Jillian Chown

Jillian Chown is an Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management. She studies how organizations govern expert work in settings where professionals have wide discretion and managers have little direct control.

Her research shows that organizations rarely shape what experts do by giving orders. Instead, they set the conditions under which experts make their own choices — through financial incentives, peer influence, the division of tasks, the boundaries around roles, and even the layout of physical space. These arrangements are often subtle, and their effects frequently unintended: a design that helps experts work well in one setting can get in their way in another. Much of her fieldwork is in healthcare, where the governance problems are hard and the consequences immediate.

Chown works across methods, from large-scale quantitative analysis to ethnographic fieldwork, and builds theory connecting individual behavior to broader organizational and institutional dynamics. Her work has appeared in Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Nature Communications, and Sociological Science, 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 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, and a degree in Engineering Science, also from the University of Toronto.