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UCI Paul Merage School of Business Professor Margarethe Wiersema has received the 2022 Service Award from the Strategic Management Society (SMS).

The SMS Service Award is conferred in recognition of significant and enduring service that made an outstanding and distinguished contribution to the Strategic Management Society and its members.  Among other criteria considered by the SMS Board of Directors, the recipient should have lengthy, significant, and effective service to the SMS and its members.

“The SMS Service Award signifies international recognition by the academic community of my contribution to building and advancing the strategic management discipline and profession over the past 20 years,” said UCI Merage School Professor Margarethe Wiersema.  “It recognizes the cumulative impact of my leadership and devotion in building the strategic management community, broadening academic discourse, mentoring junior scholars, and transforming the profession to enhance opportunities for academic scholarship.  My involvement and influence as recognized by receiving the SMS Service Award enhances the visibility and academic reputation of UCI, the Merage School, and the Strategy & Entrepreneurship area.”

Professor Margarethe Wiersema is internationally recognized as one of the leading experts on corporate strategy and corporate governance with more than 60 publications and over 13,000 citations and her research has appeared in the New York Times, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Fortune, Business Week, the Washington Post, and The Economist Intelligence Unit for their “Executive Briefing”.  She served as Associate Editor of the Strategic Management Journal, on the board of directors of the Strategic Management Society and was Past President of the Corporate Strategy and Governance Group of SMS.

Professor Wiersema holds the Dean’s Professorship in strategic management at the Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine. She has an MBA and PhD from the University of Michigan. Professor Wiersema is an SMS fellow and former Dean of the fellows. She has an honorary doctorate from the Copenhagen Business School, was awarded the Irwin Educators Award from the Academy of Management Strategic Management Division in 2022 and the Distinguished PhD Alumni Award from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan in 2006.

“We congratulate Professor Wiersema on this recognition of her substantive contributions to the field of strategic management,” said UCI Paul Merage School of Business Dean Ian Williamson.

Margarethe will be recognized at the SMS Annual Conference in London and during the SMS Awards Webinar Series in the fall of 2022.

Q&A With Professor Margarethe Wiersema

How did you become involved with SMS?

Membership of SMS was a natural steppingstone upon graduating from the doctoral program at the University of Michigan and I attended my first SMS conference in 1989 and have participated in nearly all of them since. I was invited to join the editorial board of the Strategic Management Journal in 1994 and served as an associate editor at SMJ from 2009 until 2018. When the Interest Groups of SMS were first formed in 2005, I was elected to be the leader of the Corporate Strategy and Governance Interest group and served in that role for three years. In 2006, my fellow SMS members elected me to the Board of the Strategic Management Society and I served until 2010. In 2005, I served as co-chair of the first SMS doctoral consortium. In 2012, I became a Strategic Management Society Fellow and was elected to serve as Dean of the SMS fellows from 2018-2020.

Describe what SMS was like when you became involved? How was the scope of the Society different from what it is today?

When I first joined SMS it was a much smaller academic organization, with a deliberate effort to be international in terms of its membership and where it held its conferences. The early conferences were a conscious blend of academic and business attendees and presenters. This differs considerably from the Academy of Management or other academic organizations. At the time, SMS only published the Strategic Management Journal with Dan Schendel serving as the sole editor. Conferences were much smaller which enabled more exchange between scholars and practitioners. The growth in scholarship devoted to strategic management led to the creation of interest groups as well as an annual conference that now include workshops, as well as doctoral and junior faculty consortiums. These changes brought in more junior scholars and doctoral students into the society. The publications of SMS expanded to include Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal and Global Strategy Journal.

Throughout your career, you have helped to promote others in the field of strategic management. What do you find most rewarding about the support you give?

I thoroughly enjoy interacting with the many junior scholars I have had the privilege to collaborate with and feel we both benefit from the exchange of ideas. They are all hard working and ambitious and it is rewarding to see them prosper in their careers. Many are international scholars with whom I have kept in touch with over the years and I relish our ongoing friendships.

Based on the various leadership roles you have served in for SMS and other organizations in the field, what new opportunities do you see for associations to support strategic management scholars?

It is increasingly more difficult to publish in the top journals such as SMJ as the number of strategy scholars has grown domestically as well as internationally. This makes it ever more important for academic associations to provide support for junior scholars and doctoral students in their academic endeavors. One of the distinctions of SMS from other academic organizations in management has been its decades long ties to the business community. The opportunity to engage with managers is more critical today than ever as turbulent changes in the world have transformed the corporate governance and strategic landscape in which companies operate. Increased investor focus on ESG issues as well as societal expectations have clearly impacted both the strategy and the governance of companies and poses challenges for management and boards in that companies also face activist investors focused on shareholder wealth. SMS has the opportunity to be at the forefront by providing an exchange on these critical issues and thus engaging academic scholars with the pressing issues that face corporations globally.