Chair's Message

Royston Greenwood, University of Alberta, tells us what OMT has been doing for you, including the exciting events planned for San Antonio.

The mid-year meeting of the Executive Committee was held in Vancouver (which belied its reputation and stayed mostly dry) and the agenda covered three main items:

• Progress on our new website – given that you are reading this message, you can see what it looks like and I hope you are as pleased as I am with it.  Many thanks to Web Master Joe Gehman and to Brayden King for overseeing his team of Bloggers (Yuan Hou, Massimo Maoret, Clarissa Chaiy, Mia Reynard and Evelyn Micelotta) !

• Communications with our international members – especially doctoral students and junior faculty.  The Executive received a report from the International Task Force (many thanks to co-chairs Eero Vaara and Candace Jones, and to members Bob Hinings, Ha Hoang, Markus Hollerer, Wenjue Knutsen, Fara Kodeih, Henri Schildt, Silviya Svejenovo, and April Wright). The Executive are taking steps to reach out to this community of younger international scholars.  One initiative has been the co-sponsorship with ASQ and HEC of a Workshop – held in Paris – for doctoral students and junior faculty on the development of papers.  A similar Workshop will be held in London in the Fall of this year, hopefully in conjunction with Organization Studies.  Watch this space for more details!  We will also be repeating last year’s highly successful Junior Faculty Paper Development International PDW at the Academy under the magisterial organization of Candace Jones

• This year’s Academy Conference.  Programme Chair Christine Beckman and PDW Chair Mike Lounsbury reported on the record number of submissions and the invaluable help of you as reviewers. An exciting piece of news is the selection of Joel Baum as this year’s Distinguished Scholar.  Congratulations are also in order for the following:

• Lou Pondy Best Paper Based on a Dissertation: Christopher Yenkey (Cornell) – Ethnic homogeneity in a social network: recruiting investors into the Nairobi  Stock Exchange.

• OMT Best International Paper: Eric Zhao & Tyler Wry (Alberta) - Societal patriarchal logics and the emergence of microfinance organizations.

• OMT Best Symposium: Forrest Briscoe (Penn State) & Adam Cobb (Michigan) – Shifting power and the changing US employment relationship

• OMT Best Paper Award: Jim Westphal (Michigan), Sun Hyun Park (Michigan), Michael McDonald (Central Florida) & Matthew Hayward (Colorado, Boulder) – Helping other CEOs avoid bad press: impression management support among CEOs toward journalists

Once they have received their awards at the Business Meeting, you can congratulate them and offer to buy them a glass of wine at the OMT Social.

These Awards are selected by the Research Committee and many thanks should be given to Joe Labianca for steering this process. Joe, who has been a very diligent and patient Chair of the Research Committee, is stepping down this year and will be succeeded by Joe Broschak – welcome Joe! If any of you want to join this committee, please contact Joe.

The Executive is delighted to acknowledge the continuing sponsorship of SAGE (Best Paper Award) and Organization Studies (Best Symposium Award).  And, this year we have five new sponsors – the University of Bocconi (Best International Paper), the Universities of Alberta and UC (Irvine) (Meet OMT), Emerald Press (Doctoral Consortium) and Oxford University Press (Distinguished Scholar)

Finally, for those of you who are interested in participating in the Doctoral Symposium, Doctoral Dissertation, or the Junior Faculty Symposium, now is the time to submit your name and materials.  For details, see the News on our website.

Royston Greenwood

Chair, OMT Division