Priyam Saraf
​
I am a 5th year Ph.D. candidate in Organizational Behavior with a Ph.D. Minor in Sociology at Stanford University (expected graduation in spring of 2026).
​
Why do firms in emerging economies under-adopt practices that are supposed to make them more productive? Addressing this puzzle—the under-adoption of “productivity-enhancing” practices—is central to my work.
I study strategic decision-making processes in emerging economy firms during the adoption of global management and technology practices. In my primary research, I study automation and CEO professionalization practices where I examine how elites within firms—owners, CEOs, and managers—interpret these practices, often produced in the Global North, through their local meaning systems. Local meaning systems are constituted by moral orientations, cultural beliefs, and institutional affordances. How do these interpretive processes shape the adoption of global practices, firm performance, and economic development? In a related stream, I study the production of global practices (e.g. sustainability) whose definitions are fluid but that are increasingly expected from firms.
I use field-based methods, mainly ethnography combined with experiments and quantitative data, to test and build middle-range theories drawing on economic and organizational sociology. Empirically, I study the adoption of practices in the Global South (e.g., automation, professional CEOs among Bangladeshi garment exporters) and the production of practices in the Global North (e.g., sustainability).
My work has received recognition from the Academy of Management (AoM) and the American Sociological Association (ASA). A paper from my dissertation on variation in firms' adoption of automation technologies was awarded the Best International Paper in the Organization and Management Theory Division at the AoM, a Runner-Up for the Academy’s Carolyn B. Dexter Award, and received ASA's Graduate Student Best Paper Honorable Mentions in the Development and Science and Technology Sections.
​​​​
In addition to the (expected) Ph.D., I received an MPA from Columbia University, and a dual BS in Economics and a BS in Information Systems Management from Singapore Management University.
