Melissa Wooten

Education and Interests

(Ph.D. Management & Organizations, University of Michicgan, 2006; B.S. Computer Science, 1999)

Melissa Wooten investigates organizational change among colleges and universities, specifically using institutional theory as a means of understanding how the degree distributions of historically black colleges and universities changed following the American civil rights movement. Professor Wooten's analyses have shown that students at black colleges earned a more diverse set of degrees following the civil rights movement. Then, comparing the degree distributions of the historically black colleges to a subsample of traditionally white colleges and universities, she found that this increase in degree diversity among the black college population moved the field of American colleges and universities toward greater similarity or homogeneity in their degree distributions.
 
In other parts of her work, Professor Wooten utilizes social movement and discourse theories to understand how organizational leaders garner financial and cultural support. Using the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) as an empirical context, she has sought to understand how the leaders of this organization used their annual fundraising campaign to provide a coherent framing for the purpose of a black college in various historical periods. While paying attention to the frame construction process, she also devotes equal attention to the way in which the discursive opportunity structure influences the leader’s possibilities.

In addition to focusing on higher education, she has begun to develop a research project that focuses on improving the educational outcomes for African-American youth in urban settings. Looking beyond individual and family characteristics as an explanation for student achievement, she focuses on the community as an equally contributing factor to the educational experiences of African-American youth.