Job Market Paper

Attention Allocation in Online Communities

Online communities are increasingly important sites of social and economic life. These communities depend on the attention of member resources in order to survive. This article asks the question: how is attention allocated in online communities? Early work highlighted a key promise of the internet: to counteract homogenizing cultural forces in society and provide a more egalitarian context for a greater diversity of content to find an audience. A large body of literature has found instead that the allocation of attention online resembles resource allocation in many offline settings: characterized by power-law distributions in which a few offerings attract the bulk of attention. Moving beyond just the distribution of attention, I undertake an ecological analysis of online communities, measuring the location of communities both in a structural resource space of users as well as in a cultural topic space based on language. In line with past work, I find that the most generic communities attract the bulk of attention. However, my study identifies a new pattern: by examining community location in the ecology, I find that niche communities are not relegated to the periphery of the ecology, but rather can succeed in the very center, right next to the most dominant, generic communities. This suggests a significant difference in how the allocation of attention occurs online, and a means through which online platforms provide space for culturally diverse communities to flourish.

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Papers Under Review

Concerted Quantification: How Expert Teams Reconcile Overwork and Client Satisfaction (with Vanessa Conzon)

R&R at Organization Science

White-collar employees are increasingly overworking, with negative individual and organizational consequences. Pressures for long intense hours often come from clients and are reinforced by coworkers’ concertive controls, and the increasing quantification of work has, in many cases, tightened such controls. We examine if and how employees might rely upon quantification to, in contrast, limit overwork. We draw on data from a 21-month ethnography of teams of IT professionals who work for clients in finance. We find that while these workers faced pressure to overwork, they managed this tension through a process we label “concerted quantification.” In this process, team members commensurate tasks into smaller numeric units that are then summed into a larger numeric figure that represents the work the team will accomplish in a two-week period. They then leverage this quantification in two ways: to openly justify maintaining their workload, particularly when facing peer pressure to take on more work, by pointing to numbers as collective, codified team decisions; and to obscure work changes from clients. To support these actions, workers legitimize quantification to clients. Overall, we find that quantifying processes both (a) help teams determine an appropriate amount of work to take on without engaging in overwork, and (b) set clients’ expectations of success in this context of expert, professional work. We contribute to research on overwork, concertive control, and quantification by highlighting how quantification, through opaqueness and transparency, can allow white-collar workers to limit overwork.

Working Papers

Narrating Value: How Staff Professionals Form Embedded Relationships with Line Workers

This paper examines how staff professionals can form embedded relationships with line workers. Common organizational narratives paint the work of staff professionals as peripheral to core organizational goals, fueling conditions of low status and authority that make it difficult for staff professionals to win the cooperation of line workers. Past research has shown that staff professionals can achieve some authority by establishing client service relationships with line workers. On its own, however, such an approach emphasizes staff-line distinctions, reinforcing existing narratives and limiting relational development. Drawing on an 18-month ethnographic study of environmental, health, and safety practices within a university setting, this paper illustrates a multistage, interactional process through which staff professionals changed existing narratives and built embedded partnerships that served as the basis of greater contribution. First, similar to past work, staff professionals built a foundation of authority—doing so by approaching short, simple interactions with line workers as service transactions. Then, staff professionals developed embedded relationships by approaching lengthy, complex interactions as collaborations, engaging in a process of knowledge sharing to co-create core work. Over time, staff professionals cemented their position as integral contributors to core work processes—change reflected in both narrative and relational development.

Beyond Representation: Extending the Effectiveness of Diversity Approaches via Individuation (with Ray Reagans)

Organizations face two main options for managing diversity: a “colorblind” approach that minimizes differences by valuing equality and a “multicultural” approach that highlights, and thereby values, differences. Emerging research emphasizes the importance of demographic representation in shaping the appeal of either approach to women and people of color. While this helps to make sense of why these groups respond better to different approaches, it introduces a tradeoff. Because these groups are usually represented at different levels within organizations, managers may have to choose between creating a culture that benefits women or people of color, but not both. Building on a connection between representation and a more general idea of individuation, this paper argues that individuation offers a more malleable contingency along which the effectiveness of a diversity approach varies. The benefit of a more malleable contingency is that it enables managers to foster alignment. We predict that this alignment will in turn enable a single diversity approach to work for all demographic groups. In an experiment, we find support for our predictions. First, we find that the effectiveness of a diversity approach varies with individuation. Second, we find that aligning different demographic groups on their level of individuation softens the tradeoff between choosing a “colorblind” or “multicultural” approach, such that all groups perform as well or better under one approach compared to the other.

Works in Progress

“Collective Action Online: Networks and Language of a Virtual Investor Movement.”

“Social and Cultural Networks in Digital Crowdfunding Platforms.”

“Community Moderation and User Engagement on Reddit.”

“Sources of Cultural Change in Online Communities.”

“Keeping Time: Interaction Scripts as Coordinating Mechanisms for Self-Organizing Teams.” (with Vanessa Conzon)

“What Day is It and Who Cares about the Date? Social Media Expressions of Temporal Disorientation Before and After Pandemic Onset.” (with Ezra Zuckerman Sivan and Catresa Barlow)