Curtis K. Chan is an Associate Professor in the Strategy, Entrepreneurship, and Management department at the University of Alberta’s School of Business. (See a profile that the University of Alberta wrote up about me here!)
His research explores how people navigate the challenges and opportunities of their work. He studies work, occupations, and professions, and he is an inductive, qualitative field researcher. His projects begin with a puzzling phenomenon in the world. He then asks what is going on, and what it can teach us about organizations. A thread running through his research is how people carry out and make sense of their work when their occupation’s ideals meet the demands of managers, clients, new technologies, and the public. He has studied people as varied as airport security screeners, university career advisers, Finnish teachers asked to digitize their teaching, Instacart gig-workers suddenly hailed as heroes during the pandemic, police officers, and street dancers. His award-winning papers appear in top-tier academic journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Academy of Management Journal, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and the Academy of Management Annals. He also has written work appearing in the Harvard Business Review. Curtis serves on the Editorial Review Boards for Administrative Science Quarterly and Organization Science.
As a teacher, he has taught organizational behavior and theory and has received “Teaching Star” distinctions. He was named one of the Poets&Quants Top 50 Undergraduate Professors Of 2020.
Curtis’s full academic CV is here. He was previously an Assistant Professor at Boston College's Carroll School of Management. He received his Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Harvard Business School and Harvard University, also earning a master’s degree in Sociology from Harvard University. His bachelor’s degree is also from Harvard University, where he graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.
