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Professors Margaret Peteraf and Jay Barney are the inaugural winners of the 2020 STR Distinguished Scholarship Award, awarded biannually for a discovery of major importance in strategic management. The award recognizes an individual or individuals that have either made a specific theoretical or empirical discovery or have developed a core set of ideas that fundamentally advanced research and understanding in the field of strategic management. Thus, priority is given to the discovery's importance to the field, with secondary priority weighted toward more recent discoveries, rather than the accumulation of disparate body of work. In choosing among the nominees, the Awards Committee assessed how the development of the field would have differed if it did not have the benefit of the contribution (i.e., was it a next logical step in the scientific progress or did the individual(s) do something that was really unexpected

The specific discovery recognized by the STR Award committee pertains to advancing the criterion for how and when resources contribute to competitive advantage. Members of the Division's Award committee elaborated on the discovery of Margie and Jay:

• "Jay and Margie are well known strategy scholars who put the RBV on the map with their 1990 and 1993 papers respectively.  As Jay noted in his paper, strategy, since SWOT, has been conceptualized in the literature as the fit between internal strengths and weaknesses and external threats and opportunities.  If Porter fleshed out the threats and opportunities side via his use of IO economics, Barney and Peteraf's papers set down the core foundation for thinking about the strengths and weaknesses side of the fit equation." 
• "In my opinion, their two papers, as well as a variety of less cited others in the early 90's, really changed the course of research in the field.  After Porter 1979/1980, the 80's were all about using IO methods and arguments to map competitive positioning and competitive interactions in markets and industries.  After Barney and Peteraf, the conversation shifted inward, to organizational level heterogeneity in resources and capabilities.  In my opinion, this laid the foundation for not only the RBV, but a large swath of work on innovation, growth, entrepreneurship, and the like. It also brought "management" processes back into the theoretical conversation about the roots of competitive advantage."
• "No Strategy PhD seminar would be complete without a session on RBV. And no session on RBV would be complete without Jay's and Margie's work."

Professor Margaret Peteraf is the Leon E. Williams Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. She received a Ph.D. in industrial organization economics from Yale University and has served on the faculties of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern as well as the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. 

Professor Jay Barney is a Presidential Professor of Strategic Management and the Pierre Lassonde Chair of Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University, and served on the faculties of Max M. Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University, Texas A&M University, and University of California at Los Angeles.

The STR Division takes great pride inb congratulating Professors Margaret Peteraf and Jay Barney for their distinguished contribution! We will honor them with a reception at next year's Academy of Management Meeting in Philadelphia.

Attachment(s)

2020 Newsletter - DISTINGUISHED SCHOLARSHIP AWARD.docx   51 KB 1 version