Summer R. Jackson

Summer R. Jackson

Assistant Professor of Business Administration

Assistant Professor of Business Administration

Organizational Behavior
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Summer R. Jackson
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Featured Work Publications Awards & Honors

Summer Jackson is an Assistant Professor of Management in the Organizational Behavior unit at Harvard Business School. She teaches LEAD in the MBA required curriculum.

Professor Jackson is an organizational ethnographer whose research focuses on how human capital systems—recruitment, hiring, development, promotion, and retention—interact with race, class, and gender to shape opportunity structures and career outcomes. Her comparative field studies include high-growth technology firms and large multinationals, enabling her to identify the policies and everyday practices that foster both excellence and equity. Through close collaboration with her field sites, her findings translate into actionable strategies for building inclusive, high-performing workforces.

Her research has been recognized with the INFORMS Best Dissertation Award and as a runner-up for the Administrative Science Quarterly Dissertation Award. It has also appeared in scholarly and news outlets, including Organization Science, Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Review, MIT News, and Harvard Business Review. She is on the Editorial Review Board of Organization Science.

Professor Jackson is a graduate of Stanford University and earned her Ph.D. in Management from the MIT Sloan School of Management, where she was recognized as a Presidential Fellow and Graduate Woman of Excellence. Prior to graduate school, she worked for the U.S. Department of State in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, where her service was recognized with a Meritorious Honor Award and the Fleet Seminar Fellowship at the Naval War College.

Professor Jackson is married to Luke Tarbi, a senior marketing executive, angel investor, and former Navy officer. They have one son and live in the Moss Hill neighborhood of Boston. Their family spends their free time hiking and skiing the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

Featured Work
Triadic Advocacy Work
Scholars of street-level bureaucracy and institutional research focus primarily on the relationships between advocates and their larger bureaucratic and social systems, assuming that advocates have little need to satisfy their beneficiaries. We find otherwise in our two-year ethnographic study of public defenders advocating for disadvantaged clients in interactions with district attorneys. In our analysis of 82 advocacy opportunities, we demonstrate that, when existing bureaucratic and social systems put beneficiaries at a disadvantage, advocates may be concerned about managing fraught relationships with their beneficiaries in addition to navigating barriers within the bureaucratic and social systems. We further show a tension between the two; ironically, engaging in advocacy work on behalf of beneficiaries can lead to beneficiary mistrust. As a result, advocates engage in triadic advocacy work—managing impressions with their beneficiaries while also influencing powerful actors within the system on behalf of these same beneficiaries. Understanding the process by which advocates navigate this tension is critical to understanding beneficiary outcomes. By reconceptualizing advocacy work as a triadic process among advocate, bureaucratic system, and beneficiary rather than as a dyadic process between advocate and bureaucratic system, this paper develops new theory about how advocates can attempt to garner benefits that advance the rights and opportunities of the disadvantaged.
(Not) Paying for Diversity: Repugnant Market Concerns Associated with Transactional Approaches to Diversity Recruitment
In a 20-month ethnographic study, I examine how a technology firm, ShopCo (a pseudonym), considered 13 different recruitment platforms to attract racial minority engineering candidates. I find that when choosing whether to adopt recruitment platforms focused on racial minority candidates (targeted recruitment platforms) but not when choosing whether to adopt recruitment platforms on which the modal candidate was White (traditional recruitment platforms), ShopCo managers expressed distaste for what they perceived to be the objectification, exploitation, and race-based targeting of racial minorities. These managers’ repugnant market concerns influenced which types of platforms ShopCo adopted. To recruit racial minorities, ShopCo eschewed recruitment platforms taking a transactional approach that emphasized speed, quantity, efficiency, opportunity, and compensation, in favor of platforms taking a developmental approach that emphasized individuality, ethics, equity, community, and commitment. I show that ShopCo managers had different relational models for recruiting based on the race of the candidate. By exploring the new mechanism of repugnant market concerns, I aim to increase understanding of employees’ resistance to DEI initiatives, which can create barriers to workplace reforms even when organizations are committed to change.
It Takes Two to Untangle: Illuminating How and Why Some Workplace Relationships Adapt While Others Deteriorate after a Workplace Microaggression
Although scholars largely assume that workplace microaggressions negatively impact the work relationship between the target and the perpetrator, relational deterioration is not the only observable relational outcome. Indeed, there are instances of relational restoration or even positive adaptation after a workplace microaggression. To coherently make sense of myriad relational outcomes, we draw on theory on relational fractures and theory on intergroup relations to build new theory that specifies how and under what conditions varied relational outcomes may emerge. We theorize that a workplace microaggression, as a relational fracture, by and large activates a target’s motivational system aimed at protecting the self at the expense of the relationship (a self-protective motivation). We then pinpoint the relational conditions under which targets may shift from a self-protective motivation to a relationship-promotive one (characterized by reflection and inquiry) and how, in turn, perpetrators may proceed (in terms of the motivational system activated). We complete our theory by theorizing the conditions under which the pair of motivational systems activated leads to shallower or deeper levels of dyadic relational repair work, with consequences for the work relationship. Our theory offers important insights that challenge, redirect, and extend scholarship on workplace microaggressions.
Journal Articles
Working Papers
  • Jackson, Summer R., and Basima Tewfik. "Was That a Microaggression: A Multilevel Theory of Microaggression Sensemaking." Working Paper, 2023. View Details
  • Jackson, Summer R., Ray Reagans, and Ezra Zuckerman Sivan. "An Organizational Dilemma: A Framework for Considering and Countering Racism by Formal Organizations." Working Paper, 2023. View Details
Awards & Honors
Runner-up for the 2024 Administrative Science Quarterly Dissertation Award for “(Not) Paying for Diversity: Repugnant Market Concerns Associated with Transactional Approaches to Diversity Recruitment” (September 2023).
Recipient of an MIT Sloan PhD Fellowship, 2016–2021.
Winner of the 2020 INFORMS Best Dissertation Proposal Competition for “Understanding Organizational Inequality at ‘Well Intentioned’ Companies: The Case of ShopCo’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Policies and Practices.”
Recipient of Funding Support and Participant in the NYU Stern Diverse Pathways in Academia Conference in 2019.
Selected for the 2020 OB Doctoral Consortium by the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management.
Named as an MIT Graduate Women of Excellence Honoree in 2019.
Recipient of Fieldwork Funding Support from the Good Companies, Good Jobs Initiative, 2018–2019.
Selected for the 2018 Medici Summer Research Institute.
Recipient of an MIT Presidential Fellowship in 2016.
Recipient of Meritorious Honor Award from the U.S. Department of State in 2015.
Selected for the Fleet Seminar Fellowship, Naval War College, 2014–2015.
Recipient of the Haas-Koshland Memorial Award for 2008–2009 (Haifa, Israel).
Recipient of the National Security Education Program David L. Boren Scholarship in the 2007 (Cairo, Egypt).
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