I do not have a clear research identity as I focus on two research streams that are both important to my identity: ideology in management and China-Africa relations. Ideally I will be able to combine them in the future but for now they are separate parts of who I am as a scholar.
The first chapter of my dissertation, coauthored with former IESE Ph.D. Candidate Xabier Barriola, analyzes the role of owner ideology in organizational discrimination. Titled “Other than the racism, I liked the city: The role of ideology in organizational hiring,” we explored the intersection between political and racial ideology by examining perimetric employees, who are employees who contribute marginally to organizational goals and are viewed as fundamentally expendable, to tease out the role of ideology in this organizational setting. We utilized this concept because there are many factors that go into the hiring and retention process and this eliminates many alternative explanations. Using Federal Election Commission (FEC) donations as a proxy for ideology of National Basketball Association (NBA) owners. we identified all NBA owners from 2000 through 2020 and downloaded their donation information, starting with an initial list of 111,517 observations of every donation by a person with the same name as an owner, using multiple spellings of their name. For robustness, we repeated this process for executives and coaches, generating an additional list of 216,742 observations. Since FEC donations are differentiated by name, that meant owners with common names, such as Michael Jordan, can be somewhat of a challenge to identify. Owners sometimes had multiple addresses, used multiple spellings of their name, changed careers before owning an NBA team, filled out their FEC information in unusual ways, etc., so we manually matched all observations. However, there is no standard formula and many times we relied on detective work for successful identification. Our results show that a conservative-owned NBA team has 34.7% higher odds of hiring a White player into far peripheral positions, and that the odds increase to 52.3% when African American players, rather than Black players from other regions of the world, are named to the NBA All-Star team in the prior season.
My second chapter attempts to situate current management scholarship’s interaction with ideology as part of a longer conversation between the two going back over a century. The current research stream dates back a decade thanks to the pioneering work of Chin, Hambrick and Treviño, which connects research on Upper Echelons Theory with a longstanding interest on the role of values, claiming that ideology is a value. However, there are other management research streams, especially Critical Management Theory, that could benefit management’s current understanding of ideology as a value by incorporating broader structural analysis beyond individual dyadic relationships between manager and subordinate. Coauthored with my advisor, Carlos Rodríguez Lluesma, we hope to submit it to Academy of Management Annals.
My final chapter looks at racial justice ideology in mobilizing insider activism within organizations. Specifically, it examines how organizational insiders who believe in racial justice ideology engage in platform activism to meet their goals, including removing owners who stand in opposition to racial justice. This paper, also coauthored with Dr. Barriola, as well as Prof. Alexandra Rheinhardt and Prof. Massimo Maoret, uses Twitter data from the NBA and the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) as a proxy for ideology in support of racial justice and in opposition to an organizational owner, Kelly Loeffler, who actively attacked the racial justice organization Black Lives Matter (BLM). We also attempted to measure the effects of this activism. To do so, we downloaded all tweets posted by active NBA and WNBA players on Twitter from May 2013 until May 2021. For tweets relating to organizational critiques around Kelly Loeffler, we conducted a pilot study after an initial manual review of 9,739 tweets, ultimately generating a list of 21 keywords and phrases. We identified a total of 13 tweets in the NBA and 279 tweets in the WNBA in this category of critiques. As Loeffler was also running a U.S. Senate campaign for the state of Georgia in the summer of 2020, we then downloaded Federal Election Commission (FEC) individual donation data from February 1, 2020, until August 15, 2020. We identified the donations made to candidates that were running for Senate in the 2020 elections, as there were multiple elections in that year and our focus was only on the Georgia Senate race between Kelly Loeffler and Raphael Warnock. Though this was a Georgia Senate race, WNBA players are spread out around the country and thus we used a triple difference estimator to find the effect of WNBA platform activism.
Outside of my dissertation, my professional background as a China-Africa management consultant motivated me in pursuing research on China-Africa economic engagement. I coauthored a paper with Leonce Ano and Linda Calabrese on the role of Chinese Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Africa, examining how the term is defined and operationalized and how that operationalization results in wildly different data analysis. Much social science literature, including international business scholarship, does not correctly define and operationalize FDI, as it refers to transactions that allow for control and management of the assets over the long-term and thus the main risk is borne by investors. However, the Chinese projects in Africa that make headlines and generates interest from social scientists often come in the form of policy bank loans, grants, and other forms of finance, and the risk is borne by the borrowing country, not investors. Thus much Chinese economic engagement with Africa is not FDI and will not count towards FDI statistics, but many scholars mistakenly use that term in their research. To illustrate this point, we demonstrate that many published articles conflate FDI or investment with development finance (such as infrastructure finance provided via lending) in their datasets and, using more accurate datasets, we observe a strong positive correlation between Chinese FDI and GDP growth, which is a straightforward measure that applies to a range of social sciences. A single percentage increase in Chinese FDI is associated with a 26% increase in GDP growth. Conversely, we also observe a negative correlation between Chinese lending and generic “investment” and GDP, where a single percentage increase in these factors is associated with a 16% decrease in GDP. Again, most social science datasets, including those in international business, erroneously use the latter but claim to study the former in their FDI research, often conflating infrastructure finance with FDI.