Stephen Tallman

Earlier this month Dr. Stephen Tallman, professor of management and E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Professor of Business, was inducted into the Fellows of the Strategic Management Society (SMS) during the SMS Annual International Conference in Madrid, Spain.

The SMS is the premier academic organization in the world that focuses on strategic management. Since its inception in 1981, the SMS had inducted a total of 65 Fellows, and Tallman is now counted among them.

A member of the SMS since he graduated from University of California, Los Angeles in 1988 with a Ph.D. in management, Tallman went on to teach at several universities, including the University of Hawaii, the University of Utah and the Cranfield School of Management in the United Kingdom before coming to the Robins School of Business in 2005. Since then he’s established a legacy in the organization.

He looked back on his time with the SMS, noting that the organization considers scholarship, reputation and service when electing Fellows and describing some of his contributions of service to the SMS. “In 2000 the SMS started to form interest groups for the various fields within strategic management, and then-president John McGee, whom I’d known from Cranfield, approached me to start what became the Global Strategy Interest Group. I held the first meeting in 2002 and chaired the group for about four years. Since then more groups have started, including the Stakeholder Strategy Group founded by Dr. Jeff Harrison and others. Dr. Doug Bosse is the current program chair for that interest group, an important role as the conferences are now structured around these interest groups.”

He went on to say, “In 2007 I was asked to become an associate editor of the Strategic Management Journal (SMJ), the premier strategy journal worldwide. Soon the SMS decided to start journals that addressed subcategories of strategic management. I was asked by the society executives in 2009 to create a proposal for an international strategy journal. I put together an idea and a team, and in 2010 my colleague Torben Pedersen of Copenhagen Business School and I organized a launch conference for the Global Strategy Journal. Our first issue was published in 2011, and we continue to serve as co-editors. We already have established a reputation for interesting and high-quality scholarship and hope to be listed soon in the Social Sciences Citation Index.”

With this election Tallman not only joins the ranks of the SMS Fellows, but also the ranks of the half-dozen or so people who are Fellows at both the SMS and the Academy of International Business (AIB), the main academic organization for international business. Elected an AIB Fellow in 2008, he “served on the editorial board for the Journal of International Business Study and aided in programs and conference activities for that organization, too. It was an honor to be elected then, and it’s an honor now. I hope to continue to serve both organizations for years to come.”

Over the years most Fellows of both the SMS and AIB have been elected from large research-focused schools, rarely choosing individuals from schools without doctoral programs. Tallman’s Fellowships show the possibility remains that whether at a research-focused school or a school committed to both teaching and scholarship, scholars can be recognized for their contributions to their field and education.