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Prestigious award, honour for Schulich Professor Dirk Matten

Dirk Matten, professor of strategy and Hewlett-Packard Chair in Corporate Social Responsibility at York University's Schulich School of Business, has been honoured with a prestigious award from the Academy of Management Review (AMR) and recognition from Assent Compliance.

dirk Matten

Pictured, left to right, at the award ceremony on Aug. 12 in Chicago: Jay Barney, editor-in-chief of the Academy of Management Review; Professor Dirk Matten, Schulich School of Business; and Professor Jeremy Moon, Copenhagen Business School

In this year’s Top 100 Corporate Social Responsibility Influence Leader list, curated by Assent Compliance, Matten was the only academic and ranked next to CEOs and CSR leaders of Google, Apple and Unilever.

According to Assent Compliance, the chosen recipients were selected for embodying corporate social responsibility (CSR), and using their influence to help others establish or improve their corporate social responsibility programs.

In addition, Matten recently received the highly prestigious AMR Paper of the Decade award for his paper published in 2008.

The paper, entitled “ ‘Implicit’ and ‘Explicit’ CSR: A Conceptual Framework for a Comparative Understanding of Corporate Social Responsibility,” co-authored with Jeremy Moon (Copenhagen Business School), received an astounding number of citations (more than 3,500, according to Google) in books and articles across the world since its publication in April 2008.

“This year the decision was easy for the board of AMR, as this article is by far the most cited in this period,” AMR Editor-in-Chief Jay Barney said in Chicago at the award ceremony. The AMR journal is ranked No. 2 out of 209 management journals and No. 2 out of 140 business journals by Google Scholar.

Matten suggests that the article, which takes its point of departure in an analysis of differences between European and U.S. approaches to corporate social responsibility, has been quoted so much for the following reasons:

  • it enables analysis of CSR in a variety of national settings and explanation of different national approaches;
  • it enables analysis of dynamic features of CSR (e.g. reflecting institutional change, globalization); and
  • in particular, it enables understanding of why European and other non-U.S. companies have adopted their own CSR strategies over the past decade or so.

“I am rather humbled to have been selected,” said Matten.

Barney said that the winning paper “has demonstrated a significant impact in the field of management."