Saïd Business School Research Excellence Award for Dr Violetta Splitter

Dr Violetta 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).