Jillian Chown

Jillian Chown is an Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management. She studies expert work and how organizations structure and govern it. Her research examines how organizations shape work that depends on specialized knowledge and judgment, and how experts and managers reshape those arrangements in practice.

Her work shows how organizations influence expert decisions through the design of tasks, roles, incentives, peer environments, control systems, and physical space. These arrangements affect what work experts perform, whose practices influence them, which clients and cases they receive, and how they coordinate with others. Their effects are often indirect and can vary across settings: an arrangement that supports expert work in one context may impede it in another.

Healthcare is a central domain in Chown’s research. Hospitals and health systems make the challenges of organizing expert work especially visible because professionals retain substantial discretion while their decisions must be coordinated across roles, teams, and organizational levels. Her studies examine how organizational arrangements shape clinical decisions, professional-client matching, communication, implementation, and patient outcomes.

Chown uses methods ranging from large-scale quantitative analysis to ethnographic fieldwork. Her research connects individual behavior to broader questions in organization design, organizational control, professional work, and organizational change. Her work has appeared in Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Nature Communications, Sociological Science, JAMA Surgery, and BMJ Leader, and has been covered in Time, the Financial Times, and Kellogg Insight. Her dissertation research on organizational controls was runner-up for the ASQ Best Dissertation Paper Award.

She teaches Leading Strategic Change in Kellogg’s MBA program and the Macro Organizational Research Methods PhD seminar. Before entering academia, she was an Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company. She holds a PhD in Strategic Management and an MBA from the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, as well as a degree in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto.