Edward Zajac is generally considered to be the world's leading researcher in the field of strategic management, above all in the areas of corporate governance and strategic alliances. The School of Business and Economics at Freie Universität Berlin is granting Zajac an honorary doctorate in particular for his achievements in the area of symbolic management with regard to organizational behavior. According to Prof. Dr. Ronnie Schöb, the dean of Freie Universität's School of Business and Economics, "It would be hard to find anyone more deserving of an honorary doctorate from the School of Business and Economics than Edward Zajac. In the field of management research, which has a long tradition at Freie Universität Berlin, Zajac has achieved outstanding academic accomplishments. His work draws on different methods in economics and thus fits very well with the vision of a coherent economic science such as we pursue at Freie Universität."

Through his research Zajac shows that top managers can meet external demands (e.g., from shareholders) by announcing new corporate governance mechanisms, without ever implementing them. For example, Zajac was able to demonstrate empirically that merely announcing the introduction of variable pay systems for executives can increase the price of stock, without these announcements actually having to be followed by action.

Since 1993 Edward Zajac has been the James F. Beré Professor of Management and Organizations and the director of the Center for Research on Strategic Alliances at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University (USA). In 1996 he received the Sidney J. Levy Teaching Award. Edward Zajac is one of three editors of the Strategic Management Journal, one of the leading management journals worldwide.

Time and Location

• Friday, October 5, 2012, 11 a.m.
• Freie Universität Berlin, Henry Ford Building, Senate Assembly Hall (2nd floor), Garystraße 35, 14195 Berlin (subway station: Thielplatz, U 3)