Research
Published
Narrative Affordances: What Stories Can and Cannot Do
Academy of Management Annals, 2025
A review of 40 years of management research theorizing what narratives can accomplish for core organizational functions — making meaning, persuading, sharing, and coordinating — and the limits that constrain them.
Preparing for Submission
Not All Good Stories Make Good Investments: Why Symbols Need Substance to Be Credible and Legitimating
Qualitative analysis of 100 entrepreneur-investor interactions at three pitch events, focused on the concrete anecdotes in pitches and how investors respond to them. It analyzes the recurring narrative tropes that define the genre, demonstrating that the familiar Aha! moments and origin stories are less persuasive than more distinctive, detailed stories about personal commitment, customer problems, and product trials. Based on the lines of questions from investors, this paper develops hypotheses about when stories strengthen versus undermine credibility — arguing that it depends on whether investors perceive them as complements or substitutes for data and argument claims.
Navigating the Classificatory Void: Why Activist Short Sellers Tell Messy Stories
With Georg Rilinger (equal authorship)
Examines how activist short sellers structure narrative reports to catalyze stock sell-offs. Contrary to prior research, finds that effective reports are rhetorically elaborate and unevenly-evidenced rather than concise and consistently well-evidenced. Identifies a tradeoff between communication structures that persuade versus those that coordinate investor behavior.
Institutionalized Strangers: How Activist Short Sellers Cultivate Outsiderness to Purvey Novel Information to the Market (working title)
With Georg Rilinger
Examines how activist short sellers cultivate and maintain outsider status as a strategic asset rather than a liability to overcome. Drawing on a 35-year case study (1990–2025), argues that these “institutionalized strangers” leverage technical expertise alongside deliberate markers of illegitimacy to preserve the functional autonomy needed to publish critical information on corporate misconduct that insiders cannot. Suggests that successful intervention in a field may depend not on assimilation but on a strategic hybridization of competence and behavioral defiance.
Working Papers
From Defense to Offense: The De-Stigmatization of Dual-Use Entrepreneurship and Investing (working title)
With Fiona Murray. Status: Data collection.
Entrepreneurship as Economic Development: A Causal Evaluation of a Rural, State-Sponsored Accelerator and Pitch Competition
With Ethan Poskanzer. Status: Data collection.