Chair’s Program Communications

Chair’s Statement – Management History Division

 Vienna, August 4, 2026

Dear friends and colleagues of the Management History Division,

Today, as the 86th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management comes to a close, so does my term as your Division Chair. Tomorrow I wake up as Past Chair — a title that sounds like a farewell but is, in truth, a promise: to keep serving this community, one step behind, as Diego Coraiola takes the helm.

Before I pass the gavel, allow me a few words. Not a report — you have had plenty of those from me. This is a letter. From me, to you.

In 2022, you gave me your vote — and with it, something far heavier… your trust. I have carried that trust every single day since, through every role that followed, to this last one. And I mean every day: the early mornings and the late nights, the weekends given to agendas, reports, and minutes, the emails answered across every time zone so that no member, no volunteer, no idea was ever left waiting. I never counted the hours — trust is not repaid by the hour. I have tried to repay it in the only currency I know: tireless work, transparency, and an unreasonable amount of love for this Division and for what it stands for.

Look at what we built together. Eight events and workshops in a single year, across continents and time zones: two paper development workshops that turned ideas into submissions; the Michael Heller Grant Series; a joint PDW with the Entrepreneurship Division that drew nearly eighty registrants and became a model of cross-division collaboration; the Corporate and Brand Heritage Conference in Naples; the publishing workshop in Rome with the Editor-in-Chief of the Academy of Management Journal. And we arrive in Philadelphia with a program that grew against the headwinds — seven paper sessions, six PDWs, four symposia, and a plenary — with submissions higher than the year before.

We opened doors, and we kept them open. A mentorship programme built from nothing, with fourteen mentors, thirteen mentees, and demand that outstripped capacity. Some $8,500 in travel grants to scholars from twelve countries, awarded transparently; it is a budget line and a decision. Five global ambassadors, from Italy and Turkey to Japan, Russia, and India. A new volunteer team drawn from across the globe. A Resource Repository spanning eight domains of our field's foundational literature. Doctoral students are being sponsored, a BALAS pathway to Latin America has been opened, an India PDW is underway, and a North Macedonia conference is in motion.

We also found our voice. A new logo. A rebuilt website — and the Academy chose our Division, one of its smallest, among the very first for its website redesign pilot. Two hundred and sixty posts in eleven months, with our LinkedIn base growing from 200 to 3,000 (the third-most followed Division), becoming a benchmark for the other Divisions and AoM!

And we governed ourselves the way historians would wish to be remembered. Every Executive Committee meeting is minuted, recorded, and archived. Every election and every award is transparent and conflict-of-interest controlled, with roughly forty percent of you turning out to vote — a figure many larger divisions would envy. In a leadership climate survey, we had the courage to read honestly. DIGR reviews closed with satisfaction, with no revisions requested, and the Division handed over in good financial health.

Yet if you ask me what I truly leave behind, it is none of these things, because events end. What stays is a voice, a door, a memory, and a standard. I leave no monuments. I leave capacity.

And here is the truth that matters most: none of it was mine. It belongs to the executive members, to our mentors, reviewers, ambassadors, and volunteers, who gave their time and asked for nothing in return. And it belongs, above all, to you — the members, the base of this Division — who voted, applied, reviewed, presented, and showed up on Zoom at impossible hours because you believe, as I do, that a small division can think big. Nothing in this letter happened without you. Nothing.

Three years ago, I asked for your trust. Today I return this role to you and ask myself the only question that matters: have I repaid it? That answer is yours to give, not mine. What I can promise is that not a single day passed without my trying.

So here is the Division I hope you build: one whose ideas travel further than its size suggests; where history is not a subject others visit, but a method others borrow; where a scholar in Lucknow or São Paulo stands no further from the center than one in Philadelphia. Congratulations to Diego, our incoming Chair, and to our newly elected officers, Nicholous Deal and Regina Greenwood — the future is in wonderful hands. Give them what you gave me, and they will do even greater things.

A Division is not led. It is kept. Thank you — from the bottom of my heart — for letting me keep it for a year.

See you in Vienna.

With gratitude, always,