PhD Candidate in Sociology at UC Berkeley

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Hi, I’m Janna! I'm a Sociology PhD candidate at UC Berkeley. My research interests span organizations, climate politics, science and technology studies, and economic sociology.

I use qualitative and computational methods to examine the role of information-based governance in the broader political economy of sustainable transition. I research how the institutional, political, and technical dimensions of knowledge production around data and measurement — what gets counted in our understandings of climate and environment — shape different pathways for organizational action.

My dissertation project “Making Climate Count: The Emergence and Consequences of Organizational Metrics in Corporate Climate Governance” examines the organizational politics of corporate climate disclosure, where firms disclose climate metrics including emissions, targets, and risks to investors and securities regulators. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, policy analysis, and computational analysis, I show how metrics-based disclosure standards emerged to govern companies on climate action and how organizations produce and attach meaning to climate metrics. I first detail how NGOs and the financial sector developed and consolidated voluntary corporate climate disclosure practices before its eventual uptake by securities regulators that increasingly narrowed climate action around risk. I further examine how sustainability professionals within complying companies navigate their organizations to collect, produce, and interpret the required climate metrics, and how these metrics in turn shape organizational routines around sustainability. Finally, I explore the implications of metrics-based climate governance, where the quantification of climate progress through climate disclosure can both enhance organizational legitimacy and substitute formal indicators for substantive climate action.

I aim to bridge scholarship on organizational change, the sociology of quantification, and the political economy of climate change. I am interested in unpacking how climate politics necessarily includes the politics of data. I see applications of my research to many facets of climate governance, including climate reporting, emissions markets, offset markets, supply chain reporting, and sustainable finance.

Other ongoing projects include investigating the social and environmental impacts of data center infrastructure; the construction of financialized nature indicators (with Viet Phan); hiring for sustainability skills in corporations (with Katherine Baird and Adair Morse); the “platformization” of climate governance; and comparative studies on organizational pathways for sustainability and responsible AI (with Angele Christin and Sanna Ali).

My work has been supported by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative, the Hewlett Foundation, the American Sociological Association, and the Center for Advanced Internet Studies. Prior to graduate school, I earned a B.S. in Computer Science with honors in Science, Technology, and Society, and an M.A. in Sociology from Stanford University.

Publications

• Fligstein, Neil and Janna Z. Huang. 2026. [Forthcoming] “Institutional Entrepreneurship in the Creation of Multistakeholder Governance Fields for Climate Change: The Case of the Corporate Climate Disclosure Field.” Research in the Sociology of Organizations: Organizations and Climate Change [Walker, E. and Vasi, I. (eds.)].
• Fligstein, Neil and Janna Z. Huang. 2025. “Finance in Sustainable Transition: A Comparative Review Across Institutional Investors, Asset Managers, Venture Capital, Insurance, and Municipal Bonds.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 16(4): e70012. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.70012
• Huang, Janna Z. 2023. A Break in the Cloud: The Local Sociotechnical Affordances Underlying Global Internet Infrastructures. Technology in Society 74:102319. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2023.102319

Under Review

• Huang, Janna Z. “Managing the Climate Crisis: The Endogenous Development of Climate Disclosure in Global Corporate Climate Governance” (revise & resubmit at Social Forces)
• Huang, Janna Z. “Making Climate Count: Embedding Climate Metrics in Organizational Routines”

Working Papers (full manuscripts available)

• Huang, Janna Z. and Neil Fligstein. “Field and Organizational Drivers of Climate Disclosure”
• Huang, Janna Z., Angèle Christin, and Sanna J. Ali. “Metrics for Good? Quantification and Organizational Change in Sustainability and Responsible AI”