Ada Leung

My primary research focuses on the sociological aspects of consumer behavior, including social structural factors (networks, inequality, culture, and social influence), consumption practices (such as financial management practices, museum-going, philanthropic behaviors, weight-control), and how such behaviors are related to personal values, such as materialism, and ultimately consumers’ quality of life. Another research stream of mine investigates how organizations learn through their network ties and their resultant organizational change. The common theme in my research is to explore how social structures shape and co-evolve with individual consumption and organizational management behaviors. Social actors (either consumer or organization) at different positions in the social structure have differential access to resources and hence face different conditions during consumption and organizational learning. At the same time, these practices feedback to the social structures the actors are embedded in, and cause structural changes in the social system. Social processes takes a relatively long time to unfold, therefore, it is imperative to triangulate the findings using multiple methods (e.g. surveys, ethnography, and social network analyses).