Knowledge and Knowing in Expert Communities

I'm interested in analyzing how knowledge and knowing in expert communities relate to social processes at the level of these communities and the field. This research program dovetails with my interest in computational methods for qualitative research.

Some Research Questions:

Do organizational leaders impact the innovativeness of knowledge produced by teams?

Do administrative leaders of organizations with knowlege creating teams have a measurable effect on the structure and vocabularies in texts produced by these teams? Do they affect the distinctiveness of texts produced by an organization? Is there evidence for field-level isomorphic pressures on the discursive practices of knowledge producing organizations that manifest as heteromorphic or isomorphic trends in semantic structure? Do organizations become more isorphic relative to the field over time? 

To address these questions, I'm using computational methods to measure distinctiveness in texts, and a hypothetico deductive research methodology. I have a manuscript that I am working through, and will attempt at submitting to a conference.

How have vocabularies around technology been enrolled in management research over time?

Here, I want to do a more or less traditional systematic literature review. The less traditional part is that I will incorporate machine classification and representation as part of my analysis. 

Check out my initial explorations here.

How does the knowledge of a field, encoded in its texts, evolve over time?

This study is based on the core assumpton that knowledge produced by a member (or group of members) of an epistemic community existing within a field at some point of time is some function of a) the knowledge produced by that community at a previous point in time, b) the structure of the epistemic community and its relation to the field at large, and c) some within- and between-community semantic inheritance process.

I'm thinking of this as the study of the spread and inheritance of semantic structure in socially produced knowledge across a longitudinal contributor network where edges are dated coauthored documents.