The Joanne Martin Trailblazer Award is presented once every two years. The award recognizes scholars who have taken a leadership role in the field of OMT by opening up new lines of thinking or inquiry. A Trailblazer is a boundary-spanner and a conversation starter, someone who extends and builds the OMT community by shepherding new ideas and new scholarship, often in unconventional ways. Actions that may indicate “trailblazing” behavior include starting up or moving forward a journal or scholarly series, organizing a conference or workshop, and beginning or continuing a conversation about a set of OMT ideas.
The establishment of the award was motivated by the retirement of Joanne Martin. An important part of her legacy is that she has challenged and extended the boundaries of OMT. She was a critical voice in research on culture, and she leveraged her position in an attempt to bring feminism and critical theory into the mainstream of organization theory. Professor Martin encouraged people that wouldn’t have traditionally been considered in the mainstream of organization theory to develop ideas that did not fit into existing theories and has thus broadened the membership of OMT. For instance, Joanne was a panelist at the first Critical Management Studies PDW at the Academy of Management in 1998, and she has been a frequent panelist at junior faculty and Ph.D. consortia. In this role, she has supported and encouraged junior faculty and acted as an early role model for women entering the field.
2022 OMT Joanne Martin Trailblazer Award
Joep Cornelissen and Markus Höllerer
for their pioneering work in establishing the open access journal Organization Theory as a conceptual journal that is anchored in a European tradition of fostering intellectual diversity while aiming for a global reach and inclusiveness in ways of theorizing.
Past Winners
2020 Doug Creed, Bryant Hudson, Gerardo Okhuysen, and Maureen Scully, for their scholarly efforts in starting and shaping our conversation about LGBT issues, stigma, shame, taboo, and power in organizational settings
2018 Cynthia Hardy, Cliff Oswick, and Nelson Phillips, for their pioneering work on organizational discourse, institutional discourse and discourse analysis.
2016 Haridimos Tsoukas, for his contributions to introducing philosophical approaches and process thinking into OMT (manifested in his editorship of Organization Studies, and his development of the International Symposium on Process Organization Studies) as well as his many and varied ground-breaking and highly-cited publications. See Haridimos's thank you speech here.
2014 Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan, coauthored the now classic text Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis which pushed scholars to confront the hidden assumptions in the field’s dominant paradigms and revealed how these paradigms influenced the ways in which we interpret organizational actions and develop theory.
2012 David Hickson for his leadership in founding Organization Studies
2010 Positive Organizational Scholarship Group -- Wayne Baker, Kim Cameron, Jane Dutton, Robert Quinn, Gretchen Spreitzer, Lynn Wooten.
2008 Arie Lewin for his leadership in founding Organization Science and the Organization Science Winter Conference. Download Award Presentation.