Department members Estefania Amer and Sarah Stephen were nominated for best paper awards at the 77th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management in Atlanta. Estefania’s paper was finalist for the International Management (IM) division’s Douglas Nigh Memorial Award for interdisciplinary research. Sarah’s paper was finalist for the Best Student Paper Award given by the Social Issues in Management Division (SIM).
Estefania Amer, a Senior Researcher and Lecturer in HEC Lausanne’s Strategy Department, recently presented a paper at the Academy of Management (AoM) 77th Annual Meeting (Atlanta, August 4-8, 2017), “Foreign Markets and Environmental Performance: The Timing of the Response to Institutional Pressures”, which was one of the three finalists for the International Management (IM) division’s Douglas Nigh Memorial Award for interdisciplinary research. This paper has also been judged by the IM division to be one of the best papers of the conference, and a shortened version of the paper will be published in the conference’s Best Paper Proceedings.
Estefania’s paper shows that companies that enter new foreign markets and, as a result, face an increase in the institutional pressures in favor of more environmentally-friendly practices, prioritize compliance with some types of institutional pressures over others. It also shows that when these companies' financial resources are limited and their international experience is narrow, they tend to forgo compliance with normative and cognitive pressures, which can seriously compromise these companies’ legitimacy in the new foreign markets.
During the conference, Estefania also obtained a Best Reviewer Award from the Organizations and the Natural Environment (ONE) division, and another one from the IM division, in recognition of her service as a reviewer of the conference’s papers.
A research paper of Sarah Stephen, PhD Candidate at the department was recognized as one of the three finalists for the Best Student Paper Award given by the Social Issues in Management Division (SIM) of the AoM. The SIM Division comprises of scholars and practitioners engaged in addressing individual and organizational ethics, corporate governance, and stakeholder behaviors and relationships.
Five research papers, authored or co-authored by postgraduate students, had been nominated for the award, of which three papers reached the final round of deliberations. Sarah’s paper, entitled “The Evolution of Emergent Practices in Mature Organisational Fields”, analyzes the rise and early diffusion of responsible investment funds in the financial services and contributes to understanding institutional change in contexts that are hostile to a new practice.
Supervised by Professor Guido Palazzo, Sarah is a final year doctoral candidate whose current research revolves around socially responsible investing and organizational theory and connects to her broader research interests on corporate environmental performance, shareholder activism, and ethics in finance. She has also contributed to a research project on methodology of qualitative research, the outputs of which have been published in the past three years.