Jade Wong is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government.

Jade is an organisational ethnographer who studies professionals’ day-to-day encounters with bureaucratic objects such as performance measures and paperwork. The question that organises her work is: what does it take for professionals to sustain their commitment to making the world a better place despite the frustrations and disappointments from working in resource-strapped, rule-laden, emotionally-trying settings?  

As a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Jade will work on a book manuscript and commence a new project. Her book manuscript, which is based on ethnographic fieldwork at a large, publicly-funded, health care organisation in the United States, contains a collection of stories about ambivalence. It studies how professionals’ ambivalence is provoked, mobilised, and the effects this has on social relations and organisational practices.  

Whereas her first project explains why ambivalence makes deviating from the status quo so difficult, her second project will examine attempts to create social change. By ethnographically studying how change is defined, enacted, and experienced on the ground in UK public organisations, she will address the question: what does it take for public organisations and professionals to be seen as creating change?

Before joining Oxford, Jade earned a PhD in Social Work and Welfare at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice at the University of Chicago. She also holds an MSc in Social Policy and Planning at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA in Commerce and Economics at the University of New South Wales, Australia.