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 when professional discretion is high and direct control is limited.

Her research shows that organizations shape what experts do not through command, but by structuring the conditions under which discretion is exercised — through incentives, peer influence, task design, role boundaries, and even physical space. These arrangements often operate in subtle and unintended ways: enabling effective action in some contexts while constraining it in others. Much of her empirical work is set in healthcare, where governance challenges are acute and the stakes are immediate.

Professor Chown uses multi-method approaches, ranging from large-scale econometric analyses to field-based ethnographic studies, and develops new theoretical concepts that integrate micro-, meso-, and macro-level analysis. Her research has been published 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 work on organizational controls received the ASQ Best Dissertation Paper Award (Runner-Up).

She teaches Leading Strategic Change in Kellogg's MBA program. Before academia, she was an Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company.

Professor Chown holds a PhD in Strategic Management and an MBA from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, and a degree in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto.