Joseph Nixon

Joe Nixon is an Organization and Management PhD Candidate at Emory University's Goizueta Business School. His research interests stem from his longstanding interest in understanding the potential of entrepreneurship and business to address social ills, including social inequality, stratification, and persistent poverty. Joe’s work, grounded in organizational sociology, examines the global proliferation of social enterprise, including its spread as an organizational form and its prominence as a cultural theme influencing behavior and social evaluation.

In his dissertation, Joe considers how social entrepreneurial themes influence college applicant discourse and to what end. Specifically, he investigates whether applicants invoking these themes are disproportionately rewarded with offers of admission and whether these themes predict subsequent academic performance. To do so, he leverages advanced natural language processing (NLP) techniques, including transformer-based contextual word embedding, to create thematic measures from text-based discourse. In other research, he examines the diffusion of social enterprise from a world society perspective and the cross-cultural evolution of social innovation ecosystems in order to disentangle influences of local context from global pressures to conform. His research consistently seeks to understand how organizations can have positive social impact.

Joe holds a BA in Mathematics, an MA in Higher Education Administration, and an MBA in Entrepreneurship. Prior to beginning his doctoral studies, Joe was a manager in student affairs, mentoring, advising, and supporting students at various universities in the United States. He also spent several years in industry as a sales and marketing consultant, collaborating with hundreds of small business owners to address challenges they faced.

In his spare time, Joe enjoys playing strategy board games, snowboarding, and teaching his dog new tricks. He is an avid euchre player and a fan of his hometown Chicago Bears