Priyam Saraf

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2021 - 2022 Academic Year

Cognitive Communities, Managerial Decision-Making and Organizational Technology Adoption in Bangladesh

Why firms in developing countries do not adopt technology, from emails to 3D, despite proven value and available information is a fertile area of research. This literature treats the manager as an atomic decision-maker arriving at the verdict of economically-inefficient behavior. Reimagining technology adoption as a material and cognitive activity undertaken by socially embedded managers, the project will generate novel data on their cognitive world-views, culturally salient goals and network-level drivers to improve our understanding of the social basis for managerial behavior. The research uses full-cycle research methods to move from inductive-descriptive research to causal evidence; piloted in Bangladesh's garment industry.

Priyam Saraf, Graduate School of Business

Priyam Saraf is currently pursuing a PhD in organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Prior to this, Saraf worked as a senior economist at the World Bank, through the Young Professional Program, on projects to improve firm productivity in Mexico, Chile, India, Jamaica and Pakistan for ten years. She holds a masters in public policy with focus on development economics at Columbia University and a dual bachelors in economics and information systems management at the Singapore Management University. She is interested in investigating the social and cultural processes underlying the emergence of capabilities and knowledge. For example, how do social structures influence markets and emergence of material and cognitive capabilities within firms (and vice versa)? What kinds of knowledge do disciplines come to produce and how do disciplinary boundaries evolve through history? Saraf has published policy recommendations including in the World Development Report on Education (2018) and has worked at Bain & Company and the Monetary Authority of Singapore prior to the World Bank.

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