|
|
 |
 |
Aaker Honored with First Spence FellowshipMay, 2003
IN 2001, THE NOBEL COMITTEE honored A. Michael Spence, dean emeritus of the Business School, with the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on signaling theory. Much of the research that led to the prize was done during Spence's early years in academia when he was a graduate student and an untenured junior faculty member exploring a new avenue of research. To celebrate Spence's accomplishment, a small group of friends has created a special fund that now stands at $7 million to support and underwrite the recruitment, research, case development, and teaching done by young faculty members at the Business School. The fund will build the School's efforts to attract the best young scholars in their fields and also support the work of junior faculty already at the Business School as they pursue the kind of research that will lead to future academic recognition. Jennifer Aaker, associate professor of marketing, whose research includes understanding the role of culture and its impact on attitudes as well as the use of brands, has been named the first A. Michael Spence Faculty Scholar. Each year a rising academic star who is on the tenure track or recently tenured but not yet a full professor will be recognized as a Spence Scholar. "Promising young scholars are the cornerstone upon which the future of the Business School rests," said Dean Robert Joss. "The competition to attract and retain these promising junior faculty has never been more intense." The donors who have supported the fund honor Spence's achievements and at the same time "make an important investment in the next generation of Business School faculty," he said. Recruiting outstanding young faculty is among the dean's top priorities in recent years along with retaining outstanding scholars already on the faculty. The Spence Faculty Scholar award recognizes excellence in scholarship and teaching as well as potential for future faculty leadership. The founding gifts for the fund came from Anne and Robert M. Bass, MBA '74, president of Keystone Inc.; Philip H. Knight, MBA '62, chairman and CEO of Nike Inc.; Charles W. Robinson, MBA '47, president of DynaYacht Inc.; and Cemex SA of Mexico plus anonymous gifts. Information on the fund is available from David Kennedy, associate dean for development, (650) 723-3355. A RESEARCH PAPER SUMMING up lessons learned from the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies has been awarded the Accenture Award by California Management Review (CMR) for having made the most important contribution during the past year to improving the practice of management. Written by James Baron and Michael Hannan, "Organizational Blueprints for Success in High-Tech Start-Ups: Lessons from the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies," appeared in the Spring 2002 issue of the publication. The award recognizes the paper's intellectual contribution, originality, relevance, and clarity and style. Baron is the Walter Kenneth Kilpatrick Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resources, and Hannan is the StrataCom Professor of Management. CMR is available online at www.haas.berkeley.edu/News/cmr. CREDIT RISK, A NEW BOOK by professors Darrell Duffie and Kenneth Singleton, provides the first integrated treatment of the conceptual, practical, and empirical foundations for credit-risk pricing and risk measurement. The book models credit risk for the purpose of measuring portfolio risk and pricing defaultable bonds, credit derivatives, and other securities exposed to default. Volumes of trade in the credit derivatives market have almost doubled each year, in recent years. Average default rates on U.S. rated bonds are at their highest levels since the Depression years of the 1930s. General interest in credit markets and credit modeling has been extremely high. Duffie, the James Irvin Miller Professor of Finance, and Singleton the C. O. G. Miller Distinguished Professor of Finance, offer critical assessments of alternative approaches to credit-risk modeling while highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of current practice. The book is published by Princeton University Press. |
|
LEADERS AND THEIR ORGANIZATIONS are constrained by environmental factors beyond their control, and organizational actions such as mergers, joint ventures, or the structuring of corporate boards are attempts to manage those constraints. Widely accepted today, these ideas were novel before the 1970s, when Business School Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer was working on a theory explaining the relationship between organizations and their environments. Along with the late Gerald R. Salancik of Carnegie Mellon University, he published a book in 1978 outlining how the decisions of organizations were shaped by their dependence on resources from others. The book, The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective, has been cited more than 2,300 times since, making it one of the classics of organizational science, yet it has been out of print for many years. Worried that young scholars have become too accepting of the ideas in the book without reading it, Pfeffer was pleased recently that Stanford University Press decided to republish the original this spring as a paperback with an updated introduction. "There is actually very little research that has explored the operation of external constraints on organizational decisions," he writes. He is prodding researchers to devise new studies that compare the book's ideas with two other theories—population ecology and institutional theory—each offering different explanations for the environmental constraints on organizations. Another prod will come in August when the Academy of Management hosts a symposium on the 25th anniversary of the book's initial publication at its annual meeting in Seattle. While other researchers have argued that managers can do little to change an organization's fate, Pfeffer and Salancik postulated that under some circumstances, managers can adopt strategies to overcome, for example, a competitors' market power or a government's regulation. The constraints are rooted in their need for resources, and one way that companies gain resources is to make deals with other companies, Pfeffer says. The two also argued that the idea of power, not just rationality or efficiency, helped explain the actions of people within organizations and industries. In 1992, Pfeffer wrote that "power evolved inside electric utilities from engineers to lawyers and business specialists as the critical issues shifted from more technical concerns of building and operating power plants to dealing with an increasingly complex and contentious regulatory environment and managing highly leveraged capital structures in ever more dynamic financial markets." Population ecology, a related but different theory, emphasizes that organizations are shaped especially by their density within their industry, writes Pfeffer, who is now the Thomas Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior. Population ecologists study the births and deaths of organizations to get a better understanding of how industries evolve over time. Institutional theorists emphasize the pressure put on organizations by social rules and expectations. A good way to gain a deeper understanding, Pfeffer says, would be to test the theories' main differences in more studies of real-world organizations.
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
Faculty
