The Carolyn Dexter Award, Jacob Eisenberg, Dexter Award Committee Chair

2007 was my third and last year serving as the Chair of Dexter Best International Paper Award Committee. I was delighted to observe that this year we stroke yet a new record in the quantity and diversity of submissions and reviewers, while maintaining the strong quality standards that we came to expect from Dexter Award nominations in previous years.

This year, 394 of the papers accepted for the meeting programme were self designated as Dexter Award potentials. Looking five years back, to 2003, where 119 papers were self designated for the Dexter Award, we notice an increase of over 300% in this figure! I believe that this impressive growth in a mere five-year period reflects the increased visibility of the Dexter Best Paper Award (organized by the ITC-International Theme Committee on behalf of the Academy), which has been established in 1995 as part of Academy’s internationalization process. In 2007, we received Dexter Award nominations from 23 (!) divisions and interest groups, a nice increase from 20 divisions/IGs last year. Thus, only one division (Conflict Management) did not nominate a paper for the award. The 23 nominated papers were again diverse both in their content and the methodological approaches used. The 61 authors came from 17 different countries across the globe, from China to Brazil and from Spain to New Zealand.

This year, I was blessed with a large body of volunteers, allowing us to make sure that each nominated paper is blind-reviewed by three reviewers and, at the same time, not asking volunteers to review more than two papers each. This dedicated and highly skilled team of reviewers represented a wide variety of divisions and 14 countries. This year, four papers were selected and finalists and the Award Committee had the challenging task of selecting the winner among these excellent papers. For their part in this demanding task, special thanks are due to the Dexter Committee members: Christopher B. Bingham, David Lamond, Eleanor O'Higgins Anat Rafaeli and to my dedicated assistant Brona Russell.

The award winning paper, submitted by the OMT Division, ‘Wary Managers/Investors: Vulnerability, Control, Trust, and Distrust in Foreign Enterprises in China’ authored by Lai Si Tsui-Auch (Nanyang Technological U.) and Guido Moellering (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies), was a fascinating paper of a very high standard in its theory, methodology and discussion. The paper examined the very timely issue of the conditions under which trust and control are managed by foreign companies in various regions of China. I think it’s worthwhile brining the ‘story’ behind this research project as it was told by Guido Moellering: “In the spirit of the award, it was at AOM 2005 in Hawaii that Lai Si and I met for the first time and discussed the topic of foreign managers' trust in China. Combining our previous expertise in the topic area, we started to work on the paper that has been nominated. We did much of the writing by sending emails back an forth (making good use of the time difference between Singapore and Germany) but what also helped us a lot was a research visit by Lai Si here at my institute in Cologne, Germany, in 2006”. I wholeheartedly recommend that you read this brilliant and highly readable paper.

The three other finalists were: ‘National Governance Systems, Stakeholder Power, and Post-Acquisition Dynamics’ (BPS Division) by Laurence Capron (INSEAD) and Mauro F. Guillen (U. of Pennsylvania); ‘Geographic Orientation and Performance of Global Versus Regional MNEs’ (IM Division) by Christian Geisler Asmussen (Copenhagen Business School) and Anthony Goerzen (U. of Victoria); and ‘E-Government, Corruption and National Prosperity: Evidence from Cross-Country Data’ (PNP Division) by Shirish C. Srivastava (National U. of Singapore) and Thompson S.H. Teo (National U. of Singapore).