CBS Honorary doctorate 2006 -
Barbara Czarniawska
CBS appoints Professor Barbara Czarniawska Honorary Doctor in Organization Theory. She is a world-renowned scholar and a leading figure within organization theory. Her demonstrated ability to bridge across the many disciplinary (and other) divides is particularly relevant to such a diversified school as CBS.
| Professor, PhD Barbara Czarniawska (Gothenburg Research Institute) is an extremely creative and productive researcher, teacher and writer. She is the author of nine books and has edited other ten books and special issues of journals.
This Spring she will publish two edited books, 'Organization Theory' and 'Management Education and Humanities'. In the current times of canons, we have every reason to consider the former book a canon of organization theory.
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Barbara Czarniawska (born 1948) received her Ph.D. in Economic Sciences at Warsaw School of Economics in 1976. She has worked at Stockholm School of Economics, Lund University and Gothenburg University. Currently she holds The Swedish Research Council and Malmsten Foundation Chair of Management Studies at GRI (Gothenburg Research Institute). Professor Czarniawska is a Titular Professor at the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management, Brussels. She has worked as a visiting professor at several European and North American universities, including Sloan School of Management at MIT.
Professor Czarniawska is a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences and the Swedish Royal Engineering Academy.
The number of articles she has published as book chapters or journal articles exceeds 50. Her book 'Organization Theory' provides an overview of the history and the current issues of organization theory. Being charged with the prestigious task of defining the canon is a testimony to professor Czarniawska's central position and high status in the international community of organization scholars. The latter book - 'Management Education and Humanities' - is also telling, but in a different way. It aims to rescue management ideas from the narrow issues of decontextualized techniques and tools so dominant in the current research and teaching. It proposes to view and to teach management as a task embedded in cultural, political and humanistic traditions. The book symbolizes professor Czarniawska's scholarship. She speaks and writes with a distinctly critical, intellectual attitude, while broadmindedly sourcing other fields and traditions for inspiration and insight. We recognise a personal quest behind one of the section headlines in the book, "Bringing Humanities into the Heart of Management".
Professor Czarniawska has had an important impact on research and thinking in all quarters of the world, not least Scandinavia and North America. Her ideas are widely cited (a Google Book search returns 3.130 pages on February 15, 2006), often with utmost reverence. Karl Weick delivers a prominent example of such reverence when he writes:
"… And then there is Barbara Czarniawska, ever able to put our turmoil into perspective as when, in her essay "Who Is Afraid of Incommensurability?" she calmly reminds us that "there are much more serious dangers in life than dissonance in organization theory. Crossing the street every day is one such instance. We may as well abandon this self-centered rhetoric [about incommensurability] and concentrate on a more practical issue: it seems that we would like to be able to talk to one another, and from time to time have an illusion of understanding what the Other is saying". (Weick, K.E., 'Theory Construction as Disciplined Reflexivity: Tradeoffs in the 90s.' AMR, Vol 24:4, 1999, p. 797)
Professor Kristian Kreiner
(Dept. of Organization and Industrial Sociology)
Sidst opdateret af Insights@CBS 13.3.2006 | marts - 2006, nr. 19
