HBS established the Institute for the Study of Business in Global Society (BiGS) to serve as a research-based platform that brings together a community of scholars, students, alumni, and other practitioners to find solutions to some of society’s biggest challenges. A key component of this effort is the BiGS Visiting Fellows Program, launched in April 2022, which draws to campus scholarly researchers who join the School for a year to work on specific projects—often partnering with HBS faculty—related to some of today’s most important issues.

The fellows provide intellectual leadership that accelerates the process of knowledge creation at HBS and leverages the expertise of the School’s faculty. For the 2022–2023 academic year, the BiGS Visiting Fellows’ work centers on race, diversity, inclusion, and inequality.

These topics are front-of-mind for today’s business leaders. According to a January 2021 CEO survey by Fortune and Deloitte, 94 percent of CEOs said that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are strategic priorities for them as company leaders, and 72 percent planned to disclose DEI metrics to the public. And yet, a 2021 Deloitte report, The equity imperative: The need for business to take bold action now, states: “Despite agreeing that change is needed, many leaders have come to realize how difficult it will be to create meaningful, measurable, and sustainable change.”

BiGS will integrate and amplify work addressing racial equity and other pressing concerns currently underway at HBS, and the BiGS Visiting Fellows Program will help catalyze new streams of research.

“The inaugural cohort of BiGS Fellows is made up of rising professors looking at critical issues such as racism in business technologies, inclusion in organizations, bias in legal policies, and the effect of incarceration on employment and entrepreneurship,” says Debora Spar, the Jaime and Josefina Chua Tiampo Professor of Business Administration, who oversees BiGS as senior associate dean for Business and Global Society. “They exemplify the mission of BiGS: to shine a light on those areas where business and society intersect and where research can help make meaningful change.”

The program provides HBS with an opportunity to invite leading scholars who are experts in a particular field to work on projects across the School rather than be aligned with a specific academic unit at HBS, explains Drew Keller (MBA 2022), director of BiGS, who notes that next year’s cohort will focus on climate change and sustainability. “We hope that the fellows share their existing research broadly with the HBS community, but also work with our faculty to explore new avenues of inquiry to create productive research collaborations.”

2022–2023 Institute for the Study of Business in Global Society Visiting Fellows

Stephanie Creary, Assistant Professor of Management, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Creary studies the dynamics of inclusion and allyship in organizations. She has been associated with the HBS community since 2007, as Professor David Thomas’s research associate, as a member of Professor Robin Ely’s Gender and Race in Organizations Research Group, and as a race and diversity expert partner in the School’s ambitious plan to develop and disseminate course material on advancing racial equity in business.

Damon Phillips, Robert Steinberg Professor of Management, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Phillips explores the relationship between incarceration, employment, and entrepreneurship (including self-employment). He has a particular interest in the fate of the more than 600,000 people in the United States who return home from prison each year, especially as most of them are reincarcerated within the first few years. He was previously a fellow with Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Broderick Turner, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Tech, and Cofounder, Technology, Race and Prejudice (T.R.A.P.) Lab

Turner’s research explores how race and racism are built into markets, business systems, and technology. The T.R.A.P. Lab has developed an algorithm audit platform that collects data about the outcome of an algorithm within a particular context and then assesses its impact on users. The platform studies facial and emotion recognition and can help uncover the racial bias in algorithms used by social media platforms, which may have coded rules that alter which faces are seen by users.

A. Chyei Vinluan, Postdoctoral Fellow of Business Administration in both the Negotiation, Organizations, and Markets Unit and Organizational Behavior Unit at HBS

Vinluan’s research examines the relationship between the cognitive processes underlying racial categorization and stereotyping, as well as experiences of encountering stereotypes and discrimination. She examines these processes among individuals who are considered to be less prototypical racial category members to understand the diversity across and within racial categories. Vinluan will join the BiGS Visiting Fellows Program in spring 2023.

Jamillah Williams, Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown University

As a sociologist and legal scholar, Williams investigates the effectiveness of various legal, policy, and organizational interventions designed to reduce bias and enhance equity and inclusion. While she specializes in workplace and economic inequality, she is interested in exploring the nature and effects of contemporary bias (structural, explicit, implicit) across a range of contexts. Williams was recognized with the 2021 Michael J. Zimmer Memorial Award presented annually to a rising scholar in the field of employment and labor law. She was also named a 2022 Gender+ Justice Fellow at Georgetown, a network of scholars who examine intersectional issues of gender, racial, and economic justice.

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