HSE Scholar Recognized at Academy of Management Annual Meeting

From August 1-5, the Academy of Management h­eld its 74th Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (USA). The Annual Meeting is the premier conference for more than 10,000 academics, and professionals in the scholarly management and organization field. This year it was attended by a delegation of eight representatives from the Higher School of Economics.

For HSE one of the highlights of this year’s conference was a report presented by Marie-Ann Betschinger, Assistant Professor in the HSE’s Faculty of Management, which received a best paper award of the International Business division. The paper, co-authored by Olivier Bertrand (SKEMA Business School, France) and Alexander Settles (Rutgers University, USA), was titled ‘Getting by with a Little Help from My Friends: The Relevance of Political Affinity for the Bidding Strategy in Cross-Border Acquisitions’.

‘At the Faculty of Management, we believe that participation in the Academy Annual Meeting is important for any of our professors and researchers, so we try to offer financial support for those whose papers are accepted,’ said Nikolay Filinov, Dean of the HSE’s Faculty of Management. ‘The formats of the various sessions were quite diverse, ranging from a large plenary session attended by several thousand participants to small roundtable meetings. In general, the quality of sessions was very high.’

Speaking on the degree to which Russian research in the field of management fits in with international trends, Filinov argued that in general, if we use metaphor suggested by Klaus Meyer from China Europe International Business School, studies are transitioning from context-specific research (i.e., focused on process or phenomena in a particular country) to context-embedded research.

‘Studies of the second type introduce context as an independent or moderating variable and, ultimately, lead to the formulation of either context-bounded theories, i.e., we understand in what contexts a theory is valid, and in which ones it is not, or — and this is a rare success — to the formulation of general, context-free theories,’ said Filinov. ‘Although generalizations are dangerous, management research in our country is moving more toward the second type.’