I have always been fascinated by life entrepreneurship: how people negotiate changes and new beginnings in their work lives. My research interests revolve around social aspects of learning and sense-making in the context of career transitions and organizational change.

My dissertation investigates job attainment during career changes. I focus on the learning that happens prior to the attempted job entry, where learning is understood as the process of becoming a legitimate participant in the new job. Role learning and identity change are necessary for becoming a legitimate participant of the new community - that is, for being accepted in the new job. I hypothesize that the extent of role learning and identity change (and, by extension, the likelihood of job attainment) will be affected differently by individuals’ social relationships. I am now in the middle of my data collection. A variant of the theory underlining my dissertation was published in the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management.

A central idea that emerges from my dissertation research is that successful transitions depend on specific professional identity claims being articulated and granted. Related to this intuition, Herminia Ibarra and I are working on a paper where we develop the characteristics and functions of narratives in effective identity claiming and granting.

I am also interested in how social structures and practices enable individuals to get their job done well. Together with Charles Galunic, we look at the structures of work relationships and the career logics that lead to strengthened client integration in professional service firms. Finally, I draw on four months of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted during my second year to analyze the practice of organizational identity in everyday life during times of organizational upheaval. John Weeks and I have a chapter published and a paper under s ubmission on this project.