About Tan
My research examines how organizations and organizational actors strategically construct social evaluations—such as celebrity, reputation, status, and legitimacy—as intangible assets that shape how audiences recognize, attend to, and engage with them. I study how these evaluations influence stakeholder judgment and decision-making under uncertainty, and how they affect resource mobilization, influence, and value creation. I am particularly interested in emerging actors whose objective track records are limited and for whom audience perceptions, narratives, and affective responses may play an especially important role.
Before earning my Ph.D. in Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the University of Tennessee, I studied political science and international political economy at Yonsei University, served as an intelligence officer in the Republic of Korea Air Force, and worked in human resources at a global trading firm. These experiences gave me an instinct for how narratives are constructed, how organizations project credibility under uncertainty, and how stakeholders make decisions with incomplete information.
At Texas A&M University–San Antonio, I teach “Principles of Management (MGMT3311) and Human Resource Management (MGMT3325) and advise the Entrepreneurship Club. I use computational methods — NLP, text embeddings, and content analysis — to trace how stories, identities, and perceptions evolve over time. I’m particularly interested in the startup ecosystem in Texas, where I’m building connections with founders, incubators, and investors to bridge academic research with entrepreneurial practice.
When I’m not researching, I’m probably at a national park, a local brewery, or on a road trip looking for stories worth telling.
