Academy, Institutional Theory and Organizational Research.

AutorTsujiguchi, Fernanda Yumi
CargoUniversity of Victoria's Roy Suddaby - Biography - Interview

On October 6, 2017, Prof. Roy Suddaby kindly received the interviewer in his office at Peter B. Gustavson School of Business at the University of Victoria to talk about academic life, Institutional Theory and organizational research.

At the University of Victoria, Prof. Suddaby serves as the Francis G. Winspear Chair and works with PhD students in the area of organizational analysis. He is a researcher internationally renowned for his outstanding contributions to the field and significant global scholarly impact. In 2014, 2015 and 2016, he was named by Thomson Reuters as one of the World's Most Influential Scientific Minds (Business and Economics). He is editor of the Academy of Management Review and has served as editor or guest editor for several other journals. In addition, Prof. Suddaby is a strategic research advisor at the University of Newcastle Business School and an honorary professor at the Copenhagen Business School.

Interview

Fernanda: Before starting your academic carrer, you were working in another professional area. When did you decide to come to academia?

Roy: I came to academia very late in life, I was very old, I had a previous career as a lawyer, I really disliked being a lawyer, I disliked it from law school, but you have this sort of escalation to a commitment in a career, and the changing point for me was when my wife and I started having children, and you have to understand that lawyers work very, very hard, long hours, and I spent many weeks where I did not see my children awake, so I decided that I would go back to school and do a PhD, because I always enjoyed, I had an MBA before and I enjoyed doing more academic work, and my wife agreed quickly that we should go back, and so that was the turning point. And it's been fantastic, I never regret the decision, my only regret is that I wish I'd have done my PhD sooner.

Fernanda: How did you become one of the most successful researchers in such a short time?

Roy: The true answer is that it was by accident. The more sophisticated answer is that I took some risks in my career, and you have to understand that because of my previous answer, because I had a previous career, I didn't have big aspirations for my academic career. The plan that my wife and I had, we got married in Victoria, 25, 26 years ago. The plan that I had was that we would come back to Victoria once I got my PhD. I would teach in a community college and maybe do a little law practice on the side, but we had a nice balance in work and life, so as a result, I really didn't care about following fads and fashions in my thesis research. And so I was at the university of Alberta at the time, folks there were very interested in change but also in institutions at the same time, so I thought: "Why is it that we assume institutions don't change? They change, just very slowly, and sometimes very rapidly", and so I was doing a thesis on processes of institutional change in the legal and accounting professions, at a time that everyone was talking about institutions being the same all the time. So I didn't have much hope that I would get a job at a real university, but I didn't care about that, and because I didn't care, I took some risk. And then when I woke up from my 3-year dissertation, I suddenly discovered that the world was talking about change in institutions, so that's the luck part. I happened to do the right thing by accident in a sense.

Fernanda: What is the biggest contribution you think you've made in the area?

Roy: I don't know if I've made it yet, I think I am still working on it, but I think that I've made a contribution in the sense of problematizing change for institutions, suggesting that institutions actually do change. We need to understand better how they change. I also think that my contribution is to pay attention to the symbolic and cultural elements of the change, particularly in the important role that language plays in managing change, this is my biggest contribution. My current focus is in using the language of history, and the argument of history as an argument for change or for resisting change.

Fernanda: Since you entered in the academy, what are the major advances and the main losses?

Roy: The advances are easy. When I joined the university, when I was very young, I studied law because at the time business was not considered a real academic discipline, it was a very practical discipline, but it wasn't academically oriented, whereas law was both practical and academic at the same time. Business has transformed dramatically now, it is a...

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