Local institutions, collaboration and new field formation: The case of Slow Money

Academy of Management ONE Division, Finalist at Doctoral Dissertation Award (2018)

My dissertation, a two-year-long ethnography that examines the creation of local and regional sustainable food systems, focuses on the role local institutions and agency play when individuals with different backgrounds collaborate in newly emerging markets.

The research examines how the local context shapes micro-level interactions among a field’s actors, and ultimately affects the vocabularies, meanings, and practices used in an emerging field. My empirical setting is Slow Money, a non-profit organization started in 2008 that connects small-scale farmers and food entrepreneurs with local investors across the United States.  

Dissertation Committee: Prof. Beth A. Bechky (Chair, NYU Stern), Prof. Gino Cattani (NYU Stern), Prof. Renee Rottner (UCSB)

Click here for a poster of my job market paper (presented at SMS Berlin, Sep 2016)