Hosted by the Cooperative Strategies Interest Group
Free for Members | $39 for Non-Members
Can’t attend live? We still encourage you to register — you’ll be among the first to receive the session recording once it’s released.
The webinar will: i) explore whether the field of strategic management is healthy and slowly but surely accumulating knowledge over time, or instead, fragmenting into too many phenomenon-centric theoretically-disintegrated subfields that don’t cumulate knowledge (or that talk past to each other), and, ii) discuss what is the role of theory, of different kind, in informing this dynamic and in resolving the tension between phenomenological fragmentation and the integration/accumulation of knowledge.
Justin Frake (Ross, Michigan) will start the webinar by presenting his work on “what is strategy?” which documents key trends in our field over the last decades. The patterns documented therein will be a shared context for debate and discussion. Joe Mahoney (Gies, Illinois), Mary Benner (Carlson, Minnesota; editor SMJ) and Rodolphe Durand (HEC Paris) will contribute their arguments, own original work, experience, and vision related to these issues.
Panelists:
Mary Benner is a Professor in the Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship Department. Her research, at the intersection of organization theory and strategic management, explores how firms innovate and adapt to technological changes. She has studied the effects of systematic process management practices such as ISO 9000 and Six Sigma on firms’ innovation and responses to new technologies, and is currently examining the influence of financial markets and securities analysts in how established firms innovate and address the opportunities and challenges of technological change. Her research is published in leading academic journals and has won several awards, including the Academy of Management Review’s Decade Award and Best Paper Award. She has been a Co-Editor of the Strategic Management Journal since January 2023. She served as a Senior Editor at Strategy Science in 2022, as an Associate Editor at Administrative Science Quarterly from 2012 to 2021, and as a Senior Editor at Organization Science from 2010 to 2012. She also serves on the editorial board of the Academy of Management Review. She has a PhD in management from Columbia University, an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and a BS in economics from the University of Minnesota.
Rodolphe Durand is the Joly Family Professor of Purposeful Leadership and the academic director of the Purpose Center. He founded the Society and Organizations Institute (S&O) and led it until September 2024. Rudy’s primary research interests concern the normative and cognitive dimensions of firms’ performance, and especially the consequences for firms of defining their purpose and coping with the current major environmental and social challenges. As a member of Boards (in listed and private firms, in non-profit organizations), the impact committee, and the purpose committee (comité de mission), Rudy helps multiple organizations develop, implement, and assess impact strategies that value a firm’s purpose and its intangible assets. Rudy is also a prolific author of books where he puts in perspective the decline of ideologies, the evolution of capitalism, and the new foundations of management, notably: Organizational Evolution and Strategic Management (Sage, 2006), The Pirate Organization: Lessons from the Fringed of Capitalism (co-authored with JP Vergne, Harvard Press, 2013), and Organizations, Strategy, and Society: The Orgology of Disorganized Worlds (Routledge, 2014). For his work, he received the American Sociological Association’s R. Scott Award in 2005, the European Academy of Management/Imagination Lab Award for Innovative Scholarship in 2010, was inducted as a Fellow of the Strategic Management Society in 2014, and was granted a Doctor Honoris Causa from UC Louvain in 2019.
Joseph Mahoney is the Caterpillar Chair of Business at the Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interest is organizational economics, and he has published more than 90 journal articles, authored the influential Economic Foundations of Strategy, and served in leadership roles across multiple scholarly organizations. He was elected a Fellow of both the Academy of Management and the Strategic Management Society and was named one of Poets & Quants’ Top 50 Undergraduate Professors of Business.
In 2005, he published Economic Foundations of Strategy, which has been adopted by over 45 doctoral programs. He served as Associate Editor of the strategy field’s flagship journal, Strategic Management Journal (2006-2015), and as Associate Editor of the Academy of Management Review (2018-2020). For the 2008-2009 academic year, he served as Chair of the Strategy (STR) Division of the Academy of Management.
He is the winner of the Irwin Outstanding Educator Award from the STR Division of the Academy of Management. He has been elected to the Academy of Management (AOM) Fellows and to the Strategic Management Society (SMS) Fellows.
Justin Frake research investigates how micro-level behaviors drive macro-level outcomes. Substantively, my research focuses on strategic human capital, misconduct, and politics in the workplace. I created whatisstrategy.org to empirically investigate common concerns about the field of strategy.
Moderators:
Francisco Brahm
Shivaram Divarakonda