It's my great pleasure to personally invite
Professor Başak Yakış-Douglas (King's College London) https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=drb8S7MAAAAJ&hl=en and
Professor Richard Whittington (Saïd Business School, University of Oxford) https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=VqHdsNgAAAAJ
to our ICEBS Lecture and Paper Development Workshop on July 26, 2022.
Dr. Başak Yakis-Douglas is Associate Professor in International Business Strategy at King's Business School and an Associate Fellow at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. After receiving an MSc in Analysis, Design, and Management of Information Systems from London School of Economics, she completed her DPhil at New College and Saïd Business School, University of Oxford as a British Council Chevening scholar and an ESRC-SKOPE fellow. In 2015, she was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Business School. Başak's broader research interests involve the uniqueness paradox in strategy and strategy communications. Recently, she has published an article under these headings in Strategic Management Journal with the (short) title "Cheap Talk" in which her author team measured share price reactions associated with strategy presentations. Her research appears frequently in practitioner journals and public access media as well as mainstream refereed journals. Her research has been published in prominent practitioner journals such as Harvard Business Review and Perspectives and mentioned in public media such as Forbes, Sky News, and BBC. She been representative-at-large for the Strategy-as-Practice interest group in Strategic Management Society and acts as a reviewer for a plethora of top journals in organization theory and strategy.
Professor Richard Whittington is one of the founding figures of strategic management research outside the United States and one of the most influential scholars, thinkers, and educators in the strategic management community worldwide. He a Professor of Strategic Management at the Saïd Business School of the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of New College, Oxford. He has a PhD from Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, an MBA from Aston Business School and an MA in Modern History from Magdalen College, Oxford. Richard Whittington is a leader in the field of Strategy-as-Practice research, having published the first paper in the field (1996). He is author of eleven books, including two of the most influential textbooks on strategy. He has served as an Associate Editor of the Strategic Management Journal, a Senior Editor of Organization Studies and a Deputy Editor of the British Journal of Management and has held full or visiting appointments at i.a. Harvard Business School, HEC Paris, and Imperial College London.
Professors Whittington and Yakış-Douglas will present an ongoing research project on sustaining attention to strategic issues co-authored with Tomi Laamanen. Here's an abstract of the paper:
Our purpose is to establish the importance and explore the nature of sustaining attention - an important concept that has equivalent import as the well-recognized processes of attention allocation and attentional engagement. Employing a practice perspective, we carried out longitudinal, comparative-case studies in five high-tech companies and tracked 26 strategic issues in real time over two years. We carried out 75 interviews, observed 142 meetings and 74 activities, and collected 359 documents. Our empirical findings illustrate that sustaining attention manifests itself as regaining, retaining, and reinforcing resources and senior managers engage in cognitive and political practices that differ both in the extent to which they employ them and how they make use of them. Theoretically, our research reveals that sustaining attention is an effortful accomplishment that is far from being a natural extension of attentional engagement. Rather, it is the outcome of deliberate, discretionary and often imaginative practices of senior managers. Our research also highlights the crucial role that the political nature of practices plays in sustaining attention – consistent with the attention-based view's underlying behavioural theory of the firm approach, we extend existing treatments that feature cognitive practices with a greater emphasis on political practices.