Dissertation
Alternating Currents: Occupational Status Hierarchies, Expertise Coordination, and Strategic Transitions
My dissertation follows Gradient (a pseudonym), a multibillion-dollar deep-tech battery startup, over four years through three strategic transitions—the shift from exploration to growth, a product pivot toward powering data centers to support the AI boom, and a forthcoming IPO—using qualitative (primarily ethnographic) methods. It draws on more than 1,600 hours of observation and 300 interviews. Where prior research depicts occupational status hierarchies within organizations as singular and static, I develop a dynamic model of how these hierarchies emerge, diverge into multiple coexisting orderings with different sources of status, and ultimately converge—and I show how these shifts affect expertise coordination and shape strategic transitions.
Job Market Paper
“Suits and Lab Coats: Epistemic Privileging and Its Impact on Strategic Transition in a ‘Deep-Tech’ Battery Startup”
Under review at Organization Science · Finalist, Kauffman Best Student-Led Paper Award in Entrepreneurial Cognition, 2024 Academy of Management Annual Meeting · Draft available upon request
This paper begins from a puzzling observation during Gradient’s strategic transition to the growth stage: the firm’s high-status battery scientists began micromanaging and seeking control over marketing, public relations, and event-planning tasks outside their expertise and job responsibilities—tasks that prior scholarship suggests they would avoid. We theorize this pattern as epistemic privileging, a process in which incumbent high-status professionals disregard the expertise of other professional groups in order to protect their reputation before their invisible college, in turn delaying task execution and hindering the firm’s strategic transition.
Under Review
A second stream of my research examines how expertise is evaluated beyond the firm, between experts, intermediaries (e.g., media organizations, influencers, and algorithmically curated platforms), and the public. These two papers study how technological developments and changes in the media are reshaping the constitution and evaluation of expertise in the public sphere—dynamics that speak to what scholars are calling the ‘crisis of expertise.’
“Expert Authority by Popularity: How Technological Developments and Changes in the Media Have Given Rise to a Novel Mechanism for Evaluating Expertise”
Under review at Organization Science
This paper theorizes expert authority by popularity, in which audiences look to their peers—rather than traditional markers such as credentials—to evaluate expertise.
Working Papers
“Founder Mode as a ‘Cultural Anchor’: Understanding How Startup Culture and Processes of Authority Attenuate the Negative Impacts of Micromanagement by Founders and Senior Technical Employees”
Presented at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting (2025) and the Berkeley Culture Connect Conference (2026)
“‘I Think We Can Move Fast Here’: Political vs. Traditional Serendipity in Organizations”
In preparation · Presented at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting (2025)
Publications
Benjamin-Pollak, N.A., & Karunakaran, A. (2025). “Expert authority and the public sphere: Media intermediaries, professional norm violation, and the market for expertise.” In K. T. Elmholdt, R. Huising, & E. I. Mäkinen (Eds.), Expertise in and around organizations: The changing constitution and ecology of expertise (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 97, pp. 249–269). Emerald Publishing. Open access.
This chapter develops a model of expert amplification, showing how professional norms and media intermediaries skew which experts are selected and represented to the public—in ways uncorrelated with underlying expert quality.