Jillian Chown

Jillian Chown is a Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Her research examines how organizations structure work, roles, and expertise—and how these design choices shape professional behavior, coordination, and performance. Across her work, she is especially interested in how specialization, task allocation, and organizational roles influence who does what, for whom, and with what consequences.

Her research spans settings such as health care, professional services, and complex organizations undergoing change. She has studied topics including professional–client matching, gendered task segregation, the introduction of specialized roles, hybrid professional roles, and the persistence of organizational initiatives whose practical value has faded. A unifying theme in her work is understanding how organizational structures both enable and constrain effective action, often in subtle and unintended ways.

Professor Chown uses multi-method approaches, ranging from large-scale econometric analyses to field-based ethnographic studies, and develops new theoretical concepts that integrate micro-, meso-, and macro-level analysis. Her research has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Nature Communications, Sociological Science, and British Medical Journal–Leader, and has been featured in Time, The Financial Times, and Kellogg Insight.

Professor Chown received her PhD in Strategic Management from the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, where she also earned her MBA and B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science. Prior to academia, she worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company, Deloitte, and a healthcare consulting start-up.