Last week I received the really exciting news that my PhD dissertation was selected for the finals of the Grigor McClelland Doctoral Dissertation award. In this year’s international competition in the field of organization and management studies, 98 dissertations were nominated, of which 3 were shortlisted for the finals.

The Grigor McClelland Doctoral Dissertation Award is an annual prize of £5,000 awarded to innovative scholarship demonstrated within a PhD thesis in management and organisation studies. The award is supported by the Journal of Management Studies (JMS) and the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies (SAMS).

Grigor McClelland was was the founding editor of the Journal of Management Studies, which is still globally influential after 50 years, founding director of the Manchester Business School, and author of a string of books on management whose readership has lasted for half a century.

The primary focus of the dissertation award is to recognize and award doctoral research that is expansive and imaginative in that it covers significantly new terrain or counters existing thinking within management and organisational research. The shortlisting and selection of the award winner is carried out by a panel of six senior scholars within management and organization studies. The panel consists of representatives from SAMS, JMS and EGOS. The prize will be awarded to the work that, in the opinion of the panel, was truly novel and creative in its theory development, use of methods or the empirical contexts covered in the dissertation.

The winner is announced during a special session on July 6th at the 2017 EGOS conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. In this special session the shortlisted candidates for the award will present their research, followed by the award presentation and a reception.

Previous Winners

2016: Douglas Lepisto, Western Michigan University, USA
Reason For Being: Exploring the Emergence and Members’ Responses to Organizational Purpose in an Athletic Footwear and Apparel Company.

2015: Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, New York University, USA
Shifting Loci of Innovation: A Study of Knowledge Boundaries, Identity and Innovation at NASA.

2014: Ryan Raffaelli, Harvard Business School, USA
Identity and Institutional Change in a Mature Field: The Re-Emergence of the Swiss Watchmaking Industry, 1970-2008.