• Six academics collect awards for their research at annual conference
  • Academy of Management biggest research body in the world
  • Annual awards event run online because of the global pandemic
  • Pro-Dean hails cutting edge research that is leading world debate

Warwick Business School academics are celebrating after their research claimed five awards at the prestigious annual Academy of Management conference.

The 80th Academy of Management Annual Meeting saw Eivor Oborn, Professor of Healthcare Management win two awards, while Irina Surdu, Associate Professor of International Business Strategy and Rene Wiedner, Associate Professor of Organisation & Human Resource Management, were also awarded prizes for their research.

The WBS team comprised of former doctoral student Christina Wawarta and her supervisors Loizos Heracleous and Sotirios Paroutis, both Professors of Strategic Management, also won an accolade for their research.

The Academy of Management (AOM), which is the largest global association devoted to management and organisation research, held the event online for the first time in its history due to the global pandemic.

Ram Gopal, Pro-Dean for Research and Professor of Information Systems Management, said: “We have some world-class academics at Warwick Business School doing cutting-edge research, so it is no surprise that the school has once again won so many awards at the AOM.

“Congratulations to the award winners, they are showing that WBS is leading the debate and deepening our understanding of business and management on a global scale.

“Our research is not only published in world-leading journals, but is undertaken in partnership with policy and practice, to ensure both relevance and practical application.

“We also encourage an interdisciplinary approach to respond and contribute to varied societal issues.”

Professor Oborn won the Organisation, Communication, Information Systems division’s Best Paper for her research entitled Place and Organizing for Emerging Technologies: Challenges of Scaling 3D Printing Across a UK Hospital. 

Her five-year ethnographic field study details why innovative 3D printing at three UK National Health Service hospitals failed to scale and go anywhere.

In the same division she also claimed a First Runners-Up prize in the Best Published Paper Award category for the Trajectory Dynamics in Innovation: Developing and Transforming a Mobile Money Service Across Time and Place paper published in Organization Science.

The paper studies how mobile banking app M-Pesa was changed and re-designed to meet the demands of consumers in Kenya, showing how innovations are reshaped as they become implemented in a different context to where they originated.

Dr Surdu’s paper What Happens Abroad, Stays Abroad? Comparing the Reputation Risks of MNE Irresponsibility in the Home and Host Markets won best paper in the AOM International Management division. The paper also went on to win Best Full Paper in the International Business and International Management Track at the British Academy of Management awards.

Her analysis of more than 1,800 acts of corporate scandal between 2005 and 2012 shows how the characteristics of irresponsible events, and the location in which they happen, influence a multinational’s reputation in their home market.

Dr Wiedner won the Pushing the Boundaries Award from the Strategizing Activities and Practices (SAP) division with the paper Sustenance Through Liberation: Vinyl Record Manufacturing After Disruption and Before the Hype.

The still-to-be published paper studies the decline of vinyl records as CDs take over to theorise how a disrupted and largely defunct technology can be preserved thanks to enthusiastic amateur manufacturers.

The SAP division also handed the Best Student Paper Award to Dr Wawarta, Professor Heracleous, and Professor Paroutis, for their work Temporal Tensions in Human Space Flight: NASA’s Practices for Managing Long-term Strategic Change. 

The paper uses NASA’s adaptation to a new space era involving numerous private companies, such as SpaceX, to investigate how the agency built new capabilities to manage time-related tensions across strategic initiatives over a long period of time.

Professor Gopal added: “The breadth of subjects covered and the depth of the insights of this award-winning research really help WBS stand out as a world-class centre of valuable and impactful research.”