PhD Candidate in Sociology at UC Berkeley

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Hi, I’m Janna! I'm a Sociology PhD candidate at UC Berkeley. I employ qualitative and quantitative methods to examine the intersection of markets, organizations, and climate politics. My research investigates how organizational politics and technical expertise shape the emergence, stabilization, and contestation of corporate climate governance. My work has been published or forthcoming in Social Forces, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, and Technology in Society.

My dissertation project charts the emergence and consequences of corporate climate disclosure, where firms disclose climate metrics including emissions, targets, and risks to investors and securities regulators. Combining interviews, participant observation, policy analysis, and quantitative data, she shows how organizations produce and attach meaning to these metrics and the broader implications of finance's role in efforts toward sustainable transition. 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.

By illuminating how the institutional, political, and technical dimensions of knowledge production shape pathways for organizational action, this work contributes to scholarship on organizational change, the sociology of quantification, and the political economy of climate change. I am particularly 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 Angèle 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

• Huang, Janna Z. (Forthcoming) “Risky Climate: The Endogenous Institutionalization of Climate Disclosure in Global Corporate Climate Governance.” Social Forces
• 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. “Making Climate Count: Dynamics of Organizational Commensuration around Climate Disclosure”
• Huang, Janna Z., Angèle Christin, and Sanna J. Ali. “Metrics for Good? Quantification and Organizational Change in Sustainability and Responsible AI”
• Huang, Janna Z., Adair Morse, and Katherine Baird. “Jurisdictional Reinforcement in New Institutionalism: Evidence from the Integration of Sustainability in Corporations”