About Summer

I am an organizational ethnographer who studies how race, class, and gender shape people’s experiences at work

At Harvard Business School, I am an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Organizational Behavior Unit, where I teach Leadership and Organizational Behavior in the MBA required curriculum. My research examines how human capital management systems — recruitment, hiring, development, promotion, and retention — shape opportunity structures and career outcomes in organizations.

I am especially interested in the gap between organizational ideals and organizational practice. Many organizations say they want to become more diverse, inclusive, and equitable. Yet the systems they use to pursue those goals often produce unexpected tensions. My work examines those tensions up close: how people interpret diversity initiatives, how employees learn what advancement requires, how race and class shape mobility, how workplace relationships unfold across difference, and how organizational practices can both mitigate and reproduce inequality.

Ethnography is central to how I do this work. The dynamics I study are often subtle, relational, and difficult to see from a distance. To understand them, I spend time inside organizations, observing how policies and practices are interpreted, adapted, resisted, and enacted in everyday work. Ethnography allows me to uncover the mechanisms that are often missed when we study inequality only through formal policies, outcomes, or individual attitudes.

My path to studying organizations began long before graduate school. I was born in Mallorca, Spain, and grew up in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Growing up internationally, in a multiracial and multinational family, shaped how I think about identity, culture, and hierarchy. I learned early that bringing people from different backgrounds into the same space does not automatically produce equal interaction. Context matters. So do power, language, history, and the structures that shape how people relate to one another.

I later studied Arabic and Hebrew, and worked across the public and private sectors on issues related to governance, economic development, and sustainability. Before beginning my Ph.D., I served as an Evaluation Specialist for the U.S. Department of State in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, Office of Assistance Coordination, where my work was recognized with a Meritorious Honor Award. That experience helped clarify the questions that now animate my research. At State, I became increasingly interested in how well-intentioned organizations can struggle not because people lack commitment, but because their structures, incentives, and workplace dynamics make learning and change difficult.

I am also a mother. My experience surviving severe preeclampsia and HELLP syndrome deepened my commitment to Black maternal health and to organizations working to improve maternal and infant outcomes, including March of Dimes. That experience is personal, but it is also connected to the questions that have long animated my work: how inequality becomes embedded in systems, how people experience institutions differently depending on race, class, and gender, and what it takes for organizations to change.

Outside of work, I live in Boston with my husband, Luke Tarbi—a senior marketing executive, angel investor, and former Navy officer—and our two children. As a former Division I heptathlete at Stanford, I still love movement, competition, and being outdoors. As a family, we spend as much time as we can hiking and skiing in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

Photography by Russ Campbell