Prof Isak Ladegaard
Assistant Professor
39172060
9.15, 9/F., The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus
I am an economic sociologist and criminologist and I study governance. Governance of organizations, platforms, novel and alternative markets, and complex collective problems.
A particular interest of mine is how technological developments, while supporting governance, also make governance a burden, for instance by exposing the limits of state power, and by creating new capacities for regulatory circumvention and contestation.
Such contestation includes practical solutions, such as the effective administration of illegal markets, but also techniques of legitimation, as when banned exchanges are configured to look and work like legal ones.
My work typically leverages qualitative and computational research methods.
Before returning to the University of Hong Kong, where I did my undergraduate degree, I spent four years on the tenure track at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and six years at Boston College, where I obtained my Ph.D. I was born in Oslo.
More information about me and my work can be found at www.isakladegaard.com
Ladegaard holds an MA and PhD in Sociology from Boston College, and a BA in Journalism from the University of Hong Kong.
Economic Sociology
Technology and Society
Crime and Deviance
Ladegaard is currently writing about platform technology.
Ladegaard, I. (2026). Cents and sociability: The digital disembedding of illegal markets. The British Journal of Criminology, azag019.
Ladegaard, I., & Rieger, A. (2026). How “Ceremonial Openness” Prevents Organizational Change: An Analysis of Corporate Earnings Calls in the Oil and Gas Industry, 2007–2020. Social Problems, 73(1), 70-89.
Ladegaard, I. (2025). Open Secrecy: How Technology Empowers the Digital Underworld. Univ of California Press.
Ladegaard, I. (2024). Cleansing frames: How digital ‘consumer reports’ of cannabis and psychedelics normalise drug-taking and neutralise its counter-cultural potential. Sociology, 58(1), 100-117.
Ladegaard, I., Ravenelle, A. J., & Schor, J. (2022). ‘God Is Protecting Me… And I Have Mace’: Defensive Labour In Precarious Workplaces. The British Journal of Criminology, 62(3), 773-789.
Ladegaard, I. (2021). Strangers in the sheets: how Airbnb hosts overcome uncertainty. Socio-Economic Review, 19(4), 1245-1264.
Ladegaard, I. (2020). Open secrecy: How police crackdowns and creative problem-solving brought illegal markets out of the shadows. Social Forces, 99(2), 532-559.