Work Outside: How Novel Collaborations Construct Innovative Financial Markets, Change Organizations, and Advance Careers

This dissertation examines how novel, cross-boundary collaborations among professionals give rise to novel markets, reshape organizations, and redirect careers. Focusing on securitization structured finance, it explores how buyers, sellers, bankers, lawyers, accountants, trustees, ratings agencies, consultants, and regulators co-construct what I call collaboration-induced markets (CIMs). While some collaborations merely facilitate transactions, high-impact collaborations structure a broader market field—establishing templates, infrastructures, incentives, and expectations that outlast any single deal. Why would professionals step outside of their firms and spend time and money on uncompensated work or uncertain initiatives? Drawing on comparative-historical analysis, in-depth interviews, longitudinal deal-level data, and immersive fieldwork, I show how such work outside serves as a vehicle for advancing market structures, organizational development, and professional standing. These collaborations take shape in a variety of settings—from informal meetings, formal industry working groups, on regulatory panels, at conference happy hours, and in elite social circuits—revealing a patterned ecology of seemingly peripheral but powerful activity. Work Outside contributes a novel mechanism for understanding market creation and organizational change: not as a top-down mandate or a reactive adaptation, but as an emergent response to collaborative market creation activities by organizational entrepreneurs operating at the interstices of firms, industries, and institutions. The dissertation offers a new theoretical lens on the sociology of markets, organizations, professions, and innovation—showing how professionals, by working outside, shape the futures of both their organizations and the broader economy.