Paula Jarzabkowski

Professor Paula Jarzabkowski has won Academy of Management PTC Practice Impact Award 2016: a prestigious and highly valued award that seeks to recognize and celebrate an outstanding scholar for her or his contribution to research and theory in practice based studies and overall impact on managerial and organizational practices. Previous winners include Herman Aguinis (Kelley School of Business), Steward R. Clegg (UTS),  Martha S. Feldman (UC Irvine) and Denise M. Rousseau (Carnegie Mellon University).

The award committee noted that Professor Jarzabkowski’s nomination was “among the set of very impressive nominations, the most outstanding one in terms of making a contribution to research and theory in practice based studies and overall impact on managerial and organizational practices.” Her nomination referenced her impressive achievements in establishing and furthering the field of strategy as practice through seminal articles and books, advancing practice-based management and organizational research more generally in the top journals of our discipline, and the impact for a range of industries stemming from her large scale ethnographic projects. Such projects have most recently included a global ethnography of the reinsurance industry which has been much discussed in the press and for which she won the 2013 ESRC Outstanding Impact on Business Award.

An example of this impact is the reaction to her most recent book Making a Market for Acts of God: Risk Trading Practices in the Global Reinsurance Industry (Oxford University Press). This work has been labelled “without a doubt one of the best available illustrations of the heuristic power of the practice approach […and] a masterclass in how to study and describe in an accessible way a seemingly complex and almost intractable phenomenon. (Davide Nicolini, Professor of Organization Studies, Warwick Business School) and “a must read for anyone interested in (re)insurance, including those working in this industry” (Bronek Masojada, CEO Hiscox Group).

This award highlights the rigor and relevance of strategy as practice research and the important and far-reaching implications work in this field can have. A big congratulations to Paula from the whole SAP Community!

2016 Selection Committee: Karlene Roberts, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley | Denise Rousseau, Carnegie Mellon University | Herman Aguinis, Kelley School of Business | Markus Blut, Newcastle University Business School | Tyrone Pitsis, Leeds University Business School | Christof Backhaus, Newcastle University Business School.