Elizabeth Long Lingo

Biography

PhD Organizational Behavior and Sociology Harvard Business School and Harvard University 2005 A.M Sociology Harvard University 2002 BA Finance Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst Summa Cum Laude 1993 My classroom is a living-learning lab where students develop the capacity to analyze and navigate a complex and messy web of often hidden interpersonal, group, and organizational dynamics and paradoxes. I regularly stretch students out of their comfort zone, offering immersive, hands-on experiences in which students put analytical frameworks to the test and see what works best for them—given their unique personal and cultural experience. Students in my courses evolve from thinking, “there is no way I can do this,” or “I am not innovative or creative,” to having confidence in their ability to lead innovation and navigate complex interpersonal and organizational dynamics. My teaching is informed by my research on how entrepreneurs, innovative leaders, change makers, and creative producers advance their ideas from concept stage to implementation. I am especially interested in the negotiated nature of collective creativity—how claims to control, legitimacy, and expertise are contested and managed in practice, and how leaders manage ambiguity as they co-create across networks, disciplines, and organizational boundaries. I am also interested in gender and leadership outcomes—and how we can support women innovators and entrepreneurs across the globe advance novel solutions and change. As an ethnographer, I focus on the actual work of leaders as they engage these challenges. My research offers new insight into network brokerage as process and as a relational practice. My research has been published in top-tier journals including Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ), Poetics, Work and Occupations, and the Chronicle of Higher Education and featured in the New York Times, The Guardian (UK), Forbes, Fortune, and BBC Global news. My ethnographic research on music producers working in the Nashville country music industry was recognized as a best paper at the Davis Conference on Qualitative Research, and was chosen for the ASQ Editor’s Choice Collections as one of the top papers focused on networks and knowledge. I have also had the wonderful opportunity to put my research into practice. Over the last decade, I have consulted nationally and led the launch of new programs and curricula around entrepreneurship, social innovation, design thinking, and creative enterprise for the public good, and been a Senior Research Fellow and Assistant Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy, the nation's premier public policy think tank focused on art, culture, creative enterprise, and the creative workforce.

Research Interest

Leading innovation, entrepreneurial ventures, and creative projects Networks and brokerage Negotiation of collective creativity Gender and leadership