Academic Research in the Public Eye

Academic Research in the Public Eye: Apparently One Dissertation Wasn’t Enough

Finishing an 805 page dissertation should probably have been enough research for a while.

Apparently not.

While working through years of litigation, public records, regulators, corporations, FOIAs, and the occasional government response that created more questions than it answered, I kept finding patterns that didn’t quite fit neatly into the dissertation.

So now I’m working on developing additional academic research articles in public.

They’re WIPs. Not peer-reviewed. Not declarations that I’ve discovered the secrets of the universe. Just working research, written out, sourced, challenged, updated, and available for anyone curious enough to find it.

What I’m Researching:

Competitive Decoupling: Built from institutional decoupling, CSR, stakeholder theory, and competitive strategy. The question: what happens when the gap between what an organization publicly stands for and how it behaves doesn’t just create legitimacy but potentially creates a competitive advantage?

Regulatory Knowledge Fragmentation: Built from organizational information theory, bounded rationality, knowledge management, and public administration. Basically: how can the government have the information while the government somehow doesn’t know the information?

Oversight Abstention: Built from regulatory governance, professional oversight, discretion, and institutional theory. If a watchdog refuses to intervene because it doesn’t want to affect an ongoing proceeding, what happens when not intervening can affect that proceeding too? Welcome to the Nonintervention Paradox.

Institutional Policy Incoherence: Built from policy-coherence, implementation, decoupling, and administrative theory. What happens when the governor, legislature, regulators, enforcement agencies, and government lawyers all have to explain the same policy and the explanations don’t necessarily sound like the same policy anymore?

And underneath all of it remains my dissertation’s Structural Gravity Theory: unresolved institutional obligations don’t simply disappear. They accumulate, interact, and can eventually change institutional behavior.

There is a common theme here:

What institutions say. What they know. What they do. Who is responsible. And what happens when those things stop matching.

Cannabis, Illinois, Kentucky, litigation, and public records gave me the initial data. The interesting question now is whether these ideas survive outside those environments.

That’s why I’m putting the research in the public eye while I’m still working on it.

If you’re an academic, researcher, attorney, regulator, student, or just someone sitting on a dataset that makes you think “you should probably see this,” reach out.

I’m interested in contrary evidence too. Comparative data, other industries, other states, other countries, joint research, co-authorship, or somebody demonstrating that one of my ideas doesn’t work.

That’s research.

Apparently this is what happens when you don’t know when to stop asking “why?”