Member Spotlight: Marieke Huysentruyt and Leandro Nardi, recipients of the 2022 Carolyn B. Dexter Award
Leandro Nardi and Marieke Huysentruyt
are the winners of the 2022 Carolyn B. Dexter Award for their paper, “Corporate Social Responsibility, Financial Materiality, and the Challenges of Forced Migration: Evidence from Tragic Refugee Incidents in Europe”
submitted to the Strategic Management (STR) Division, for its strong contributions to theory and novel methodology.
The paper explores whether exposure to social challenges influences an organization's corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities and focuses on refugee incidents and forced migration to Europe. The paper uses original methodology to examine how an organization's headquarter proximity to tragic refugee incidents influences its CSR portfolio decisions.
Leandro is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at HEC Paris, based in the Society & Organizations Institute (and an incoming assistant professor at HEC Paris). He researches the intersection of strategic management and social impact, including topics such as CSR, the interplay of financial and nonfinancial dimensions of performance, ESG, and impact-oriented business and investments. Leandro received his BA in Business Administration at University of Sao Paulo and PhD in Business Economics at Insper Institute of Education and Research.
Marieke is an Associate Professor in Strategy and Business Policy and Academic Director of the Inclusive Economy Center at HEC Paris. She is passionate about teaching and carrying out research on social inequalities, with applications in the fields of strategy, behavioral economics, development, and business policy. She received her MSc in Bioengineering from Catholic University of Leuven, MSc in Applied Economics and Management from Cornell University, and PhD in Economics from London School of Economics. She is currently on the Editorial Review Board for Academy of Management Discoveries.
Marieke and Leandro were motivated by current events to write this paper. They set out to find a social shock, much like the COVID-19 crisis, that would allow them to study how firms respond when social inequalities are made more salient. When the COVID-19 crisis hit, many companies responded by donating to emergency relief funds, making their own technologies available for producing masks, and/or investing to improve the psychological wellbeing of their employees. The question they ask, in turn, is whether companies alter their CSR portfolio decisions when the forced migration crisis hits home or nearby.
“We see the award as a 'vote of confidence' or 'green light' for all of us researchers who go the extra mile to develop robust and original research methods to study important social topics. With the on-going Ukrainian refugee crisis, the paper has of course gained in relevance. The burden is on us to try to ensure that research projects like ours also gain in impact.”
The Carolyn B. Dexter Award is an all-Academy award given to the paper that best meets the objective of internationalizing the Academy of Management. Each of the Academy's Divisions & Interest Groups nominates one annual meeting submission for this prestigious award each year; up to three of these nominations may be selected to receive the award. Each paper nominated for the Carolyn Dexter Award is designated as such on the program.
Carolyn B. Dexter Award Committee: Mukta Kulkarni (Chair), Indian Institute of Management; Anna Brattström, Lund University; Stacey Fitzsimmons, University of Victoria; Daniel S. Halgin, University of Kentucky; and Wei Jee Ong, National University of Singapore.