Looking back on the Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2016 in Anaheim, California

After Disneyworld Orlando in 2013, this year’s Academy of Management Annual meeting was again in a Disney resort, only this time in Anaheim, California. A lot happened during five days packed with workshops, meetings, presentations and, of course, receptions at the world’s largest gathering of management and organization scholars. What follows is a short list of my personal highlights at this year’s meeting:

• I presented the paper on “Communicating Corporate Afterlife: Post-mortem Statements of Failed Startups”, co-authored with my former FU-Berlin-colleagues Nils Köster and Erik Schäfer. (see Pecha-Kucha-style slides below; in case you’re interested in the draft paper, just send me an email)

• I was honored to contribute to the first edition of the Strategizing Activities and Practices (SAP) Interest Group’s “Doctoral & Early Career Program” in a Professional Development Workshop on post-PhD career strategies.
• I was honored to receive one of several “Outstanding Reviewer” Awards of the SAP Interest Group.
• As one of the co-founders of the recently launched “Open Strategy Network“, I made sure some merchandise was made available to fellow strategy researchers.

• Only after returning home the best news of all reached me via e-mail from Dennis Schoeneborn, with whom I had written about “Fluidity, Identity, and Organizationality: The Communicative Constitution of Anonymous“. For this paper, we had been awarded the 1st Runner-up for the “Best Published Paper in 2015” of the Academy of Management’s Organizational Communication & information System (OCIS) Division.