Prof. Claudine Gartenberg explains that her early work came from trying to make sense of what she saw as a consultant during the Enron era and the 2008 financial crisis: well-intentioned people producing bad outcomes because of the organizations they worked in. Her dissertation looked at home builders that also issued mortgages and investment banks that both underwrote and securitized them. These were sensible strategies on paper, but they created internal conflicts of interest. A second line of work challenged the purely principal-agent view of firms. It showed that peer comparison and social dynamics shape how people respond to pay and how companies compete. That led to her well-known research with George Serafeim on corporate purpose. Using a large dataset of employee survey responses, they found four clusters of beliefs: purpose clarity, purpose camaraderie, trust in management, and perceptions of fairness and non-discrimination. Only purpose clarity predicted firm performance. Gartenberg notes that telling genuine purpose apart from “performative” purpose is still an open challenge in the field.

The second half turns to AI. Gartenberg argues that “everything old is new again.” Organizations are essentially constructions that enable collective action, and AI agents working with or without humans reopen the basic questions of organizational theory. She compares the present to earlier periods of institutional stress, such as the interwar years and the post–World War II era, which produced thinkers like Coase, Berle and Means, Simon, and Selznick. Asked whether big tech and AI labs like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic have purposes aligned with broad societal prosperity, she reframes the question. She sees these companies as largely well-intentioned but facing a fast-accelerating technology whose problems are too large for any single firm to solve. In her view, this calls for social science to address questions of governance, regulation, and which decisions should sit inside firms versus in the political sphere. She closes by saying her energy comes from her family, and from the conviction that now is the most impactful moment of her career to help build a world where young people can thrive.