Elizabeth Long Lingo is an AssOCIATE Professor of ORGANIZATION STUDIES AND CREATIVE Leadership at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
How do leaders work across disciplines, organizations, cultures, and networks to co-create and implement novel solutions, sustainable human-centered change, and entrepreneurial ventures?
Over the past twenty years, this question has motivated Elizabeth’s research, innovative project-based teaching, and efforts to advance organizational transformation and policy change to forge more equitable and creatively vibrant organizations, cities, and fields of enterprise.
As an ethnographer of work and organizations, Elizabeth is especially interested in the situated and lived experience of everyday work, and inductively analyzes qualitative data to build new theory and unexpected insights. Her scholarship is primarily process-focused, and offers three major contributions to the field: 1) launching a stream of research on creative brokering that informs how leaders advance entrepreneurial opportunities, meaningful change, and novel outcomes across networks; 2) illuminating the micro-processes that enable those without traditional sources of power to advance change and innovation; and 3) exploring how digital technology both constrains and enhances creative work.
Elizabeth’s research has been published in top-tier journals including Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ), Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies, Harvard Business Review, Poetics, Work and Occupations, and the Chronicle of Higher Education and featured in the New York Times, The Guardian (UK), Forbes, Fortune, and BBC Global news. She was recognized in the ASQ Editor’s Choice Collections as authoring one of the top papers in the field focused on networks and knowledge.
Elizabeth is Co-PI on two $1 Million National Science Foundation ADVANCE grants, including the Adaptation grant, “Advancing toward “FULL” Representation of Women in STEM at WPI” and the Partnership grant, “ImPACT: Increasing the Participation and Advancement of Women in Information Technology. In both projects, Elizabeth is investigating structural and systemic biases and barriers within Associate-to-Full promotion processes, with a particular interest in the transformative role of department heads and association leaders. This work has great potential to lessen inequity among the senior ranks of faculty, better align rewards with institutional missions and strengths, and develop national and international models for other STEM and project-based academic institutions and associations.
Publications
Lingo, Elizabeth Long. 2022. Digital Curation and Creative Brokering: Managing Information Overload in Open Organizing. Organization Studies, 01708406221099697.
Long Lingo, Elizabeth Long and Hille Bruns. “Auto-tuned and R-Squared: Quality Evaluations and Organizing Creativity in Music Production and Cancer Research,” 2021. Research in the Sociology of Organizations.
Elizabeth Long Lingo and Kathleen McGinn, 2020. “A New Prescription for Power,” Harvard Business Review. (July/August)
Long Lingo, Elizabeth Long. 2020. “Entrepreneurial Leadership as Creative Brokering: The Process and Practice of Co-creating and Advancing Opportunity,” Journal of Management Studies, 57(5), 962-1001..
Long Lingo, Elizabeth Long and Michael Elmes. 2019. “Institutional Preservation Work at a Family Business in Crisis: Micro-processes, Emotions and the Role of Nonfamily Members,” Organization Studies, 40 (6): 887-916.
McGinn, K.L., M. Ruiz Castro, and Elizabeth Long Lingo. 2019. “Learning from Mum: Cross-National Evidence Linking Maternal Employment and Adult Children’s Outcomes,” Work, Employment, Society. 33(3): 374-400
Long Lingo, Elizabeth. 2018. “Creative Brokerage as Integrative Creative Leadership: Process, Practice and Possibilities,” in Creative Leadership: Contexts and Prospects, by Mainemelis, Epitropaki, and Kark.
Long Lingo, Elizabeth, Colin Fisher and Kathleen McGinn. 2014. “Negotiation Processes as Sources of (and Solutions to) Inter-Organizational Conflict,” Handbook of Conflict Management Research, pgs. 308-327.
Long Lingo, Elizabeth and Steven Tepper. 2013. “Looking Back, Looking Forward: Arts-Based Careers and Creative Work.” Work and Occupations, 40 (4): 337-363.
Lee, Caroline W., and Elizabeth Long Lingo. 2011. “The 'Got Art?' Paradox: Questioning the Value of Art in Collective Action.” Poetics, 39(4): 316-335.
Long Lingo, Elizabeth and Siobhan O’Mahony. 2010. “Nexus Work: Brokerage on Creative Projects.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 55: 47-81. Selected for ASQ Editor’s Choice Collections.
Long Lingo, Elizabeth. 2010. “The Creative Foil: Managing Multi-Disciplinary Expertise.” 2010. In Kimberly D. Elsbach and Beth A. Bechky (Eds.), Qualitative Organizational Research: Best Papers from the Davis Conference on Qualitative Research, Charlotte, North Carolina: Information Age Press, pgs. 91-113.
McGinn, Kathleen L., Elizabeth Long Lingo, and Karin Ciano. 2004. "Transitions through Out-of-Keeping Acts." Negotiation Journal 20, no. 2 (April): 171-184.
Learn more about Elizabeth's research projects and publications.
Other Highlights:
*Senior Editorial Board for Organization Studies
*Best Paper, Academy of Management Annual Conference
*Best Paper, European Group for Organization Studies Annual Conference, Careers and Institutions track
*Administrative Science Quarterly Editors’ Choice Collection, Networks and Knowledge
*Best Paper, Conference for Qualitative Research, University of California, Davis
*Research Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School Program on Negotiation
*A featured speaker at TedX and other national conferences focused on innovation in higher education
*Founding Director of Vanderbilt's Curb Creative Campus Initiative and Programs in Creative Enterprise and Public Leadership
*Designed and facilitated a Change Makers curriculum for the International Fulbright Scholars Lab-to-Market programs
*Founding faculty member of one the nation's first hybrid Strategic Design MBA programs.
*Designed and led the launch of Mount Holyoke College's Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation Initiative.
*Consulted with colleges and universities on the design and launch of arts and engineering collaborations, multi-disciplinary research initiatives, campus-wide creativity initiatives, social innovation and design labs, and maker spaces.
*Worked with artists, entrepreneurs, and government leaders to launch creative city initiatives and summits in Nashville, TN and Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
*Researched entrepreneurship and creative industries as a Senior Research Fellow and Assistant Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy, the nation's premier public policy think tank focused on art, culture, creative enterprise, and the creative workforce.
*Finance Undergraduate of the Year, Isenberg School of Management, UMass, Amherst
Education
Ph.D., Joint program in Organizational Behavior, Harvard Business School and Harvard University
Fellow in Harvard's Program on Negotiation
A.M., Harvard University
Focus: Sociology of Work and Organizations
Bachelors of Business Administration, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Finance, Summa Cum Laude
Visit my Worcester Polytechnic Institute webpage