I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where I am a faculty affiliate of AI at Wharton and the Center on Digital Culture and Society. My research centers on the relationship between work, technology, organizations, and political economy in the age of AI. More broadly, my research and teaching interests include the sociology of work, technology and society, economic sociology, qualitative research methods, organizations, and sociological theory.
My new book, Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality, investigates the role of financiers in shaping our technological future. I draw on 19 months of participant-observation research to examine how investors’ demand for rapid growth created organizational problems that managers solved by combining high-tech systems with low-wage human labor. The book shows how the burdens imposed on startups by venture capital—as well as the benefits and costs of “moving fast and breaking things”—are unevenly distributed across a company’s workforce and customers. With its focus on the financialization of innovation, Behind the Startup explains how the gains generated by tech startups are funneled into the pockets of a small cadre of elite investors and entrepreneurs. To promote innovation that benefits the many rather than the few, I argue that we should focus less on fixing the technology and more on changing the financial infrastructure that supports it.
Articles based on this research have been awarded the 2019 W. Richard Scott Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the ASA's Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work, and the 2021 Star-Nelkin Paper Award from the ASA’s Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology. My research has been supported by the Upjohn Institute, the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, and the UC Berkeley Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. My work has been featured in the Financial Times, Fast Company, Axios, and in a publication of the World Economic Forum.
