Jillian Chown

Jillian Chown is an Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Her research examines how organizations structure the work of expert professionals, and how these structures shape who does what, how work gets done, and with what consequences for performance, adaptation, and inequality. She focuses on settings where professionals retain significant autonomy and where there is considerable knowledge asymmetry between professionals and those outside the profession, making adaptation and change particularly challenging.

Professor Chown’s research is organized around three interrelated streams. The first focuses on task and role design in professional work, investigating how organizations allocate, regulate, and redesign tasks, and how these choices influence efficiency, adaptability, and disparities. This includes research on the symbolic and material characteristics of tasks that contribute to gender inequality, and on how specialized roles serve as “allocative infrastructure” to improve matching between professionals and clients.

The second stream examines attention and visibility in professional contexts, exploring how the distribution of attention affects evaluation, influence, and decision-making. Her studies show how public and organizational attention interact with social categories, such as gender, to shape market reactions to leadership appointments, and how role structures condition professionals’ responsiveness to organizational shocks.

The third stream investigates power, influence, and persistence in professional fields, analyzing how firms and institutions gain access to and shape the work of autonomous professionals, and why some organizational practices endure after their instrumental value fades. She has introduced new concepts such as expert capture, which explains how firms embed themselves in professional networks to secure access, and symbolic persistence, which describes the continuation of practices for symbolic rather than instrumental reasons.

Across these streams, 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, Sociological Science, Nature Communications, 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.