Nova J. Bradford
I am a PhD candidate in Management at Stanford University where I held a three-year fellowship with the Knight-Hennessy Scholars.
I am a strategic management scholar with two complementary lines of research. First, as a field researcher, I study how organizations adapt to new rules, mandates, and constraints. Colleagues call me an “ethnographer who writes code,” meaning I combine traditional qualitative methods and natural language processing. Second, as a methodologist, I study artificial intelligence, including the accuracy and reliability of computational tools deployed in research and industry. My dissertation, Strategic Adaptation in Constrained Systems: Lessons from Innovators, Hospitals, and Artificial Intelligence, develops this agenda across three studies, and was awarded the “Outstanding Paper Based on a Dissertation” award from the Academy of Management’s Health Care Management (HCM) division.
Research
Organizations don’t often explicitly defy the constraints imposed by regulations, but they don’t always passively accept them either. When faced with new rules, motivated actors might reconfigure their strategies, repurpose existing structures, and exploit ambiguities in order to continue meeting the same goals under their new constraints. As a strategic management scholar, my dissertation research centers on these adaptations and the puzzle they create: though rational from the actor’s perspective, I’ve documented how these actions can inadvertently reinforce inefficiencies, reproduce biases, and undermine the very goals the policies were meant to advance.
Colleagues call me an “ethnographer who writes code,” meaning I use both traditional qualitative methods and natural language processing in my research. The phenomena I study are reflected in, negotiated through, and (often) constituted by human language, so I use a plurality of methods that treat human language as a source of data. Additionally, because of my frequent computational work, I also study tools as a methodologist: the second line of work maps the behavior and limitations of language models, with implications for anyone deploying these tools in research or industry.
Moving forward, I plan to expand this work to new settings. Healthcare has been a fertile context for studying these dynamics given its dense regulatory environment, but I plan to extend this agenda to other organizations that operate under comparable mandates, such as B-corporations or firms subject to ESG disclosure. The projects below trace how I arrived at this agenda and the methods with which I pursue it.
Teaching
My formal training as an educator includes pedagogy courses from Stanford’s Center for Teaching and Learning, which included evidence-based teaching methods and curriculum design. Using this training, I served as the teaching assistant for Leading and Managing Health Care Organizations (OB 348) at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, a project-based course for MBA, MD, and other graduate students interested in understanding how innovation happens in healthcare organizations. In addition to developing case materials and planning and delivering lectures, I coached student project teams as they conducted real-world design innovation projects that addressed operational challenges at local healthcare organizations.
In addition to classroom teaching, I facilitated a number of elective workshops during my three-year fellowship as a Knight-Hennesy Scholar. Most notable was the Mental Health Innovation Workshop, a bi-weekly elective I facilitated across two academic years that brought together MBA, MD, and PhD students interested in emerging technology, entrepreneurship, and mental health. In the workshop, I taught user-centered design methods and facilitated peer-feedback in which students could brainstorm, evaluate, and sometimes challenge entrepreneurial projects in the mental health space.
I also facilitated a number of standalone workshops, including Rethinking Leadership: Power, Influence, and Possibility, which raised questions of how leadership actually works, what taken-for-granted assumptions are often embedded in ideas of leadership, and how practitioners can incorporate critical leadership studies into their work. Similarly, my workshop Nonfiction Publishing provided an accessible introduction to translating academic ideas for mainstream audiences and navigating the popular press.