Research
Research Pipeline
I am a qualitative sociologist of organizations, occupations, and work who is interested in how labor markets, institutions, and power relations evolve under globalization and technological transformation. My research investigates how young African workers adapt to technological change and transnational organizational systems.
My research agenda has three aims: 1) define and understand the factors that shape decision-making power within international organizations, 2) understand how African young people prepare for and enter the digital economy, and 3) understand how African young people conceive of entrepreneurship as a means of socioeconomic mobility. Currently, my work is based in Kenya.
1. Decision-Making within International Organizations
Research under this aim grew out of a desire to understand how decision-making power is distributed within NGOs that have international teams and how organizations can imbue individuals with privilege and power. From this research stream, I published “She Can Get a Visa: How Nationality and Class Shape Decision-Making at a Kenyan NGO,” in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (2023). This study uses ethnographic data to show how nationality and class hierarchies shape task allocation, decision-making authority, and organizational outcomes at a Kenyan NGO that has a U.S.-based board and a Kenya-based board. I demonstrate that the NGO uses an elastic approach when deciding who can best accomplish a given organizational goal. I present the concept of elastic transnational stratification, which theorizes how organizations allocate power and responsibilities based on perceived identity advantages. I find that the person who can best accomplish a given organizational goal may not be the person with the most privilege; rather certain situations call for local knowledge and expertise from less privileged individuals.
2. Preparing African Young People for the Digital Economy
My doctoral dissertation and current book project, “Young, Gifted, and African: How Kenyan Young People Navigate the Digital Economy” is based on fifteen months of ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews in Nairobi, Kenya with young people, government workers, and civil society representatives. I also conducted a digital ethnography of various job search platforms and websites and content analysis of the curricula of various African youth upskilling trainings and programs. In my first chapter, I used systems thinking to map the organizations and institutions involved in the various job-hunting processes of Kenyan young people. My second chapter revealed how young people sought to avoid poor work conditions through developing international online portfolios of work in a process I call “digital tarmacking”. My third chapter advances a concept I’m calling “skilled precarity”. I found that many young people still struggled to find decent, regular work despite participating in upskilling and digital work training programs.
3. African Entrepreneurs and Job Creation
I advance two archetypes that exist on a spectrum for why middle-class Kenyan young people seek out entrepreneurship opportunities. Previous scholarship on entrepreneurship in Africa focuses on two extremes: desperation entrepreneurship in severely impoverished settings or startup founders who aspire to become the next ‘African Unicorn’. While these archetypes are crucial to study, they do not capture the nuances of some young African people’s relationship with entrepreneurship and precarity. I find that highly skilled middle-class Kenyan young people are hustlerpreneurs who become entrepreneurs to avoid “waithood” in the traditional job-market or are heropreneurs who want to leverage their skills to improve the socioeconomic status of others.
I am in the process of developing a new project on African jobtech entrepreneurs who are attempting to “uberize” nontechnical work.
Areas of
Expertise
- Qualitative Research Methods
- Labor, Work, and Occupations
- Transnational Organizations
- African Entrepreneurship