About me

I am on the 2026–27 academic job market, seeking a tenure-track position in management and organizations.

Organizations rarely fail to adopt social initiatives — they fail to keep them. My research asks why some internal change agents sustain contested programs through resistance, controversy, and shifting windows of opportunity, while others watch identical programs disappear.

I am a Ph.D. organizational scholar (University of Colorado Boulder, 2021) and currently a Visiting Scholar in the Economic Sociology Working Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management, following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Before academia, I served as a U.S. diplomat in Cyprus, Hong Kong and Macau, and Haiti, where I managed crisis negotiations between parties with every reason not to talk. That experience anchors both my research questions and my teaching: theory matters when it changes what a practitioner does next.

My job-market paper, When Conflict Does Not Kill Practice, draws on a nine-year study of four technology firms to show how conflict itself can build the committed leadership support that keeps contested diversity programs alive.

Email: vicmarsh@mit.edu

Left: on watch in the State Department Operations Center, 2010 — a photo that ran in The Washington Post. Right: Hong Kong, during my Foreign Service years.