Priyam Saraf
Priyam Saraf
Using field-based methods like ethnography and experiments, I study how local meaning systems influence the creation, evaluation and adoption of productivity-oriented practices, shaping firm performance and economic development.
Research Statement
Why do firms in emerging economies under-adopt practices that are supposed to make them more productive? A key theoretical prediction is that global competition will have a homogenizing effect, pressuring firms to become as productive as possible or risk being selected out. If so, companies would do well to adopt new technologies, hire professional CEOs, design formal HR incentives, implement sustainability and governance standards, or more such practices. Yet across emerging economies, empirical evidence from organizational economics suggests otherwise. Firms routinely under-adopt.
Using field-based methods like ethnography and experiments, I study how locally held moral orientations, cultural beliefs, and institutional relations—what I call local meaning systems—influence adoption outcomes, with implications for incumbent firm performance, entrepreneurship, and economic development. Specifically, I focus on the organizational processes and evaluations of elite decision-makers—owners, CEOs, and managers—who interpret global practices through local meaning systems rather than treating them as inherently beneficial or neutral. I find evidence of a classification error: under-adoption is not a sign of organizational failure or inertia, as mainstream economic explanations often suggest, but an adaptation to practices misaligned with local meaning systems. Reclassifying under-adoption as adaptation matters not only for building cumulative knowledge but also for improving how public and private resources are allocated.
In addition to studying how firms adopt material practices, I study the social production of these practices in a second stream. Practices do not appear fully-formed but are outcomes of contestations of meanings and ideas among defenders and challengers. Specifically, I trace how ideas and meanings that shape productivity agendas worldwide canonize through the work of transnational professionals and anchor organizations in the Global North.
Rooted in middle-range sociological theory, my work addresses enduring puzzles in strategy and organization theory, contributing to a theory of organizational practice—and, in turn, of productivity and economic development.
Before Stanford, I spent over a decade in global public policy and strategy, working at the World Bank (as Senior Economist and Young Professional), Bain & Company, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
Research Interests
- Strategy
- Organizational Theory, Economic Sociology
- Emerging Economies
- Field-based Methods
Teaching Statement
Strategy, Innovation, International Business, Non-Market Strategy, Economic Sociology, Organizational Theory, Sustainability
Job Market Paper
This ethnography examines how CEO professionalization unfolds among emerging economy firms supplying to global value chains. While professionalization—defined as the meritocratic shift from family to non-family CEOs—is widely seen as essential for firm governance, performance, and broader development outcomes, the reasons firm owners adopt it only partially or selectively remain poorly understood. Based on 20 months of ethnography, interviews, and archival work in Bangladesh, I find that firm owners recognize pressure from lead firms in global value chains to professionalize but face compliance-control tradeoffs. To navigate these tradeoffs, they hire foreign CEOs instead of local candidates. This avoidance of locals is not rooted in concerns about competence; owners consider them sufficiently capable. Rather, it reflects their preference for controllable hires—individuals who can be easily sanctioned and are less likely to deviate. These preferences, shaped by historically fraught relations with local legal institutions, help explain their hiring choices, foregrounding controllability as a salient concern among employers operating among conditions of weak, legal, institutions and senior executive hiring. The paper examines the evaluation processes behind hiring controllable “stranger” CEOs and explores the unintended consequences for entrepreneurship and economic development.
Working Papers
This paper is a comparative ethnography of two matched garment firms that purchased the same labor-substituting auto-cutter at the same time. One implemented it within six months; the other delayed use for over three years, with the machine still unused at the time of writing. Using a matched case design, I rule out explanations based on information, incentives, or competition, and show that founders’ moral interpretations of labor—as commodified resources or as people to protect—shaped the trajectories of automation. These diverse moral orientations, due to variation in founders’ prior exposure to labor-intensive tasks, persisted despite homogenizing competition. I theorize that persistent variation in practice adoption is likely under conditions of environmental polyphony, where multiple legitimating principles coexist, often prevalent in emerging economy or other transitional contexts. (Winner of AoM OMT Best International Paper).
In an ongoing field-level ethnography, I study how climate-ed organizations and their trainers with roots in social movements in the Global North challenge—and attempt to undo—the dominant financialized, carbon-centric definition of climate; expanding the menu of ideas that constitute modern sustainability practices. Rather than emphasizing technical skills and jurisdictional closure, trainers work to build epistemic communities through radical status leveling, rapid identity assertion, and shared cultural toolkits. Their efforts rest on the belief that financialized definitions of climate stem from skill-based status inequalities, and that addressing a multidimensional problem like climate change requires dismantling such hierarchies to enable innovation. This paper converses with scholarship in the sociology of work and professions, upskilling, and sustainability practices.
Economics as a social science discipline is known to influence policy-making and organizational agendas. This paper investigates which ideas entered the social science discipline of U.S. economics between 1980 and 2015 and who produced them. Using topic modeling on a nationally representative corpus of 1.2 million U.S. Ph.D. dissertations yielding 30,000 economics dissertations—unlike citation or self-reported datasets that suffer from survivorship and elite bias—I identify “high-growth” ideas: conceptually distinct topics that rose in prevalence beyond chance. This paper introduces a representative, novel dataset into the sociology of economics to locate associations between ideas, status of the producer, and their audience.
Work in Progress
Priyam Saraf
Priyam Saraf
Priyam Saraf and Stefan Dimitriades
Priyam Saraf
Priyam Saraf and Arvind Karunakaran