(Updated May 2026)
UNDER REVIEW
Tan, M & Chai, S. “Legitimation process in segmented nascent industries” (Real title disguised for peer review) [Dissertation chapter]
2nd Round Revise & Resubmit at Strategic Management Journal
Nominated for Best PhD Paper Prize, SMS Istanbul 2024
Nominated for “That’s Interesting!” Award, EGOS Milan 2024
A study about the emergence and legitimation of a new multi-segmented industry centered around valorizing insects for multiple applications. Abstract omitted for peer review.
Selected conference presentations/workshops: GRONEN Barcelona (2026), HoFoW Lyon (2026), AOM Copenhagen (2025), ARCS Paris - PhD workshop (2025), SMS Istanbul (2024), EGOS Milan (2024)
SELECTED WORK IN PROGRESS
Tan, M. “Bottle versus breast: A historical case study of the infant formula product market destabilization and breastfeeding practice revival in the U.S., 1971-2000” [Dissertation chapter, job market paper]
As new technological product markets emerge and grow, they alter or replace older production and consumption practices. Once such markets achieve legitimacy and maturity, relationships between market constituents become institutionalized and taken for granted. Studies show that transformation in such markets often entails disruption, usually from newer product markets. Thus, we know little about how mature product markets are contested not by new commercial alternatives, but by social movements reviving older, market-eschewing production or consumption practices. Understanding this is increasingly critical as today, various movements motivated by wide-ranging social and environmental justice issues challenge established product markets through promoting practices rooted in craft, natural, communal, or care values that forswear the capitalist market system. To examine this, I am building a historical case study of the mature product market infant formula and pro-breastfeeding social movement in the U.S., focusing on 1971 to 2000, drawing on extensive archival materials from formula firms, breastfeeding and anti-corporation activists, pediatricians, regulatory agencies, parents, and mainstream newspapers. My emerging findings show a cyclical process recurring throughout time: entry of fringe actors whose moral, economic, or scientific claims resonate with some incumbent market constituents, which reconfigure their entrenched relationships, reinforced by each constituent's adaptation to shifting normative expectations of their behaviors. These produce oscillating dynamics between the dominance of product and practice that, in the long run, culminate in product market contraction and revival of practice-in-decline.
Selected conference presentations/workshops: EGOS Bergamo/virtual (2026), Ethnography Atelier (2026), Organization Science Winter Conference Paris - Doctoral Consortium (2026), AOM Management History Division virtual PDW (2025)
Tan, M. “Emotions and emergence: How entrepreneurs manage consumers’ aversive emotions in nascent market of insect-as-food products” [Dissertation chapter, collecting additional data]
Extant research has focused on the critical role of cognitive processes for new category acceptance, but has neglected emotions from consideration. In some categories, emotional appeal may be as critical as cognitive legitimacy. Further complicating, the growing environmental consciousness has spurred entrepreneurs’ entry into moral markets that often involve sustainable products from unconventional inputs. The materiality of such inputs can evoke nonconscious, aversive emotions. Given the scarcity of research examining how audience emotions shape nascent category emergence and how entrepreneurs account for these affective dynamics, this paper asks: How do entrepreneurial actors manage consumers’ aversive emotions toward an emerging category? To explore this question, I study entrepreneurial actors in nascent markets of food products made from insects as sustainable ingredients. Through interviews and archival data, I am building a processual theory on how entrepreneurs build mental representation of emotional composition diversity and intensity of different customer groups (in particular aversive emotions such as disgust, fear, and shame), and how this representation plays a role in their strategic actions and decisions.
Tan, M. “Reviving old technologies and valorizing mundane objects through reassignment of functions and meanings” [Conceptual paper, writing stage]
Objects and technologies possess both functional and symbolic value, but research often examines these dimensions separately. One stream focuses on the functional value creation of objects through technical innovations that address audience’s practical needs. Another stream explores how actors mobilize cultural resources to imbue objects or products with symbolic value that fulfills audience’s desires for expression and meaning. Given the separate domains of research, extant studies have overlooked phenomena where actors reassign objects with both radically new functional use and symbolic meaning, and face resulting audience dissonances. Amidst pressures from today's social and environmental crises, various organizations, social movements, and entrepreneurs increasingly rethink and question the roles of mundane, familiar, or discarded objects and technologies. This study theorizes how heterogenous actors 1) reassign objects and technologies with new (un)favorable uses and meanings and 2) address audience dissonances that result from these reassignment attempts.
Huising, R. & Tan, M. “Constructing a culture of responsibility among biosafety and biosecurity professionals” [Analyzing data]
A study on the evolving meaning of professional and scientific responsibility, drawing on a rich qualitative data focused on an international network of biosafety and biosecurity professionals, spanning 2017-2024.
METHODOLOGY-RELATED WORK
Huising R.*, McAlpine, C.*, & Tan, M.*, “Becoming who you are: Voices and journeys of qualitative scholars” [Analyzing data]
*alphabetical order, equal authorship
This project explores the process of becoming and being an academic scholar. We interview scholars with expertise in qualitative research methods across different career and life stages about their experiences, challenges, relationships, and moments of meaning in their scholarly lives. The central focus is not on their specific research findings, but on their trajectories as people and scientists—how they navigate identity, purpose, feedback, collaboration, boundaries, craft, and joy in the academic profession.