Prof. JoAnne Yates

Professor Yates studies both contemporary and historical groups and organizations as users of communication and information technology.

With Wanda Orlikowski from MIT Sloan's Information Technology group and Anne Jackson, a Sloan MBA alum, Yates recently published a Sloan Management Review article that applies a framework developed in the course of our genre research to a practical problem.

Doctoral student Melissa Mazmanian is studying BlackBerry use. Mazmanian, Wanda Orlikowski, and Yates wrote a paper presented at the Academy of Management and published in the AOM Proceedings in 2006. Entitled "Ubiquitous Email: Individual Experiences and Organizational Consequences of Blackberry Use," it is posted here.

Her recent historical book, Structuring the Information Age: Life Insurance and Technology in the Twentieth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005; paperback release fall 2008) examines how a large user industry (life insurance) adopted and used pre-computer information technology, and how that experience shaped (and was shaped by) their adoption and use of early computers.
(See http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title_pages/8517.html or on Amazon.com)

Currently Professor Yates is working on a study of voluntary consensus standard setting over the past 100 years, co-authoring with her husband, Craig Murphy. They also have a small book on the ISO published in 2009 and will ultimately write a scholarly monograph on the evolution of standardization.