Yuan Li

Dr. Yuan Li is an associate professor of management and organization theory. She obtained her PhD in Business Administration from the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. Before coming back to California, she was an assistant professor of Strategy and Organization at the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec.

Dr. Yuan Li’s research concerns the cultural and symbolic processes of organizational, institutional, and technological change. She studies how leaders and change agents use rhetorical tropes, arguments, and symbols to make meaning and influence reality. Published work has examined the diffusion of managerial innovations such as the Total Quality Management, the role of the government, intellectual and media elites, and entrepreneurs in China's economic transformation, impact of discourse on ODC (organizational development and change), and organizational event stigma. She is most known for theoretical models that explain mechanisms of institutionalization and decoupling as microlevel and macrolevel phenomena coevolve. These models have practical implications for a wide range of cases such as the adoption of DEI, ESG, and new technologies. She is also interested in integrating ideas of Western and Eastern philosophies to produce practical knowledge. Yuan uses qualitative methods as well as quantitative content analysis tools.

Her research has been published in leading management journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Management Inquiry, Management Communication Quarterly, and Culture and Organization, among others. She serves on the Editorial Board of Organization Studies, the flagship journal of EGOS (European Group for Organization Studies).

Department: 

School of Economics and Business Administration » Organizations and Responsible Business

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