Brown Bag: Prof. Whittington

The chair of Strategic Management and Innovation invites you to a brown bag seminar on Wednesday, June 28, 2017, at 12:00 in room F109-111 at WEV. We hope many of you can join the talk by Prof. Richard Whittington.

Title: Professional Structures and Practice Change: Institutionalization Processes in Accounting and Strategy

This chapter examines the processes by which new management ideas become institutionalized as widely-used management practices in different kinds of profession. We argue that these institutionalization processes vary according to professions’ structural degrees of social closure, as enforced for instance by tight regulations and strict qualification requirements. Closure has implications for the relevance of different strands of institutional theory. In closed professions such as accounting, institutionalization processes resemble those predicted by institutional entrepreneurship theory: the emphasis is on the roles of regulators and professional bodies, collaboration amongst change agents, episodic innovation, front-loaded change activity and isomorphic outcomes. In open professions such as strategy, management fashion theory suggests the importance of prestigious clients and competition, while institutional work theory predicts continuous innovation, relentless activity and pluralistic outcomes. The chapter argues for the value of comparative studies of professions for future research on the institutionalization of management ideas.

About the Speaker: Richard Whittington is Professor of Strategic Management at Saïd Business School and Millman Fellow in Management at New College, Oxford. Richard is a leader in the field of Strategy-as-Practice research, having published the first paper in the field (1996). The Strategy-as-Practice movement has revitalised research on strategic planning, with formally-recognised streams in such leading conferences as the Strategic Management Society, the Academy of Management, the European Group for Organizational Studies and the British Academy of Management. Richard’s research explores the recent ‘opening’ of strategy, as it becomes more transparent internally and externally, and involves a widening range of people from inside and outside the organisation. Richard is currently Associate Editor of the Strategic Management Journal. 

Schedule:

12.00 Joint Lunch (Complimentary sandwiches and drinks)

12.30-14.00 Presentation and discussion 

Location:

WEV F 109-111, MTEC, ETH Zurich

Weinbergstrasse 56-58, 8092 Zürich

Looking forward to seeing you there,