Message from the STR Division Chair
2023 Spring Newsletter & Annual Meeting Highlights
Michael Leiblein, STR Division Chair
leiblein.1@osu.edu
The STR leadership team looks forward to seeing many of you at the annual Academy of Management conference this August in Boston.
In recent years, the activities of the STR division have expanded enormously. We now regularly offer many virtual events aimed to enhance the creation and dissemination of theoretical and practical knowledge regarding the strategic management of organizations throughout the year. This letter summarizes some of the activities the STR team has put together this year and highlights a few of the great sessions that will be held during the in-person annual meeting.
2022-23 Virtual Events
This year our non-conference team put together a fantastic series of virtual symposia, workshops, and conversations aimed to enhance our members' skills and highlight our field's contributions. The bulk of this work was organized by Executive Committee (EC) members Philipp Meyer-Doyle, Mahka Moeen, Tomasz Obloj, and Richard Whittington. These events included symposia on topics including open strategy, human capital, corporate strategy, resources and strategic factor markets, knowledge and learning, behavioral strategy, and non-market strategy. We also organized Ph.D. networking workshops targeting different styles of STR research and addressing the needs of Ph.D. students entering the job market at various locations around the world. Finally, we ran a series of "distinctiveness" sessions involving prominent scholars from varied fields that drew attention to the assumptions, insights, and research questions associated with strategic management and related fields of study including colleagues with expertise in Entrepreneurship (April 5), HR (January 9), International Management (May 3), Organization Behavior (March 27), Organization Design (June 28), Organization Theory (May 17), Technology Management (April 28), and Strategy as Practice (April 17). These sessions are recorded and continue to be available from the STR HomePage (https://str.aom.org/home). To access the sessions, simply navigate to the library tab and video channel link. Please thank Philipp, Mahka, Tomasz, and Richard for their contributions to our field.
The STR team continues to generate value for the global community of scholars. This year our Global Representative Committee offered several exciting regional workshops. These efforts included sessions in South America organized by Paulo Arvate, Sandro Cabral, Marina Gama, & Thiago Soares(~75 participants), sessions in Latin America organized by Carlos Rodríguez (~30 participants), and the popular Fostering Publications around the World PDW that was organized this year by Edgar Rogelio Ramírez Solís and our global representatives.
This year, the STR Teaching Committee took on a larger role in our program. In particular, Jenny Kuan and Chen Gao organized sessions that discussed linkages between teaching strategic management and book writing (involving Glenn Carroll, Tammy Madsen, and Jesper Sørensen) and how to incorporate AI and other contemporary tools into our teaching (involving JP Eggers, Emily Cox Pahnke, and Dan Wang).
The STR Membership Engagement Committee (MEC) offers many exciting events to facilitate and extend our academic conversations. Under the leadership of Andy Wu, Aldona Kapacinskaite and Lisa Tang supported multiple sessions on reviewing for conferences workshop featuring comments from Cathy Maritan. Keith Pennington (w/ Aldona Kapacinskaite) organized multiple "Strategy Jam" sessions that provided opportunities for frank discussion among current Ph.D. students. The MEC also organized a provocative session discussing practical advice for managing remote work in academia.
Our Communications team supported the above virtual work. I want to offer a heartfelt thank you to Paolo Aversa and his Communications Committee (Jingning Ao, Laura Doria, Scott Johnson, Maria Rita Micheli, Marco Minervini, Luigi Mosca, Ilaria Orlandi, Beverly Rich, Christopher Sabel, Yixin Qiu, and Miros Zohrehvand) for their work creating and running our website (https://str.aom.org/home), uploading the above content, and advertising and promoting our events across the STR social media channels. This incredibly professional team is looking for an advanced Instagram User and a Video Editor-contact Paolo @ Paolo.Aversa.1@city.ac.uk with questions and please visit our homepage to see for yourself all the STR Division has to offer.
Co-Sponsoring Conference in Oceania
This year we applied for and received substantial funding from the Academy of Management to co-sponsor a regional conference in Oceania. This conference attracted scholars from major Australian cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth) as well as institutions located in India, Singapore, Canada, USA, Ireland, and Spain. This event was organized by Ralf Wilden, Nidthida Lin, Francesco Chirico, Krithika Randhawa, Mariano (Pitosh) Heyden, & Stephan Zhang. The STR Leadership Team will continue to welcome cosponsoring applications for smaller, more intimate conferences to facilitate global networking and professional development in our field.
Continuing to Strengthen the STR Infrastructure
The 2022-23 team advanced several efforts to strengthen the administrative side of our division. We continued to (1) clarify and assign EC roles in July to allow new EC members to interact with those rotating off of similar roles during the annual conference and start their work earlier in the fall, (2) document and share policies and practices on shared drive space, and (3) start our budgeting cycle earlier in the year so it could help guide the activities of our officers and EC members.
