Joachim Lyon

I am a PhD student studying organizational theory at the Center for Work, Technology, & Organization, in the Department of Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University.

My ethnographic research focuses on how product design work is conducted at the intersection of different organizational, occupational, and national contexts. My early work involved an ethnography of a fashion design floor in southern China, specifically the relationship between designers and patterncutters. Currently, I'm studying design practice in the globally distributed offices of two design consultancies, with a focus on how local context affects the enactment of standardized (and idealized) organizational processes.