Esther Leibel is an Assistant Professor in the Strategy group at Ivey Business School. She received her PhD in Management from New York University.
Her research employs ethnographic and linguistic methods to study the socio-cognitive dynamics of social innovation, with a focus on development of sustainable local food systems and entrepreneur resource acquisition. At the organizational and field level, she asks how purpose-driven organizations develop strategies and business models to accomplish their mission. At the individual level, she examines how social entrepreneurs interact with and gain support from investors and other resource holders, acquiring financial, social, and human capital. Esther’s research has been published or is forthcoming in the Academy of Management Annals and the Strategic Management Journal and has been supported by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the Strategy Research Foundation. Her dissertation received the Best Paper Award at the 19th Annual Social Entrepreneurship Conference and was a finalist for the Academy of Management’s ONE Doctoral Dissertation Award.
At Ivey, Esther teaches Power and Politics and is a member of the undergraduate Cross-Enterprise Leadership team. Previously, she has taught Strategy, Innovation and Global Competition as well as Leadership and Organizations.
Prior to joining Ivey, Esther was an Assistant Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Boston University and worked in sustainability consulting for Deloitte and Arthur D. Little.
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Leibel, E., (Forthcoming), "Curating 1,000 flowers as they bloom: Leveraging pluralistic initiatives to diffuse social innovations", Strategic Management Journal
Abstract: Research Summary
Social and environmental challenges in our society offer opportunities for innovation. Having a strong mission can enhance both opportunity recognition and strategic alignment; however, aligning strategy and mission can be challenging when an organization pursues its social mission in pluralistic ways. How can mission-driven organizations manage pluralistic local initiatives while cohering to their missions? Using an inductive field study, I trace how Slow Money, an organization fostering sustainable local food systems by connecting food entrepreneurs with local investors, translated its core mission into different mission-oriented local initiatives. I find that mission-oriented local initiatives were recombined to create novel strategies curated and diffused by the central leadership, and I show how, rather than derail an organization's mission, pluralistic local initiatives can foster strategies for social innovation.
Managerial Summary
Organizations addressing social and environmental challenges often are mission driven. Though a mission can help guide strategy decisions, it also can lead to strategy confusion, especially when an organization consists of many local groups with different interpretations of the mission. I use the case of Slow Money, a nonprofit supporting sustainable local food systems, to understand how an organization can transform an assortment of mission-based strategies into an asset rather than a liability. I find that by promoting an open exchange of local initiatives and strategies, Slow Money's central leadership validated strategy diversity. It also provided its local groups with the opportunity to borrow and repurpose other groups' initiatives. In this way, diverse local strategies created mission unity while also increasing organizational social innovation.
Link(s) to publication:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/smj.3656
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Leibel, E.; Hallet, T.; Bechky, B. A., 2018, "Meaning at the Source: The Dynamics of Field Formation in Institutional Research", The Academy of Management Annals, January 12(1)
Abstract: Organizational fields are a central construct in institutional theory and the notion of shared meaning is integral to the definition of “field.” In this review, we discuss how institutional scholars have examined discourse, rhetoric, and framing as mechanisms through which meanings form, change, and coalesce in institutional fields. We assess the important contributions of this literature, but we also argue that what scholars identify as discourse, rhetoric, and frames are the residues or echoes of prior social interactions. When scholars miss the opportunity to examine interactions as a key mechanism and source of these meanings, a fundamental dynamic of fields becomes obscured and the accounts become, ironically, static. A focus on interactions enables researchers to observe how institutional fields are understood and tethered to local activity, as actors layer their multiple meanings in ways that may result in unexpected outcomes. As a way to incorporate discourse, rhetoric, and frames into a dynamic approach that features social interaction as an important source of meaning, we examine possibilities evident in the growing line of research on “inhabited institutions,” and we chart productive avenues for future research on the dynamics of fields.
Link(s) to publication:
http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/annals.2016.0035
For more publications please see our Research Database
