Janna Z. Huang (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of California – Berkeley. Her scholarship is at the intersection of economic sociology, science and technology studies, management and organizations studies, and climate sociology. Her research broadly examines how the organizational, social, and technical dimensions of knowledge production around climate change shape variegated pathways for climate action.

Her three-paper dissertation draws on interviews, document analysis, and quantitative data to investigate the organizational emergence and response to corporate climate governance around the disclosure of climate metrics such as emissions and targets. The first paper details how securities regulators developed and consolidated climate disclosure rules requiring companies to report climate information. The second paper examines how sustainability professionals within complying companies navigate their organizations to collect, produce, and interpret the required climate metrics, and how these metrics in turn reshape organizations' understanding of sustainability. The third paper explores how quantifying sustainable action through climate metrics can advance organizational legitimacy but substitute for meaningful environmental progress.

Her work is published or forthcoming in Technology in Society, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, and Research in Sociology of Organizations. She holds a B.S. in Computer Science with honors in Science, Technology, and Society, and an M.A. in Sociology from Stanford University.

Publications:

Fligstein, Neil & Huang, Janna Z. 2026. [Forthcoming] (equal authorship) 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 & Huang, Janna Z. 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