Janna Z. Huang (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of California – Berkeley. She employs qualitative and quantitative methods to examine how market devices, organizational dynamics, and sociotechnical infrastructures converge to structure contemporary political economy. Specifically, her dissertation research investigates the emergence, adoption, and contestation of climate reporting practices within corporate climate governance, with particular interest in how reporting frameworks demarcate authority on what counts as "sustainable" that shape subsequent organizational action on sustainability. By illuminating how the institutional, political, and technical dimensions of knowledge production shape pathways for organizational action, this work contributes to scholarship on organizational change, the sociology of quantification, and the political economy of climate change. Her work has been published in Social Forces, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, and Technology in Society.

Janna's dissertation project charts the 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 investigates how actors across investors, regulators, corporate sustainability professionals, and standard-setters produce and attach meaning to these metrics and the broader implications of the incorporation of these metrics within financial markets' response to climate change. 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.

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
-Huang, Janna Z. 2026. “Risky Climate: The Endogenous Institutionalization of Climate Disclosure in Global Corporate Climate Governance.” Social Forces. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soag009
- Fligstein, Neil and Janna Z. Huang. 2026. “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