About

Susan S. Silbey is the Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor of Humanities, Sociology and Anthropology at MIT. She also holds a position as a Professor of Behavioral and Policy Sciences at the Sloan School of Management. Her academic roles encompass a broad interdisciplinary engagement across the social sciences and humanities, emphasizing her contributions to understanding human behavior, social structures, and policy implications. As a faculty member at MIT, she is involved in research and teaching that intersect anthropology, sociology, and behavioral sciences, contributing to the university's mission of integrating social science insights into practical and policy-oriented contexts.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Computer Science
• Social psychology
• Engineering
• Psychology
• Knowledge management
• Engineering ethics
• Law and economics
• Management
• Economics
• Business
• Public relations

Selected publications

• Nothing to Lose or Much to Lose? The Gendered Employment Consequences of Leaving Engineering Majors

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article

  Are there gender differences in the employment consequences of leaving the engineering major? Given the intense interest shown by scholars and policy makers alike in promoting women’s persistence in engineering careers, it is surprising that we could find no prior studies that answer this question. Rather, the employment consequences of leaving engineering have largely been assumed. Using wage decomposition, this paper tests for gender differences in the post-graduation wages of engineering major stayers versus leavers. We do so for three distinct longitudinal datasets. Our results are significant, consistent, and challenge prior assumptions. The unexplained portion of the stayer-leaver wage gap for male engineers across all three datasets is large, significant, and substantive – from 22% to 35% of male engineers’ mean initial annual salary. Men experience a large wage penalty for beginning but not completing an engineering degree. The unexplained portion of the stayer-lever wage gap for female engineers is small, mostly insignificant, and far less substantial – from 0% to 5% of female engineers’ mean initial annual salary. Women experience little to no wage penalty for beginning but not completing an engineering degree. These results have direct implications for the policy goals of using women’s participation and persistence in engineering to address gender wage inequality and provides novel insights regarding the mechanisms and nature of gender inequalities in engineering. Surprisingly, it is men who have much to lose by leaving engineering. The women who start engineering majors have little to lose by leaving.

  PublisherDOI

• Recourse, Repair, Reparation, & Prevention: A Stakeholder Analysis of AI Supply Chains

  2025-06-23 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The AI industry is exploding in popularity, with increasing attention to potential harms and unwanted consequences. In the current digital ecosystem, AI deployments are often the product of AI supply chains (AISC): networks of outsourced models, data, and tooling through which multiple entities contribute to AI development and distribution. AI supply chains lack the modularity, redundancies, or conventional supply chain practices that enable identification, isolation, and easy correction of failures, exacerbating the already difficult processes of responding to ML-generated harms. As the stakeholders participating in and impacted by AISCs have scaled and diversified, so too have the risks they face. In this stakeholder analysis of AI supply chains, we consider who participates in AISCs, what harms they face, where sources of harm lie, and how market dynamics and power differentials inform the type and probability of remedies. Because AI supply chains are purposely invented and implemented, they may be designed to account for, rather than ignore, the complexities, consequences, and risks of deploying AI systems. To enable responsible design and management of AISCs, we offer a typology of responses to AISC-induced harms: recourse, repair, reparation or prevention. We apply this typology to stakeholders participating in a health-care AISC across three stylized markets $\unicode{x2013}$ vertical integration, horizontal integration, free market $\unicode{x2013}$ to illustrate how stakeholder positioning and power within an AISC may shape responses to an experienced harm.

  PublisherDOI

• Turning and Internship into a Research Opportunity

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Constructing Consequences for Noncompliance: The Case of Academic Laboratories

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Legal Culture and Cultures of Legality

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Law
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Rank Has Its Privileges: Explaining Why Laboratory Safety Is a Persistent Challenge

  Journal of Business Ethics · 2022-06-19 · 13 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 11. Why Do Biologists and Chemists Do Safety Differently? the reproduction of cultural variation through pragmatic regulation

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2022-08-13 · 4 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Co-Opting Regulation: Professional Control Through Discretionary Mobilization of Legal Prescriptions and Expert Knowledge

  Organization Science · 2021 · 27 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Public relations

