September 2018 I am delighted to join emlyon business school! At the beginning of the academic year I presented a quick summary of my scholarly work about bureaucracy and formal organization, speed-dating style, as part of the faculty research get together. It was great to learn about the work of other new faculty and share my ideas on formal organization structure and its enduring importance in management and organization theory.
August 2018 I am the winner of the 2018 Louis Pondy Best Paper award given by the Organization and Management Theory Division at AOM for a single-authored paper based on a dissertation. This is an incredible surprise — especially because a number of my academic heroes are among the past winners of this prize. I have am also one of the recipients of the ABCD OMT Award (an award for those who went 'Above and Beyond the Call of Duty' as reviewers for the conference) and I have been nominated as finalist for the William H. Newman Award an all-academy award at AOM. What an honor!!
August 2018 I presented a paper at AOM 2018 in a session about "Towards Better Collaboration" with some great peers studying inter-personal cooperation, inter-firm partnerships, and collaboration among academics. It was a great pleasure to learn about such research work using all kinds of approaches and to share my own ideas on collaboration within organizations. We even had an spontaneous discussions about bureaucracy and collaboration related to the fact that the chair of the session did not show up and the AC broke down in the room but we still managed to run it well — which is probably due to the fact that we had a clear formal structure at the basis fo the event!
August 2018 In AOM 2018 I organized a PDW about Classics in Organization and Management Theory. It featured as speakers Paul Adler (USC), Silvia Dorado (URI), Siobhan O'Mahony (BU), and Marc Ventresca (Oxford). They explored the work of Marx, Albert Hirschman, Mary Parker Follett, and Mary Douglas in presentations followed by roundtables with participants. The event was overly-subscribed and I am planning to do another edition on AOM 2019. As part of the event we also produced a info sheet for each author (see below). The presentations were also recorded and will be disseminated soon via the Talking About Organizations Podcast.
August 2018 On a sunday morning, in the annual meeting of the Academy of Management (AOM) this year Michael Y. Lee and I organized a "Bureau-Cafe." This was an informal meeting part of the off-program of the OMT division in order to bring together academics interested in themes related to bureaucracy and formal organization dynamics. A number of academics from various institutions attended the session and shared their ongoing research projects and plans related to, among other themes, routines and formal procedures, the work of bureaucrats across history, the formalization of diversity ambassadors, and the changing nature of bureaucracy and formal structures in the contemporary workplace.
July 2018 I have co-organized the 2018 Summer on Practice-Based Studies at Warwick Business School together with Davide Nicolini and Hari Tsoukas. This edition explored the distinctive methodological features of practice and process research as well as their similitudes and differences. The key speakers were Elizabeth Shove (Lancaster) and Ann Langley (HEC Montreal) and the event also featured the participation of the WBS faculty involved in the Practice Process and Institutions (PPI) Research Programme.
One of the exercises in the school involved reading a classic paper by Trist and Bamforth from the Tavistock Institute on the industrialisation of the coal mining in the UK in the 50s. Participants then imagined and discussed how would a practice/process approach address the same questions posed by these authors. It was a great example of the power of earlier scholarship in inspiring discussions and pushing us to re-think assumptions about research. July 2018 I discovered that I am the winner of the Grigor McClelland Award 2018 in a ceremony at the EGOS Conference in Tallinn University in which all finalists presented their work to a number of invited academics. It is incredibly humbling and touching to receive such honor and I am deeply thankful for all those who supported my PhD journey. The Grigor McClelland award is given by the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies (SAMS) which also is responsible for the Journal of Managmenet Studies (JMS). Grigor McClelland was the founder of SAMS, the founding editor of JMS, and the founding Director of Manchester Business School.
July 2018 I presented a paper based on my PhD thesis at the EGOS Conference 2018 which was held in Tallinn, Estonia. I was part of sub-theme 11 which focused on "New Approaches to Organizing Collaborative Knowledge Creation" convened by Shiko M. Ben-Menahem (ETH Zurich), Georg von Krogh (ETH Zurich), and Samer Faraj (McGill University). It was a great opportunity to share ideas on the extent bureaucracy is 'still' an important infrastructure for collaboration in knowledge work and to learn about ongoing academic work on how digital technologies enable new forms of organizing — or sometimes simply re-package traditional structures.
July 2018 I was delighted to be invited by Maria do Mar and the Center for the Study of Women and Gender at Warwick University to share some reflections about methodological and gender aspects of my PhD research. On the 6th of July 2018, I spoke about my experience in conducting ethnography and, specifically, the relational work which characterises this approach. I shared some stories about how I got access to the organization I studied and tried to establish rapport with informants with a special focus on how gift-giving practices underpinning these processes. Using this case, I discussed some links with current debates in (feminist) ethnography about reciprocity, ethics, and related dynamics.
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