Organizations cannot operate without categories. They decide who counts as an owner, which candidate appears talented, what a customer is likely to want, and which measure will stand in for performance. These simplifications make decisions possible. They can also conceal important differences, transfer risk, and allow a model to solve the wrong problem with impressive precision.

My research examines the distance between institutional categories and lived experience. Across small proprietorship, employee selection, leadership communication, and customer strategy, I am interested in how organizations define value, distribute risk, and decide whose knowledge counts.

This agenda draws on more than two decades of experience in marketing, customer strategy, technology, and organizational leadership, together with graduate study in business and communication. Practice supplies the puzzles; research provides a more disciplined way to investigate them.

Areas of Inquiry

Small proprietors and constrained autonomy

Small-business ownership is commonly described as independence. For many proprietors, however, ownership means accepting responsibility for risks while remaining dependent on actors they do not control: landlords, franchisors, lenders, suppliers, platforms, family members, and local economic conditions.

My work examines small proprietorship as a form of constrained autonomy. I am particularly interested in how proprietors understand independence, how they absorb business closures and economic shocks, and how public policy treats formal ownership as though it were a substitute for security.

Selection, assessment, and organizational judgment

Employers routinely convert complex judgments about ability and potential into scores, rankings, interview impressions, and stories about “fit.” I study what these devices reveal, what they leave unmeasured, and how confidently organizations generalize from one to the other.

Current interests include cognitive testing in employee selection, the incremental value of assessments within real hiring systems, and the gap between jobs as advertised and jobs as performed. I am also interested in narrative capitalism: the tendency to favor candidates who offer a compelling story of visionary leadership over quieter operators whose contributions may be less theatrical but more reliable.

Leadership, communication, and contested decisions

Organizational decisions are often presented as the orderly result of evidence and analysis. In practice, they also reflect language, hierarchy, identity, and the power to define the problem before anyone begins solving it.

I examine how leadership frames shape negotiation, ethical judgment, and participation. Particular interests include zero-sum assumptions between owners and employees, militarized leadership language, destructive leadership, and the communication practices through which some perspectives become authoritative while others are treated as resistance.

Questions Guiding My Work

• How does zero-sum framing affect negotiation choices, ethical judgments, and post-negotiation regret?
• Why do organizations sometimes prefer visionary narratives to operational precision, even when prior results are uncertain?
• How closely do job descriptions correspond to the work employees eventually perform, and how does that gap affect applicant decisions and perceived fit?
• What does a cognitive assessment add to an existing hiring process—and does it sample the capabilities the job actually demands?
• How do small proprietors experience ownership when control over their businesses is distributed among institutions and stakeholders elsewhere?

Approach

My emerging research agenda combines experimental vignettes, interviews, text analysis, case-based inquiry, and organizational data. The method should follow the problem: experiments can isolate the effects of a particular frame, while qualitative and textual evidence can reveal assumptions that a predefined measure would miss.

Across methods, the governing concern remains the same: whether the categories organizations use correspond closely enough to the people, relationships, and decisions they are intended to describe.

Research and Collaboration

I welcome conversations with researchers and practitioners working in organizational behavior, entrepreneurship, employment relations, marketing, leadership communication, and employee selection—particularly where institutional models and lived experience produce different accounts of the same situation.