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Dr Violetta Splitter receives 2024 Dean’s Research Excellence Award from Oxford Saïd Business School

10 January 2025

Dr Violetta Splitter has received a 2024 Dean’s Excellence Research Award from Oxford Saïd Business School.
A woman in formal attire receiving an award being handed to her from a man in formal attire.

Dr Violetta Splitter has received a 2024 Dean’s Research Excellence Award from Oxford Saïd Business School. The award celebrated her achievements in outstanding research, including her recent work on middle managers’ struggle over their influence on strategy when frontline employees are tasked to develop strategy. Her work is based on ethnographic data with more than 400 hours of observations and 125 interviews of a strategy development process at an international financial institution.

About Dr Splitter

Violetta Splitter

Dr Splitter joined Oxford in 2024 as Fellow and Tutor in Management at St Peter’s College and Associate Professor in Strategy at Saϊd Business School. Her scholarly expertise is in sociologically oriented management and strategy research. Within these broad fields of study, her research focuses on a new organisational trend towards more inclusive and ‘open’ forms of strategy making (often referred to as ‘open strategy’), and its implications for the social dynamics of strategy work. Empirically, she examines this trend by using ethnographic methods. For example, as a non-participant observer, she followed an inclusive strategy process over seven months at an international financial institution in which frontline employees were asked to develop the corporate strategy. Theoretically, Dr Splitter’s research is informed by social practice theories (such as Bourdieu or Giddens), which allow her to focus on the actual practices of strategy work as well as its social dynamics (e.g., in terms of power relations, influence, or control).

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