20.11.2024SMS Istanbul

It was a great pleasure to reconnect with many familiar faces and meet new colleagues at the The Strategic Management Society Conference in Istanbul over the past few days. The conference provided an inspiring mix of academic insights, engaging discussions, and the wonderful opportunity to meet many people of the community again in person!

As part of our contributions, our Chair member Theresa Langenmayr, in her role as Associate Program Chair of the Strategy Practice Interest Group (IG), coordinated the pre-conference program. She also co-organized the workshop “The Ins and Outs of Conducting and Publishing Strategy Process and Strategy Practice Research”, which was facilitated by wonderful experts in the fields and provided great insights for participants. Thank you, Paolo Aversa, Renate Kratochvil, Pinar Ozcan, Ying-Ying Hsieh, Violetta Splitter, Murat Tarakci, Nadine Scholz , Quy Huy, Richard Whittington, and Zeki Simsek.

On the second conference day, David Seidl presented Robin Engelbach's and his paper on “Inclusion-as-Practice: Enacting Inclusion in Open Strategy Processes”, which was nominated for the Strategy Practice IG Best PhD Paper Award. His presentation sparked meaningful conversations around practice research in the context of inclusive strategy-making processes, helping to advance the paper further.

We were also thrilled to celebrate the success of our researcher in residence, Jing You from School of Management at Fudan University, China. In co-authroship with former Chair member Shenghui Ma, they won the Strategy Practice IG Best Paper Award for their impressive paper, “Strategic Categorization: How Different Strategy Actors Shape the Formation of a Society-Level Category”. Their outstanding work was also nominated for the prestigious Conference Best Paper Prize, highlighting the impact of their research.

Beyond the academic sessions, we thoroughly enjoyed the warm Turkish hospitality and the rich cultural and culinary experiences that Istanbul has to offer. The Cocktail Reception, the IG boat tour, and the dinner at Divan Kuruçeşme were among the many highlights of the social events, adding a special touch to the conference.

We are already looking forward to the next SMS conferences in SanFrancisco and Berlin, excited to continue our intriguing discussions!