CBS Ph.D. receives Best Dissertation award at the Academy of Management
Christian Geisler Asmussen, an Assistant Professor at the Center for Strategic Management and Globalization at CBS, won the Barry M. Richman Best Dissertation Award at the latest Academy of Management conference, which was held in Anaheim, California in August. The award was given by the Academy’s International Management Division for the best Ph.D. dissertation that contributes to basic or applied knowledge on topics within the domain statement of the division, focusing on research in management and organization theory and practice with a cross-border or cross-cultural dimension.
The Barry M. Richman award competition was open to all Ph.D. and D.B.A. students who successfully defended their dissertations during the 2007 calendar year. Out of a large pool of dissertations from a highly competitive global portfolio of Ph.D. programs, four finalists were selected and invited to present their doctoral work during a well-attended special session at the Academy. Christian was ultimately selected among these finalists as the winner of the award at the closing session of the conference.
Christian won the award for his dissertation titled “Global Strategy and International Diversity: A Double-Edged Sword”, which was written at the Center for Strategic Management and Globalization and defended publicly at CBS in October, 2007. His supervisor was Professor Bent Petersen from CBS, and the evaluation committee consisted of Professors Torben Juul Andersen from CBS, Paul Beamish from the Ivey Business School at the University of Western Ontario, and D. Eleanor Westney from MIT Sloan School of Management. The dissertation is a collection of papers studying the impact of globalization on multinational corporations’ geographic diversification choices. Among the key results, Christian developed new ways to quantify the geographic scope of international firms and showed that firm’s internationalization patterns were determined by an interaction of industry effects and the firms’ proprietary technological and marketing capabilities. He showed that the superior performance of global firms could be attributed to those capabilities rather than to their decisions to become global per se, and found evidence of a “liability of foreignness” in regional and global markets.
Four out of the five papers from the dissertation are now either published or accepted for publication, two of which are forthcoming in the Journal of International Business Studies.