About
Dr. Greetje “Gretta” Corporaal was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute where she also taught the course Digital Technology and Economic Organization. Corporaal is a Fellow of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the New Social Contract, a Teaching Affiliate at Said Business School, and co-host of the Talking About Organizations Podcast. She holds a PhD in Organization Sciences, an MSc (cum laude) in Social Research and PMC (cum laude) in Culture, Organization and Management from VU Amsterdam, and a BSc in Psychology from the University of Groningen, where she also studied Classical Violin and Modern Japan Studies. In 2014-2015 Corporaal was a visiting scholar at New York University, Stern School of Business.
A Sociologist of Work and Organizations, Corporaal’s research is positioned at the intersection of Management and Organization Studies, Information Systems Research, and Economic Sociology. She is interested in the development of AI, digital platform technologies and services, and how their usage shapes the future of work and organizing in society.
Corporaal was part of the ERC-funded project ‘iLabour: The construction of Labour Markets, Institutions and Movements on the Internet‘. This project examines online freelance work and online labour platforms. Her research focuses on the technology firms that develop these platforms and how these new private regulators create and manage their marketplaces. To this aim, Corporaal conducted a one-year ethnographic study inside one of the largest online labour platforms for knowledge work. She also studies firm adoption of platforms and how they are changing their organizational processes and practices internally to engage online freelancers as part of their external workforce.
Corporaal’s other research focuses on how globalization, digitization, and hyper-specialization are transforming work in the areas of technology, innovation, and strategy. To this aim, she conducted a 4-year multi-sited field study of cross-boundary collaboration among research scientists, engineers, and divisional managers within a Japanese multinational and its collaboration with an American engineering contractor.
Corporaal is an active member of the Academy of Management and the European Group of Organization Studies. She received various awards for her work, among which Best Reviewer Awards from the Academy of Management (2017), a Young Talent Award from the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds (2014) and the Wilhelmina Drucker Early Career Award from VU Amsterdam (2015). Her research has been covered in The Financial Times, Fortune Magazine, and Forbes Magazine.
Research Interests
Online freelancing and outsourcing of knowledge work in the digital platform economy; the development of AI, machine learning models, and algorithmic management processes; the emergence and transformation of fields, boundaries and practices; institutional processes; micro-processes of strategy-making; sociology of work and organizing; technology and management innovations and new value creation
