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Strategy Seminar with Ann Langley from April 4-7, 2016

At my school, the German Graduate School of Management and Law (GGS), we’re organizing a series of seminars called Methods in Business Research. We’re aiming to hold these seminars about two times a year. This year we had Steve Borgatti (University of Kentucky), giving a seminar on Social Network Analysis, for example. For one of the seminars in 2016, we’ll have Professor Ann Langley from HEC Montréal. Ann will be teaching her course ‘Reading, Doing & Publishing Research in Strategy & Management’ from April 4-7, 2016, in Heilbronn, Germany. Ann’s a great scholar, a fabulous teacher, and a very nice person to work with. I know this because I was fortunate enough to have taken her course during my stay at McGill University last winter. I can thus highly recommend it. You can find more details below.  Continue reading Strategy Seminar with Ann Langley from April 4-7, 2016

Study: Social Media and Community Management in D-A-CH

As reported earlier this year, we, i.e., a project group from the (German) Association for Community Management, ran a social media and community management survey over the summer of 2015. Our goal was to gain a better understanding of the working conditions of social media and community professionals in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. We were also curious about the organizational context in which these practitioners are embedded and how their communities contribute to organizational performance. We have presented the results at several practitioner conferences, namely the Social Business Club (part of IBM Business Connect) in Cologne and the CommunityCamp in Berlin. Following these presentations, we published the report, entitled ‘The Status of Social Media and Community Management in the DACH Region’. You can find our conference presentation and more details regarding the content of the study below. Continue reading Study: Social Media and Community Management in D-A-CH

AoM 2015: Session on Dynamic Capabilities

This year it’ll be the 5th time I’m attending the Academy of Management Conference. I have good memories of the doctoral consortia and workshops I attended in the early years of my PhD. Here are two of my blog posts from back then: Reflections on the AoM in 2011 and Reflections on the AoM in 2012. Over the years, the conference has become a standard summer event for me. This year, I teamed up with my colleague Madeleine Rauch (European University Viadrina/German Graduate School of Management and Law) to organize a symposium entitled ‘Dynamic Capabilities: Bridging Diverging Conversations’. We have brought together an interesting set of papers from researchers surrounding our research group on dynamic capabilities. We’re delighted to have Gianmario Verona (Bocconi) and Oliver Schilke (University of Arizona) as facilitators for the discussion. The symposium is sponsored by the Business Policy and Strategy Division, and the Technology and Innovation Management Division. Our session is scheduled for Monday, August 10, 2015, from 8:00-9:30am at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Room 205. If you are a strategy or innovation scholar interested in dynamic capabilities, we hope to meet you there. You can find the abstract below. Continue reading AoM 2015: Session on Dynamic Capabilities

Call for Applications: 6 PhD Positions

The PhD program in ‘Dynamic Capabilities and Relationships’, which I graduated from earlier this year, is currently seeking applications for six PhD positions, starting in April 2015. Deadline for applications is January 5, 2015. I think the terms are quite attractive, ranging from the choice of your own topic, a monthly scholarship, access to a laptop and research software to a personal research budget for seminars and conferences. More details can be found here.

My Top 4 Articles for 2013

Given that the year 2014 is coming to an end, I asked myself the other day which recent papers have influenced my thinking and writing this year. First on the list is the MISQ special issue by Bharadwaj et al. (2013). In the paper, the authors attempt to bring together the strategy and information systems literature and emphasize the strategic role of information technology in organizations. Next, there’s the ISR special issue by Aral et al. (2013) on social media and business transformation, which sheds light on the transformative power of social media technologies as a specific class of information technologies. Third on the list is Treem & Leonardi’s (2013) book chapter on social media affordances, explaining how social media technologies differ from previous forms of computer-mediated communication and what kind of actions they facilitate. Ultimately, there’s Wang et al.’s (2013) OS paper, which highlights the competitive nature of online groups as they compete for members’ attention and time. Continue reading My Top 4 Articles for 2013