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I am a public management scholar whose research focuses on how technology impacts organizational design and outcomes & how public organizations share data internally and with external stakeholders in order to improve responsiveness. |
Over the past thirty years, public organizations increasingly adopted new digital technologies to delivery public services and interact with the public. My research agenda focuses on how digitalization has changed the bureaucratic structure of government and how public organizations can leverage digital tools to enhance their performance and improve outcomes for their communities, while minimizing the negative effects on the public sector workforce.
Acknowledging the pervasiveness of digitalization, my scholarly work revolves around three research streams, which examine diverse types of digital technologies - from cybersecurity, open data portals and social media to electronic monitoring and e-voting – and their impact on people, organizational processes, and outcomes across a variety of policy domains, including environmental justice and genomics. Each research stream applies both quantitative (e.g., surveys, website coding) and qualitative (e.g., interviews) methods to advance theory development in public management and organization studies and provide practical insights for managers and policy makers.
My first research stream investigates how digital technologies are changing the work and the conditions under which public employees and particularly top-level public managers work. My research finds that digital tools lead to positive outcomes, such as higher election turnout, greater operational efficiency and increased information sharing. However, they come at the cost of increased stress and workload for public managers. Digital tools can also reinforce gendered dynamics in the workplace and threaten innovation when not managed properly. Drawing from a socio-technical approach, my work theorizes how institutional (e.g., policies, practices), organizational (e.g., culture, capacity) and social (e.g., employees’ perceptions and interactions) factors shape technology affordances in the workplace, expanding our understanding of technologies as socially constructed artifacts.
My second research stream examines how public organizations design practices and infrastructures to share data and how power structures in the policy environment define the role and use of data in policymaking. In response to digitalization and institutional reforms, e.g., Obama’s executive order on open data in 2013, my research explores the managerial challenges associated with the implementation of open data as well as the organizational and institutional antecedents of government data sharing with different stakeholders.
Finally, my third research stream expands on the social and institutional factors that contribute to individual choices to share data and other research inputs in data-driven sciences. Digital technologies have led a data revolution in scientific fields, such as biology, genomics, and synthetic biology. Science is a unique setting to understand data sharing as scientists need to collaborate on research while competing for academic recognition and discovery. As government needs evidence-based insights to pivot investment in data-driven science, my research focuses on how formal (e.g., regulations, governance models) and informal (e.g., values) institutions affect sharing behavior among scientists.
Acknowledging the pervasiveness of digitalization, my scholarly work revolves around three research streams, which examine diverse types of digital technologies - from cybersecurity, open data portals and social media to electronic monitoring and e-voting – and their impact on people, organizational processes, and outcomes across a variety of policy domains, including environmental justice and genomics. Each research stream applies both quantitative (e.g., surveys, website coding) and qualitative (e.g., interviews) methods to advance theory development in public management and organization studies and provide practical insights for managers and policy makers.
My first research stream investigates how digital technologies are changing the work and the conditions under which public employees and particularly top-level public managers work. My research finds that digital tools lead to positive outcomes, such as higher election turnout, greater operational efficiency and increased information sharing. However, they come at the cost of increased stress and workload for public managers. Digital tools can also reinforce gendered dynamics in the workplace and threaten innovation when not managed properly. Drawing from a socio-technical approach, my work theorizes how institutional (e.g., policies, practices), organizational (e.g., culture, capacity) and social (e.g., employees’ perceptions and interactions) factors shape technology affordances in the workplace, expanding our understanding of technologies as socially constructed artifacts.
My second research stream examines how public organizations design practices and infrastructures to share data and how power structures in the policy environment define the role and use of data in policymaking. In response to digitalization and institutional reforms, e.g., Obama’s executive order on open data in 2013, my research explores the managerial challenges associated with the implementation of open data as well as the organizational and institutional antecedents of government data sharing with different stakeholders.
Finally, my third research stream expands on the social and institutional factors that contribute to individual choices to share data and other research inputs in data-driven sciences. Digital technologies have led a data revolution in scientific fields, such as biology, genomics, and synthetic biology. Science is a unique setting to understand data sharing as scientists need to collaborate on research while competing for academic recognition and discovery. As government needs evidence-based insights to pivot investment in data-driven science, my research focuses on how formal (e.g., regulations, governance models) and informal (e.g., values) institutions affect sharing behavior among scientists.