21 Apr 2022

Harvard Business School Announces Inaugural Cohort of Institute for the Study of Business in Global Society Visiting Fellows

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BOSTONHarvard Business School (HBS) has announced the inaugural cohort of the Institute for the Study of Business in Global Society (BiGS) Visiting Fellows, who will be joining the school this fall.

The Institute was established this year to provide a research-based platform to address critical business and societal issues. By integrating and amplifying work already underway at the School and catalyzing new streams of inquiry, it aims to direct the tools and resources of Harvard Business School directly towards the critical areas where business and society overlap and occasionally collide. Rather than presuming a single purpose for the profit-making firm, the Institute will gather a community of scholars, students, practitioners, and policymakers to re-examine and explore the appropriate role for business in a complex and challenging global society.

The BiGS Visiting Fellows are scholarly researchers who will join the School to work on specific projects related to issues of business and society. They will provide intellectual leadership and research support that will accelerate the process of knowledge creation at HBS and leverage the expertise of our faculty. For the 2022 – 23 academic year, the fellowship is dedicated to scholars whose work focuses on issues of race, diversity, inclusion, and inequality.

“The inaugural cohort of BiGS Fellows is made up of rising professors looking at critical issues such as racism in business technologies, inclusion in organizations, bias in legal policies, and the effect of incarceration on employment and entrepreneurship,” said Debora Spar, Jaime and Josefina Chua Tiampo Professor of Business Administration and senior associate dean, Business and Global Society. “They exemplify the mission of BiGS, to shine a light on those areas where business and society intersect, and where research can help make meaningful change.”

The 2022-2023 BiGS Visiting Fellows and their areas of research are:

Stephanie Creary, Assistant Professor of Management, Wharton

2022-2023 BiGS Visiting Fellow Stephanie Creary,
Assistant Professor of Management, Wharton

Creary has been a member of the HBS community since 2007; first as Professor David Thomas’s research associate, then as a member of Professor Robin Ely’s Gender and Race in Organizations (GRO) group, and finally as a race and diversity expert partner to HBS in the School’s ambitious plan to develop and disseminate course material on advancing racial equity in business. She studies the dynamics of inclusion and integration in organizations, such as issues of race, diversity, inclusion, and inequality, and welcomes the opportunity to collaborate with other HBS professors.

“The emergence and impact of inclusion and integration in organizations are key issues in workplaces today that are currently undertheorized both in management and psychological research focused on this area,” noted Creary.

Damon Phillips, Robert Steinberg Professor of Management, Wharton

Phillips, previously a fellow with Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, has proposed research on the relationship between incarceration, employment, and entrepreneurship (including self-employment). He has a particular interest in the fate of the more than 600,000 people who return home from prison each year—especially as most of them are reincarcerated within the first few years.

“My research area incorporates scholarship on entrepreneurship, inequality, labor and employment, poverty, public policy, race, and social enterprise,” said Phillips. “As such, being a BiGS Fellow will give me the opportunity to build symbiotic relationships across HBS around this topic.”

Broderick Turner, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Tech, and Co-Founder, Technology, Race and Prejudice (T.R.A.P.) Lab

Turner’s research explores how race and racism are built into markets, business systems, and technology. The T.R.A.P. Lab has developed an algorithm audit platform which collects data about the outcome of an algorithm within a particular context, and then assesses its impact on its users. The platform studies facial and emotion recognition and can help uncover the racial bias in algorithms used by social media platforms, which may have coded rules that alter which faces are seen by users.

2022-2023 BiGS Visiting Fellow Broderick Turner, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Tech, and Co-Founder, Technology, Race and Prejudice (T.R.A.P.) Lab

“I think the work we’re doing in the T.R.A.P. Lab can not only enhance the academic conversation around algorithms, and algorithmic bias, but importantly, might prevent the harms that can befall racialized and vulnerable populations who may be misrepresented on the ‘free’ parts of the internet,” Turner stated.

Jamillah Williams, Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown

2022-2023 BiGS Visiting Fellow Jamillah Williams,
Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown

As a sociologist and legal scholar, Williams investigates the effectiveness of various legal, policy, and organizational interventions designed to reduce bias and enhance equity and inclusion. While she specializes in workplace and economic inequality, she is interested in exploring the nature and effects of contemporary bias (structural, explicit, implicit) across a range of contexts.

Williams was previously recognized with the 2021 Michael J. Zimmer memorial award, an honor presented annually to a rising scholar in the field of employment and labor law who demonstrates a commitment to community and workplace justice. She was also named a 2022 Gender+ Justice Fellow at Georgetown, a network of scholars engaging in interdisciplinary research related to intersectional issues of gender, racial, and economic justice.

“As a BiGS Fellow, I think I will bring a unique theoretical and empirical research perspective that is timely, relevant to current events, and has potential to disrupt mainstream approaches to organizational inequality in a way that inspires broader organizational and systemic change,” Williams commented.

2022-2023 BiGS Visiting Fellow Chyei Vinluan, Postdoctoral Fellow of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

Chyei Vinluan, currently a postdoctoral fellow of business administration in both the Negotiation, Organizations, and Markets and Organizational Behavior units at HBS, will also join the BiGS Fellows for the next academic year.

Contacts

Mark Cautela
mcautela+hbs.edu
617-495-5143

About Harvard Business School

Founded in 1908 as part of Harvard University, Harvard Business School is located on a 40-acre campus in Boston. Its faculty of more than 250 offers full-time programs leading to the MBA and PhD degrees, as well as more than 175 Executive Education programs, and Harvard Business School Online, the School’s digital learning platform. For more than a century, faculty have drawn on their research, their experience in working with organizations worldwide, and their passion for teaching, to educate leaders who make a difference in the world. The School and its curriculum attract the boldest thinkers and the most collaborative learners who will go on to shape the practice of business and entrepreneurship around the globe.