity. I find that respondents in each national context perceive insecurity as having starkly different qualities. While Spanish respondents perceive their insecurity as narrow, unambiguous, and transitory, American respondents perceive theirs as broad, ambiguous, and recurrent. I develop a framework that illuminates, first, how these perceived qualities of insecurity are underpinned by people’s understandings of the structural conditions of insecurity in each context— or “configurations of insecurity”— and second, the consequences of these perceptions for plans and decision-making. This study examines the meanings ascribed to structural conditions of insecurity, reveals the multidimensionality of perceived insecurity, and develops a framework that elucidates the sources and consequences of those perceptions.