A University of Houston-Victoria business professor's paper is being considered for the 2007 Best Paper Award from the Academy of Management Journal, one of the top five most influential management publications.

 

Stephanie Solansky

"This nomination is an incredible honor, and I am grateful to receive this recognition for the paper's contribution to the management field," said Stephanie Solansky, an assistant professor of management who co-authored the paper with five others.

 

The paper, titled "Radical Change Accidentally: The Emergence and Amplification of Small Change," is one of three finalists for the award, which will be announced Aug. 12 during the Academy of Management's annual meeting in Anaheim, Calif.

 

The journal's six-member Advisory Council identified 12 papers from those published in 2007 that they thought were outstanding, said Duane Ireland, journal editor and Texas A&M University Bennett Chair in Business. Council members ranked the 12 papers separately, and the three with the top scores were named the finalists earlier this month.

 

"Having a paper appear as a finalist for AMJ's Best Paper Award for a particular year is quite an honor and represents a true achievement," Ireland said.

 

Solansky said the paper came about when she was working on a decision-making consulting project with the other authors. Through this project, they examined how an organization's decision to offer breakfast to homeless people dramatically altered the organization and its environment. The authors found that existing theories of change did not fully explain the type of change they observed. This led to them generating a perspective of change using complexity theory as the basis of the paper.

 

"Radical change emerged from something that was small and unintended," Solansky said.

 

The paper initially was presented at the Academy of Management's annual meeting in 2005 and then was submitted to the Academy of Management Journal and selected for publication.

 

The finalists were selected from the 60 papers published in 2007 in the Academy of Management Journal, which has a circulation of 18,100 and is published six times a year. The journal has been published for more than 50 years as a way to present research about new management thoughts and techniques.

 

Charles Bullock, dean of the School of Business Administration, praised Solansky for her work on the project.

 

"Dr. Solansky's groundbreaking research is receiving the recognition it deserves from the premier empirical journal in the field of management," he said. "I could not be more pleased for her and am honored to have her on the faculty of the School of Business Administration."