Meritocracy has become an increasingly popular term. But MIT Sloan Professor Emilio J. Castilla explains in The European Business Review that saying an organization is meritocratic can increase bias.
Professor Eric von Hippel said: "Every field we look at in terms of the basic innovations, about half were done by users. And it's fantastic. Companies very seldom mention the user-developed roots of their innovations. In all our studies, what we find is that the producers lag the users."
When asked how she knew she wanted to be a business school professor, Negin (Nikki) Golrezaei said: "I was drawn to the opportunity to conduct rigorous research on practical and impactful problems in digital platforms. The ability to study these systems analytically and share that knowledge with the next generation through teaching made this career feel like a perfect fit."
Research going back to the 1940s has linked automation to degraded job quality and opportunities for workers, said MIT IDE digital fellow Matt Beane (SM '14, PhD '17). "Generally, the better we get at automating the humans left in the building, especially at low-paid, entry-level frontline jobs, they are, unless very artfully managed, just going to get quite deskilled," said Beane.
Negotiating comes more naturally to some than others. A recent study by associate professor Jackson Lu found that MBA graduates of East Asian and South-East Asian ethnicity had markedly lower salaries than South Asians and whites. The propensity to negotiate among different groups explains the gap; East Asians and South-East Asians who did not try to negotiate were more likely to say they were concerned about damaging the relationship with an employer.
This case study presents an example of a systemic investing approach, charting the Fink family's and ReFED’s transformative journey in US food waste reduction.
Professor Roberto Rigobon and postdoctoral researcher Isabella Loaiza co-authored a study examining the shift in jobs and tasks across the U.S. economy between 2016 and 2024. Rather than dispense with qualities like critical thinking and empathy, workplace technology heightened the need for workers who exhibit those attributes, Loaiza said.
According to a study by professor Arnold Barnett and co-author, aviation safety is dramatically better now than even in the last decade. The chance of dying from air travel has consistently dropped by about 7% annually and continues to go down every decade. The study used data from the Flight Safety Foundation, the World Bank, and the International Air Transport Association.
