top of page

RESEARCH PROJECTS             

The conviction that knowledge is sociotechnically constituted has profoundly shaped, and continues to animate, my research agenda. Over the years, this research agenda has been sharpened by the unique prospects and challenges facing the knowledge economy in the 21st century. If I had to bring together the diverse strands of my work under a few cross-cutting themes, these would be:

​

  • decision making in the wild

  • the social organization of expertise

  • information technologies and the workplace

​

These themes and some of my publications and working papers associated with each are described in more detail below.

​

Jan 2012   "Weathering Risk: Uncertainty, Weather Forecasting, and Expertise", Sociology Compass.

Sep 2015   "From Bricolage to Collage: The Making of Decisions at a Weather Forecast Office", Sociological Forum.

Nov 2015   Masters of Uncertainty: Weather Forecasters and the Quest for Ground Truth, University of Chicago Press.

           *    "Seeing Double: Prospective Decision Making in Cardiology Practice" (under review)

           *    "How Doctors Make Decisions" (book manuscript, in preparation)

Decision Making in the Wild
The Social Organization of Expertise
Information Technologies and the Workplace

Cross-Cutting Themes

My research conceptually develops and empirically fleshes out a sociologically-informed approach to studying real-world risk and uncertainty management that reinstates decision makers as makers of decisions, crafting locally rational solutions out of the heuristics and techniques with which they have equipped themselves over time. The unit of analysis is neither the individual nor the organization but the task at hand. The proposed conceptual framework emplaces decision makers within a more or less institutionalized sociomaterial environment that affords them certain cultural repertoires and recipes for action, intended to help them respond efficiently to the microcontext of the decision-making task. However, it is in the wild, within the evolving microcontext of action, that decision making takes shape first and foremost. Hence decision makers become skillfully improvisational and discerningly creative as a matter of habit. My research is currently aimed at assessing the role of prospection (or future orientation) in how decision makers navigate different time-driven, uncertainty-riddled tasks and develop particular problem-solving habits.

I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.

I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.

Sep 2001   "The Intellectual and Social Organization of ASA 1990-1997", The American Sociologist.

Jan 2012   "Weathering Risk: Uncertainty, Weather Forecasting, and Expertise", Sociology Compass.  

Nov 2019   "Expertise in Weather Forecasting", Oxford Handbook of Expertise (with D. LaDue, R. Hoffman, and R. Pliske)

           *    "Expertise in the Public Domain" (under review)

           *    "Screenwork as the Social Organization of Expertise" (under review)

Apr 2010   "Visual Perception at Work: Lessons from the World of Meteorology", Poetics.

           *    "Screenwork as the Social Organization of Expertise" (under review)

           *    "Reconfiguring Professional Identities: Weather Forecasting in the Digital Age" (in preparation)

bottom of page