  The governance of front-line professionals is a persistent organizational problem. Regulations designed to make professional work more legible and responsive to both organizational and public expectations depend on these professionals’ willing implementation. This paper examines the important question of how professional control shapes regulatory compliance. Drawing on a seventeen-month ethnographic study of a bioscience laboratory, we show how professionals deploy their discretionary judgment to assemble environmental, health, and safety regulations with their own expert practices, explaining frequently observed differential rates of regulatory compliance. We find that professional scientists selectively implement and blend formal regulations with expert practice to respond to risks the law acknowledges (to workers’ bodies and the environment) and to risks the law does not acknowledge but professionals recognize as critical (to work tasks and collegiality). Some regulations are followed absolutely, others are adapted on a case-by-case basis; in other instances, new practices are produced to control threats not addressed by regulations. Such selective compliance, adaptation and invention enact professional expertise: interpretations of hazard and risk. The discretionary enactment of regulations, at a distance from formal agents, becomes part of the technical, practical, and tacit assemblage of situated practices. Thus, paradoxically, professional expert control is maintained and sometimes enhanced as professionals blend externally imposed regulations with expert practices. In essence, regulation is co-opted in the service of professional control. This research contributes to studies of professional expertise, the legal governance of professionals in organizations, regulatory compliance, and safety cultures.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Accountability infrastructures: Pragmatic compliance inside organizations

  Regulation & Governance · 2021-07-08 · 34 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract We trace the pragmatic turn in regulatory governance from the level of the state and civil society to the coalface of the regulated organization. Since the 1980s, an array of new regulatory models has emerged. These models, while distinct, are unified in two related tendencies. First, they support the devolution of responsibility for standard setting, program design, and enforcement to the regulated organization. This delegation of governance to the organization itself has catalyzed the creation of accountability infrastructures within organizations, a network of offices, roles, programs, and procedures dedicated to aligning the organization's operations with external standards, codes of conduct, ethical and normative expectations, and regulations. Second, the diverse regulatory models depend, often implicitly, on organizational accountability infrastructures that incorporate the tenets of pragmatist philosophy: inquiry through narration, adaptation to context, and problem‐solving through experimentation. Reviewing the empirical literature on organizational compliance, we find ample evidence of inquiry through narration at the organizational coalface. However, we find limited evidence of narrating plurality in the organization and narrating experimentation as problem‐solving, as these activities create tensions with internal and external parties who expect singular, stable representations of governance. These tensions reveal an important incongruity between pragmatic governance across organizations and pragmatic governance within organizations. We contribute to the regulatory governance literature by documenting this important shift in the locus of governance to the organizational coalface and by charting a new research agenda. We argue that examinations of regulatory governance should be retraced in three ways. First, attention should shift to the organizational coalface, recognizing and analyzing accountability infrastructures as the central contemporary mechanism of governance. Second, the long‐standing focus in regulatory studies on why parties comply should shift to understanding how regulated parties manage themselves to achieve compliance. Third, analyses of compliance should examine the tensions in narrating adaptation and experimentation, and the implications of such tensions for the achievement of prosocial outcomes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Dispute Processing in Law and Legal Scholarship: From Institutional Critique to the Reconstruction of the Juridical Subject

  Denver law review · 2021 · 23 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Law
  PublisherOA PDF

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Developing Diverse Leadership for Engineering

  NSF · $796k · 2003–2010

• Collaborative Research: Science of Broadening Participation -- From School to Work: A Longitudinal Study of Gender Stratification in Science and Engineering

  NSF · $59k · 2011–2014

Frequent coauthors

• Cesar Mit

  National Archives

  16 shared

• Sarah Rhodes

  National Archives

  16 shared

• In London

  National Archives

  16 shared

• Edna Martinez

  National Archives

  16 shared

• Laura Pineres

  National Archives

  16 shared

• Swati Shirwadkar

  Savitribai Phule Pune University

  16 shared

• Doron Weissman

  National Archives

  16 shared

• Eitan Amir

  National Archives

  16 shared

Awards & honors

• James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award (2019-2020)
• Institut des Etudes Avancees (2015-2016)
• Russell Sage Foundation (2014-2015)
• Stanton Wheeler Prize for Mentoring (2015)
• John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (2009)