James W Riley is an economic sociologist.
He conducts ethnographic research to produce qualitative studies on the role of status, norms, social valuations, and organizational culture within innovation-driven organizations, creative industries, and cultural markets. His fieldwork aims to identify and distill complex organizational and market structures and social, relational, normative mechanisms to generate grounded theories of organizational actors’ strategic behavior.
As Principal Investigator of the blackbox Lab at the Digital, Data, Design Institute at Harvard Professor Riley is developing an intellectual community of interdisciplinary scholars engaged in grounded theory building while providing thought-partnership with organizations in cultural production, platform design, and AI approaches to value creation. The blackbox Lab focuses on digital transformations that take aim at leapfrogging historic inequities. The blackbox Lab’s mission is to research the role of digital, data, and design with respect to race, culture, technology, and business in digital spaces, products, services, and market platforms. Professor Riley earned a Ph.D. from MIT Sloan School of Management, an M.Sc. in Urbanization and Development from the London School of Economics, and a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Southern California.