We also took on several new initiatives. As the number of appointed officer positions has doubled over recent years, we (4) developed a guiding policy and several guideline documents to help coordinate activity between our team members and help their successors quickly adapt to new roles. As our virtual activities have become more frequent, we noticed a need to share best practices regarding the promotion and organization of our events and to protect ourselves from "Zoom bombing." Thus, we (5) created a detailed virtual event document and upgraded our Zoom account and security protocols to address these needs. Historically, the division budget has been focused on discrete activities (e.g., catering for the STR social). This year we (6) clarified our reporting of expenses over time and began tracking expenses across meaningful categories such as events focused on improving research, teaching, and professional development; events focused on junior, mid-career, and senior career scholars; and events focused on scholars affiliated with institutions in different global geographies.
Annual Meeting Highlights
STR Assistant Program Chair Brian Wu has organized our pre-conference activities this year with phenomenal support from STR EC member Aline Gatignon. The pre-conference program starts with the highly popular Professional Development Workshops (PDWs) and various consortia on Friday and Saturday (August 4 and 5). These events provide terrific opportunities for members to learn about research questions, theories, methods, teaching tools, and professional skills that have proven useful to our membership. Several PDWs, especially our paper development workshops, have historically matched authors with expert scholars and therefore require pre-registration. Please search the AOM program, identify those sessions of greatest interest, and register for these sessions before they are fully subscribed.
In addition, the STR Division continues to offer a strong line-up of consortia designed to bring scholars together at career stages ranging from the "Managing your Dissertation workshop" led by finalists from last year's Best Dissertation Award through to the Mid-Career Consortium. In addition, thanks to the hard work of our Teaching Committee, we will continue to deliver an increasingly popular Teaching Consortium. The Division also offers several teaching PDWs, including a walk-in "clinic" for those who have specific teaching questions for experts to answer. Make sure to consult the AOM program, the STR website (https://str.aom.org/home), or various calls for participation throughout this newsletter to learn more about the objectives and target audiences of research and teaching PDWs.
Many thanks to Brian, Aline, and all the PDW, consortia, and workshop organizers for their efforts to create an outstanding pre-conference program.
Our STR Program Chair, Deepak Somaya, has assembled an excellent conference program with the help of STR EC members Joanna Campbell, Donal Crilly, and Zeke Hernandez. Once again, the bulk of the program will consist of competitive paper sessions, where the best individual paper submissions are assembled into eight tracks. These tracks are (1) behavioral strategy, (2) nonmarket strategy, (3) resources, capabilities, and strategic factor markets, (4) strategic leadership, top management teams, and corporate governance, (5) organization structure, networks, and relational strategies, (6) corporate and international strategy, (7) knowledge, learning, and innovation strategy, and (8) industry, competition, and strategic entrepreneurship. While strategy is often seen as an applied, system-level field, the sessions are organized around the tracks to promote dialogue and community building within individual domains. In addition, we are co-sponsoring an AoM panel highlighting the role of serendipity in organizational learning and innovation research that is moderated by Christian Busch. A huge thank you goes to the nearly 1,300 reviewers who have given their time and provided developmental feedback on the many submissions in a short time frame, including emergency reviewers who worked overtime. Thanks also to the track chairs who have helped organize sessions.
At this point, I would like to draw your attention to several notable sessions as you plan your conference schedule.
STR Irwin Award Ceremony in Honor of Aks Zaheer
Sunday, 8:00 - 10:00 am, Marriott, Tremont
Please join us in honoring Professor Aks Zaheer of the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota as the 2023 STR Irwin Outstanding Educator Award winner. The 2023 award recognizes Aks for his outstanding commitment to Ph.D. student education and ongoing development of junior colleagues. In this session, we will hear from some of Aks' former and current students and colleagues as we celebrate his dedication to Ph.D. student development.
Please join Division Chair-Elect Louise Mors and the STR Officer team for a light breakfast and coffee session sponsored by the STR division and the University of Minnesota between 8:00 and 9:00 am. The formal event will begin at 9:00 am.
STR Plenary Session
Monday, 7:30 to 10:00 am, Marriott, Salon E
This year's plenary panel, David Collis, Emilie Feldman, Alfonso Gambardella, Brian Silverman, and Harbir Singh, will address the question, "Should we revisit the fundamental issues in strategic management?"
The plenary session will reference questions raised in seminal contributions to the field as well as a series of virtual sessions sponsored by the division earlier this year. While acknowledging the important refinements in our questions, theories, and methods of theory testing over time, we will ask our panel to consider some of the challenges facing the field, how we can best advance the field, and ultimately, whether the field would benefit from a new set of fundamental and guiding questions. Our goal is to help all of our members consider how their research contributes to the field of strategic management.
