Biography
Yaomin Zhang is a Lecturer in Business Strategy at Queen’s Business School. Her research investigates the impact of algorithms on hidden patterns of behaviour and how they evolve over time, specifically through the design of digital platforms and evaluation systems. Yaomin integrates perspectives from Sociology, Management, and Information Systems to analyse how digital architectures reconfigure organisational governance, economic behaviour, and social relations. Her objective is to provide evidence-based insights into how algorithms can be designed to foster sustainable social and economic outcomes.

Research Themes

• Algorithmic Governance & Social Norms: Analysing how platform rules and digital systems reshape collective behaviour and cooperative norms.

• Digital Legitimacy & Evaluation: Exploring how organisations maintain trust and credibility as digital technology changes traditional ways of measuring success and reputation.

• Platform Design & Evolution: Investigating the conditions under which innovative configurations of digital systems arise, sustain, and evolve.

Methodological Orientation
Yaomin employs a suite of methods to examine how opaque algorithms operate and their impact on collective behaviour, bridging deep qualitative insights with large-scale data analysis:

• Qualitative Case Study for theorisation

• Natural Language Processing (NLP)

• Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fs/QCA)

• Natural Experiments and Causal Modelling

Digital Business (BSc)

Information Systems in Organizations (BSc, exclusive to Business Information Technology students)

Supervision of Dissertations (MSc; MBA)

Ph.D. in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy, University of Manchester, UK.

Master in Sociology (Organizational Sociology, Economic Sociology, Labour Studies), Peking University, China.