About


Aruna Ranganathan is Associate Professor and member of the Management of Organizations group at University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. She has a courtesy appointment in the Sociology Department and is an affiliate of the UC Berkeley Labor Center. She was formerly Associate Professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and affiliate of the King Center on Global Development. She earned her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, her Master’s from Cornell University, and her Bachelor’s in Human Resources and Labor Relations from the University of British Columbia.

Having trained extensively in sociology, she takes a macro perspective on studying organizational behavior with particular emphasis on motivation and inequality in the future of work. For example, she has found that low-income workers often derive meaning from their work that influences how they make workplace decisions. Her research has also identified ways that organizations’ programs and practices can ameliorate gender inequality. Another key finding from her research regards how technology and new ways of structuring work, such as remote offices and asynchronous scheduling, are shaping workers’ experiences. She has studied these phenomena in a range of contexts, including garment factories, artisan markets, musicians’ recording studios, and white-collar offices. Her work is unique in that much of it focuses on low-income workers in the developing economy contexts, such as India.

Methodologically, she ascribes to the full-cycle research approach: a type of mixed methods wherein initial studies inform subsequent studies with the goals of refining theory and establishing both internal and external validity. Much of her work begins with qualitative observations that enable her to develop theories about a real-world phenomenon, which she then tests quantitatively, usually with a natural or field experiment.

She has used her expertise in management across the globe to design and teach the MBA course: Managing People in the Global Context, and her methodological experience to create and teach the PhD course: Full-Cycle Research Design. She has also served as Senior Editor of Organization Science and as an Industrial and Labor Relations Review Editorial Board Member. Her work has been published in American Sociological Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Management Science, and Industrial and Labor Relations Review, and covered in the popular press by outlets including the Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal. Her contributions have been recognized by various Academy of Management awards, including: Outstanding Publication in Organizational Behavior, Responsible Research in Management, William H. Newman Award for Best Paper Based on a Dissertation, and the Louis Pondy Best Dissertation Paper Award, OMT Division.