Instructors

Kevin Corley (Ph.D., The Pennsylvania State University) is a Professor of Management and the PhD Director for the Department of Management & Entrepreneurship at Imperial College Business School in London. He conducts research in conjunction with the School’s Design Studio, the Leonardo Centre for Business in Society, and the Centre for Responsible Leadership. His expertise lies in the understanding of how individuals and organisations approach change, and how leaders can use times of uncertainty and ambiguity to the benefit of their organisation and followers. He is widely published in the field's top journals on issues related to organisational change, identity, and culture, as well as qualitative research methods and theory development. Kevin has won multiple professional awards, including most recently being named the 2022 Distinguished Scholar for the Management & Organizational Cognition division of the Academy of Management. Kevin has served as associate editor of the Academy of Management Journal and currently serves on several editorial boards.

Alessandra Zamparini is lecturer and researcher (MER) at the Institute of Marketing and Communication Management (IMCA). She holds a PhD in Communication Sciences and Management from the Università della Svizzera italiana in co-tutoring with the Università degli Studi di Padova. Her research focuses on collective identity construction and change in organizational, urban and regional contexts. She is particularly interested in how multiple modes of communication, time and materiality inform those processes. She is currently leading a research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation on digital transformation and how it affects sensemaking and identity in organizations. She conducted research in the wine, tourism, and creative industries. Her research appeared, among others, in Strategic Organization, Journal of Management Inquiry, Corporate Communications: An International Journal, International Journal of Strategic Communication.

She is Full Professor of Organizational Communication at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) where she directs the Institute of Marketing and Communication Management (IMCA). She is also an Honorary Professor at Warwick Business School (UK) where she collaborates with IKON, the research unit on Knowledge, Innovation and Organizational Networks. Jeanne’s work aims to foreground how communication constitutes organizing and how material actors, such as objects and space, mediate this process. She focuses mainly on cross-disciplinary collaboration, innovation and knowledge work, embarking currently on a new research project on how organizations sustain and re-orient attention to possible threats and opportunities in everyday communication practice.

While the research contexts of Jeanne’s studies vary (e.g. cultural organizations, healthcare, biomed), her methodological approach is mostly ethnographic, building not only on classical observation, but also on visual methods such as video-based methods and photo-ethnography. Jeanne published her work in journals such as Organization Science, Organization Studies, Organizational Research Methods, Organization, or Social Science & Medicine. Prior to her current engagement, she was a senior research fellow at Warwick Business School (UK) and a visiting fellow at Boston University Questrom School of Business and at the Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University (USA).

Dr. Pellandini-Simányi is Assistant Professor in the Institute of Marketing and Communication Management. After studying Economics and Marketing (MSc), she earned her PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Previously, she taught at the Sociology Department of LSE, and held a Swiss National Science Foundation Marie Heim-Vögtlin Fellowship at the Institute of Management and Organization, USI, and an Assistant Professorship at ELTE, Budapest.

She is director of the "Business, Markets and Society" BA specialization and co-chair of the Swiss Sociological Association's Economic Sociology Research Network.

Michael Gibbert is a Professor of Marketing at USI’s Institute of Marketing and Communication Management (IMCA). He earned his PhD from the University of St. Gallen, holds an MSc from the University of Stellenbosch (South Africa) and did his post-doctoral fellowship at Yale University. He also worked as a research assistant at INSEAD, Fontainebleau and as associate professor at Bocconi University (2003-2010) in Milan and is the author or co-author of numerous journal articles and books on innovation, strategic marketing, organizational theory and research methodology.

Personal page and contact

Davide Nicolini is Professor of Organization Studies at Warwick Business School, where he directs the IKON Research Centre and the PhD programme. He is also an adjunct professor at the Department of Strategy and Entrepreneurship of BI Oslo Norwegian Business School. He serves as senior editor at Organization Studies. His current research focuses on studying organizational attention, expertise, managerial knowing, safety, and technological innovation using a practice-theoretical approach. He is also interested in the refinement and promotion of processual, relational, and materialist research methods. In the past, he used these approaches to study healthcare organizations, managerial work, construction sites, factories, public organizations, cybersecurity, pharmacies & scientific labs. Since 2019 he has been a Fellow of the British Academy of Social sciences.