Please join Division Chair Michael Leiblein, the STR Officer team, and our distinguished panelists for a light breakfast and coffee session sponsored by the STR division between 7:30 and 8:30 am. The plenary session will begin at 8:30 am.
STR Dissertation Award Finalists
Monday, 4:00 to 5:45 pm, Marriott, Wellesley
Please come and interact with this year's finalizes for the 2023 STR Division Wiley Blackwell Outstanding Dissertation Award. The finalists will present summaries of their dissertations and accept questions from the audience. This is a great opportunity to learn about some of the exciting new research emerging from our field. This year's finalists are:
- Nianchen Han, Nanyang Technological University (University of Colorado Ph.D.), Dissertation title: "How Value Appropriation Concerns Affect Knowledge Development Decisions: Evidence from Three Innovation Contexts."
- Hyoju Jeong, Tulane University (University of Minnesota Ph.D.), Dissertation title: "Understanding Digital Inequality and the Role of Cooperatives."
- Leandro Pongeluppe, Wharton (University of Toronto Ph.D.), Dissertation title: "How Approaches to Value Creation, Appropriation, and Distribution by Private-Sector Organizations Address the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals."
- Silvia Sanasi, Free University of Bozen-Balzano (Politecnico di Milano Ph.D.), Dissertation title: "Business Model Experimentation: A Scientific Approach to Strategy and Entrepreneurship."
- Jungkyu Suh, New York University (Duke University Ph.D.), Dissertation title: "Essays on Science and Innovation."
STR Business Meeting
Monday, 6:00 to 7:00 pm, Marriott, Wellesley
Please join us for the STR Division Business Meeting! This meeting provides information about the workings of the division, acknowledges the hard work of many dedicated volunteers who help to run the division, congratulates conference paper award winners, reviewers, and our newly elected officers, and announces our other award winners (including the winter of the Wiley Best Dissertation Award).
Following the process started last year, our team will post a video of the content presented during the business meeting to the STR website prior to the meeting. The intent of posting this data is to allow anyone unable to attend the conference in person to stay up to date on STR activities. This year we will also broadcast short quotes from past division chairs as they reflect on the importance of strategic management research.
The business meeting will be followed by the STR Social (in Salon F).
A Whole-hearted Thank You
Over the past year or so, a friend of mine and I have been discussing what we mean by "strategic leadership" and the process of building and leading a team engaged in strategy work. Through that conversation, we have come to the conclusion that the importance of including "like-hearted" or "good-hearted" individuals is often overlooked. Perhaps given my upbringing in the New York City area, this conclusion resonates with me. I love to be around people and debate. In my mind, disagreement is fine as long as discussions are conducted in a good-hearted and critical fashion. I believe, as a field, we can contribute greatly to the world when we debate in this manner.
I share this story as the STR division is fortunate to have some very capable and "good-hearted" people serving the division. It is difficult to thank Division Chair-Elect Louise Mors, Program Chair Deepak Somaya, and Assistant Program Chair Brian Wu enough for all of their insights and suggestions regarding how to serve the division this year. I know I cannot thank Past Division Chair Heather Berry sufficiently for all of her assistance. Heather and I have been through a lot. While we have long been "friends of friends" I have enjoyed getting to know her a bit better and working with her to move our division and field forward. I invite all of our members to recognize Heather for her five years of service as an STR Officer during the annual conference. I am personally thankful for all she has done for our field, congratulate her on her big news, and hope you will do the same.
I hope to see many of you in Boston and invite you to reach out to me or any of the other STR officers with questions about the division or the field,
Best,
Michael
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STR Leadership Team 2022-23
Elisa Alvarez-Garrido (U of South Carolina)
Paolo Aversa (City U of London)
Heather Berry (George Washington U)
Vanessa Burbano (Columbia U)
Joanna Campbell (U Cincinnati)
Donal Crilly (London Business School)
Paul Drnevich (U Alabama)
Aline Gatignon (U Pennsylvania)
Zeke Hernandez (U Pennsylvania)
Manuela Hoehn-Weiss (Oregon State)
Michael Leiblein (Ohio State U)
Dave Maslach (Florida State U)
Philipp Meyer-Doyle (INSEAD)
Mahka Moeen (U North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Louise Mors (Copenhagen Business School)
Tomasz Obloj (HEC Paris/Indiana U)
Deepak Somaya (U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Tony Tong (U of Colorado)
Richard Whittington (Oxford)
Andy Wu (HBS)
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Michael Leiblein
The Ohio State University
Columbus OH
(614) 292-0071
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