Andrea Wessendorf

Andrea Wessendorf joined the University of Edinburgh Business School as an Early Career Fellow in Strategy in March 2022. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge, Judge Business School. In her dissertation, she adopted an occupational lens on social inequality to explore how occupational group membership is constrained based on social group membership (such as gender, race, and class), and how occupational dynamics contribute to the micro-dynamics of inequality within the workplace. Prior to pursuing an academic career, Andrea worked for an international corporation, most recently as the Director of Marketing (EMEA) at the European headquarters.

Research Interests

As an organisational ethnographer and field researcher, Andrea seeks to understand how organizational and occupational dynamics affect important outcomes, such as intra- and inter-occupational collaboration in crisis response or how social inequality is sustained in the workplace – despite the growing attention to diversity, equity and inclusion. Andrea is particularly interested in studying how occupational and organisational dynamics interact to enable or constrain individuals’ agency and advancement in the workplace, and how organizational change affects different occupational groups (e.g., their roles and practices within the workplace). To do so, she examines what occupational members do in their day-to-day work and how they relate to others within the workplace.

Andrea explores these dynamics by immersing herself into the social worlds of those who she studies. By conducting in-depth field studies, she seeks to uncover empirical puzzles and develop novel theory. In her work to date, she has studied clinicians and managers in healthcare organisations, and used a large-scale diversity survey to investigate the selection of partners in law firms.