Research

Published

Narrative Affordances: What Stories Can and Cannot Do
Academy of Management Annals, 2025

I review of 40 years of management research to explore what narratives can accomplish for core organizational functions — making meaning, persuading, sharing, and coordinating — and the limits that constrain them.

Preparing for Submission

When Short Stories Are Long: Narrative Strategy Under Uncertainty (working title)
With Georg Rilinger (equal authorship)

Scholars tend to view narratives as heuristics that reduce complexity. Clear, consistent, and well-supported stories are seen as most effective in shaping market valuation. Yet activist short sellers, financial-market contrarians who depend on rapid market revaluations, often publish layered, rhetorically complex reports with mixed evidence. In this paper we explore why, leveraging qualitative coding and machine learning to analyze over 700 reports, financial data, media coverage and interviews with activist short sellers. We theorize about strategic communication under uncertainty and contribute to research on classification, valuation, and narrative.

Contesting Consensus: Activist Short Sellers’ Identity as a Resource (working title)

I explore how professionals contest consensus leveraging interviews and media coverage to construct a 35-year case study of activist short selling (1990–2025).

Stories Within Stories: How Entrepreneurs’ Concrete Anecdotes Enhance Versus Undermine Credibility (working title)

This paper contributes to a debate about the efficacy of strategic storytelling for organizations and entrepreneurs. Leveraging qualitative analysis of 100 entrepreneur-investor interactions at three pitch events, I focuses on the concrete anecdotes in pitches, analyzing the symbolic and persuasive work they accomplish, and how investors respond to them. I find that not all entrepreneurs tell stories, not all stories resonate with investors, and even resonant stories can be dismissed as irrelevant for the investment decision. Based on the lines of questions that entrepreneurs receive from investors, I hypothesize that the familiar Aha! moments and origin stories are less compelling than more distinctive, detailed stories about personal commitment, customer problems, and product trials. Building on existing research, I theorize 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. By unpacking the high-level concept of storytelling, and analyzing the full range of investor responses to it, I contribute to research on entrepreneurship, impression management, and narrative.

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.