About
A scholar of individuals and collectives
I am interested in humans as individuals and in collectives, and in what happens in the space between them.
Most of what I do starts from impatience with a particular kind of explanation. When something goes wrong in an organization, we look for someone to blame: a bad actor, a rotten culture, a process that failed. Those stories are satisfying, and they are usually beside the point, because the conditions that made the behaviour possible are still there once the culprit is gone. That is why the same thing keeps happening. I am interested in those conditions, and in why we work so hard not to see them.
So one question runs underneath everything I write: how are power, agency, and responsibility actually produced between people, rather than simply held by them? I have followed it into a fairly wide territory, more than I planned to. It runs through followership and the parts an audience plays in turning someone into a leader, through the way harm becomes ordinary, through the slow corrosion of expertise, and lately through the governance of algorithms and digital commons, where the same old questions show up with machines added to the cast.
By temperament I am a critical management scholar, and something of a magpie about it. The questions I care about rarely sit inside one field, so I borrow where it helps: from cognitive and social psychology, from economics and formal modelling, from sociology and political science.
Short bio
Dr. Aybike Mergen is an Assistant Professor of Management at Özyeğin University Business School. She holds a Ph.D. in Management & Strategy from Koç University, where she was a visiting scholar at York University's Schulich School of Business. Her academic background combines two master's degrees (Economics, Tilburg University; Political Science, Sabancı University) with professional experience in management consultancy at EY and Deloitte. A critical management scholar with strongly multidisciplinary tendencies, she draws on cognitive and social psychology, formal modelling, economics, sociology, and political science. Her research examines how power and agency are produced in organizations: how leadership and followership take shape, how harmful practices become normalized, and how accountability holds or fails in algorithmic systems. Her work appears in journals including the Journal of Management and the Journal of Business Ethics.