Janna Z. Huang (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of California – Berkeley. Her research interests span economic sociology, organizations, climate politics, and science and technology studies. She employs qualitative and quantitative methods to examine how the organizational, political, and technical dimensions of knowledge production shape different pathways for organizational action, with a specific focus on the regulatory governance and corporate response to climate change.

Janna's dissertation project examines the organizational emergence and consequences of corporate climate disclosure, where firms disclose climate metrics including emissions, targets, and risks to investors and securities regulators. Combining interviews, participant observation, policy analysis, and quantitative data, she shows how metrics-based disclosure standards emerged to govern companies on climate action and how organizations produce and attach meaning to climate metrics. She first details how NGOs and the financial sector developed and consolidated voluntary corporate climate disclosure practices before its eventual uptake by securities regulators that increasingly narrowed climate action around risk. She further 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 shape organizational routines around sustainability. Finally, she explores the implications of metrics-based climate governance, where the quantification of climate progress through climate disclosure can both enhance organizational legitimacy and substitute formal indicators for substantive climate action. This work contributes to scholarship on organizational change, the sociology of quantification, and the political economy of climate change.

Other ongoing projects include investigating the social and environmental impacts of data center infrastructure; the “platformization” of climate governance; and comparative studies on organizational pathways for sustainability and responsible AI.

Janna's work has been supported by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative, the Hewlett Foundation, the American Sociological Association, and the Center for Advanced Internet Studies. Prior to graduate school, she earned 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 and Janna Z. Huang. 2026. [Forthcoming] “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 and Janna Z. Huang. 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