Honorary Doctorate to Barbara Czarniawska

On the occasion of USI's 27th Dies academicus, Barbara Czarniawska, Senior Professor of Management Studies at Gothenburg Research Institute, University of Gothenburg, was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Communication Sciences. The accolade was conferred for her role as "forerunner of ethnographic methods and of the eclecticism of qualitative methods applied to management and organisations, of which she has offered an alternative reading in a communicative, narrative and relational key, sensitive to contexts and attentive to the interconnections between organisations and society".

Laudatio for Barbara Czarniawska
Jeanne Mengins
Director of the Institute of Marketing and Communication Management (IMCA)

Barbara Czarniawska holds a doctorate in economics from the Warsaw School of Economics and is a Senior Professor in Management Studies at the Gothenburg Research Institute, University of Gothenburg. She held positions at the University of Warsaw, Stockholm School of Economics and Lund University before coming to the University of Gothenburg in 1996.   

Visiting professor in ten countries and over twenty universities, she has been a Faculty Associate at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University since 2004. Holder of four honorary doctorates (Aalborg University, Copenhagen Business School, Helsinki School of Economics and the University of Turku), she is a member of the editorial board of several prestigious international academic journals and has supervised forty doctoral dissertations.   

She is the author of 35 books, more than 120 articles in peer-reviewed journals and hundreds of chapters, encyclopaedic entries, curatorships and special issues, with more than 38,000 citations. She has revolutionised the understanding of organisations - newsrooms, cities and businesses - by offering a constructivist, narrative and network-based understanding. Her research ranges from popular culture to the future of the welfare state, from the construction of images and news to the robotisation of work. 

By conferring an Honorary Doctorate, Università della Svizzera italiana, on the recommendation of the Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society, wishes to honour Prof. Barbara Czarniawska of the University of Gothenburg for her role as "forerunner of ethnographic methods and of the eclecticism of qualitative methods applied to management and organisations, of which she has offered an alternative reading in a communicative, narrative and relational key, sensitive to contexts and attentive to the interconnections between organisations and society".