Debra Meyerson | email
Associate Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University
Debra Meyerson is Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford University's School of Education and the Graduate School of Business, and faculty co-founder and co-director of Stanford's Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. She received her B.S. and M.S. from M.I.T. and Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Stanford University.
Professor Meyerson's research has focused on conditions and change strategies that foster constructive and equitable gender and race relations in organizations. Her work on "tempered radicalism" examines tactics people use to express their identities and advance change while getting ahead, as well as the leadership practices that encourage grass-roots change processes. More recently, Professor Meyerson also conducts research on the implications of the rise of third sector actors and the blurring of roles, responsibilities, and forms of expertise within educational institutions. Her current research in this area investigates the influence of philanthropic institutions in shaping the growth and direction of the charter school movement and the implications of these trends for schools and the professionals who work within them.
Professor Meyerson teaches courses at the School of Education and the Graduate School of Business on organizing for diversity, the leadership of social change, and educational and social entrepreneurship. She is the author of 3 books, including Tempered Radicalism: How Everyday Leaders Inspire Change at Work and over 50 articles and chapters in academic and popular publications. She has given talks and consulted to organizations in the corporate, public, and non-profit sectors throughout the world.
Professor Meyerson will be devoting her fellowship year to two projects. In the first, she will explore whether workplace norms about 24/7 accessibility via communication technologies function as the contemporary form of "face time," and, if so, whether such norms affect men and women differently. In this study, she will draw on data set of the communication patterns of high technology workers. In her second project, she will collect data to reveal the range of resources professional women and men draw on when they confront personal and professional inflection points. For this research, Meyerson intends to compare the experiences of men and women in different cultural and occupational contexts. She will also explore sources of resilience among those who take up change agent roles within their organizations.
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