Bing Ran, Ph.D.

Biography

Bing Ran is a faculty member in the School of Public Affairs at Penn State Harrisburg. His research interests focus on the dynamic interactions between society's complex infrastructures and human behavior – a domain generally understood as socio-technical systems.

Dr. Ran approaches the dynamic interactions in socio-technical systems through, for example, the study of how organizations construct and negotiate their identities within their social structures mediated by the technical and institutional constraints. His study investigates the mechanisms used by organizations to influence its internal and external stakeholders for socio-economic or political purposes, and how identities are interpreted and used according to social intentions.

Another line of his research focuses on knowledge representation and knowledge integration. Modern organizations are facing the challenges of effectively managing their knowledge assets through dynamic interactions in its socio-technical systems; and employees need to continuously integrate new knowledge into their existing knowledge structure. Dr. Ran studies the current organizational practices of knowledge management, knowledge representation in human cognition, how a person's existing knowledge influences how they make sense of the new knowledge, and how they creatively combine their existing knowledge to generate something new in their cognition (conceptual combinations).

The third line of the research by Dr. Ran and his colleagues investigates the behavioral effects of the socio-technical interactions in traditional and virtual organizations, including the public participation effectiveness in policy making, the leadership and ethics issues, employee task structure changes and the effectiveness of the socio-technical interactions in integrating different knowledge domains in an organization.

Dr. Ran is an active member of the Academy of Management (AOM) and the Administrative Science Association of Canada (ASAC). From 2001 to the present, he has been a frequent reviewer, presenter, session chair, and mentor for their annual conferences. He is currently serving as the editor of the book series Contemporary Perspectives on Technological Innovation, Management and Policy (Information Age), the associate editor of Organizational Communication and Information Systems Division (Academy of Management 2009, 2011, 2012), and the associate editor of Social and Organizational Impacts of IS Track (ICIS - International Conference on Information Systems 2012). He was elected to the membership committee, Public and Non-profit Division, Academy of Management (serving as the Committee Chair in 2012-2013). He also reviewed manuscripts for journals such as Academy of Management Review, Administration & Society, and International Journal of Public Administration. His research has won the Administrative Science Association of Canada 2010 Best Paper Award in Organizational Theory. Dr. Ran teaches graduate courses in organizational behavior, organizational theory, and human resource management and serves as the graduate faculty in MPA, MHA, and PhD programs.

• Academy of Management
• Administrative Science Association of Canada

Research Interests

• Knowledge Representation and Integration
• Organizational Identity and Identification
• Employee Task Structure and Organization Structure

Courses Taught

• P ADM 505 Human Resources in the Public and Nonprofit Sector
• P ADM 510 Organizational Behavior
• H ADM 510 Organizational Behavior
• P ADM 511 Organizational Change and Development

Publications and Research

• Ran, B. (Ed.). (2012). Contemporary Perspectives on Technological Innovation, Management and Policy (Vol. 1 & Vol. 2). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.
• Ran, B. (2012). Evaluating Public Participation in Environmental Policymaking. Journal of US-China Public Administration, 9 (4), 407–423. 
• Ran, B., & Golden, T. (2011). Who are we? The Social Construction of Organizational Identity through Sense-Exchanging. Administration & Society, 43 (4), 417-445.
• Xu, X., & Ran, B. (2010). Familiarity, Abstractness, and the Interpretive Strategies of Noun-noun Combinations. Cognitive Sciences, 5 (2), 125-138
• Ran, B., & Duimering, P.R. (2010). Conceptual Combination: Models, Theories and Controversies. International Journal of Cognitive Linguistics, 1(1), 65-90. Cross-published in S. P. Weingarten & H. O. Penat. (Eds.), Cognitive Psychology Research Developments (pp. 39-64). New York, NY: Nova Science.
• MacKenzie, D.W., Ran, B., & Ciment, J. (2010). Political Theories and Models. In J. Ciment (Ed.), Booms and Busts: An Encyclopedia of Economic History from Tulipmania of the 1630s to the Global Financial Crisis of the 21st Century (pp. 629–632). New York, NY: M.E. Sharpe.
• Plant, J., & Ran, B. (2009). Education for Ethics and Human Resource Management: A Necessary Synergy. Public Integrity, 11 (3), 221–238.
• Ran, B., & Duimering, P.R. (2009). Conceptual Combination: Models, Theories and Controversies. In S. P. Weingarten & H. O. Penat. (Eds.), Cognitive Psychology Research Developments (pp. 39-64). New York, NY: Nova Science.
• Ran, B. (2009). Conformance / Conformity. In C. Wankel (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Business in Today's World (pp. 356–357). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• Ran, B. (2009). Industrial & Commercial Bank of China. In C. Wankel (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Business in Today's World (pp. 858–859). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• Ran, B. (2009). Motivation. In C. Wankel (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Business in Today's World (pp. 1160-1161). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• Ran, B. (2009). Scheduling. In C. Wankel (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Business in Today's World (pp. 1414–1415). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• Safayeni, F., Duimering, R., Zheng, K., Derbentseva, N., Poile, C., & Ran, B. (2008). Requirements Engineering in New Product Development: How effective are the necessary interactions? Communications of ACM, 51 (3), 77–82.
• Ran, B.  (2008).  Organizing Doubt: Grounded Theory, Army Units and Dealing with Dynamic Complexity. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 30 (3), 377-382.
• Ran, B., & Duimering, P.R. (2007). Imaging the Organization: Language use in Organizational Identity Claims. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 21 (2), 155–187.
• Duimering, P.R., Ran, B., Derbentseva, N., & Poile, C. (2006). The Effects of Ambiguity on Project Task Structure in New Product Development. Journal of Knowledge & Process Management, 13 (4), 239–251.