Janet Xu
Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior
Lacob Family Faculty Scholar for 2024–2025
Academic Area:
Bio
Janet Xu received her PhD in sociology from Princeton University and her BA in sociology and public policy from the University of Chicago. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University in the Inequality in America Initiative.
Research Interests
- Economic Sociology
- Diversity
- Labor Markets
- Evaluation Systems and Processes
- Inequality
Academic Degrees
- PhD in Sociology, Princeton University, 2021
- BA in Sociology and Public Policy, University of Chicago, 2014
Research Statement
Janet Xu studies how people and organizations define, evaluate, and make claims about diversity. Her work investigates how diversity is portrayed and rationalized in labor markets, institutionalized in policies and initiatives, and ascribed value by organizational decision-makers. She uses original field and survey experiments, administrative records, and digital traces to examine the consequences of these social construction processes.