Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari

University of Cambridge, Cambridge Judge Business School, Faculty Member

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Shaz Ansari is a Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, Director of the MPhil ISO program, and Professorial Fellow of St Edmund’s College. He holds a PhD from University of Cambridge. He serves on the Editorial Boards of several leading Journals, Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly. Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Management and Journal of Management Studies and Organization Studies. He has published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Academy of Management Annals, Journal of Management Studies, Research Policy, Industrial and Corporate Change, Strategic Organization, Long Range Planning, Journal of Business Ethics, and Organization Studies. His research interests include technological and management innovations, platforms, value creation and new market development, social and environmental issues in management, creation of commons, reputation management, institutional change and diffusion of practices. He has contributed to executive education programs in many organizations, including McKinsey, Barclays group, Roche, Airbus. Tencent, Everbright Group, Shell, British Telecom, China Development Bank, Nokia, Laing O'Rourke, Barclays Bank, Stonehage Fleming, UNICEF, ICBC, China Minsheng bank, Essex County Council, KLEC (Kuala Lumpur Education City) and Nigerian Ministry of Education and Development.
Shaz Ansari
Professor of Strategy & Innovation, Judge Business School
Director of MPhil ISO, Judge Business School.
Professorial Fellow, St Edmund’s College.
University of Cambridge

Tel: +441223 768128
Fax: +441223 339701
Email: [email protected]

Address: Cambridge Judge Business School
University of Cambridge
Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB1 1AG
United Kingdom
Phone: +441223768128
Address: Judge Business School
Trumpingtion Street
Cambridge, CB2 1AG
United kingdom

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Papers by Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari

The Dynamics of VALUE in the Adoption of NOVEL Practices: A Study of OPEN Access Self-Archiving in Academic Institutions

28th Annual Meeting, Jun 26, 2016

Organizational Learning, Innovation, and Growth in an Uncertain World: The Role of Serendipity

Proceedings - Academy of Management, Aug 1, 2023

The Re-Adoption of Management Ideas

The adoption of management ideas requires substantial resources. Most research focuses on a singl... more The adoption of management ideas requires substantial resources. Most research focuses on a single adoption of ideas, how they come into use and fall out of use. Although some new management ideas ‘come back’, and have a ‘second life’ or even a ‘third life’, how and why they are re-adopted needs further exploration. This chapter explores the re-adoption of self-organization and identifies four drivers of re-adoption, explaining how external and internal conditions, technological change, and employee experience can shape the (re)action to management ideas. It concludes by outlining opportunities for future research avenues.

What Lies Beneath: Discourse and The Creation of Value in Markets

Understanding the Qualitative Content of Relational Strategies

Proceedings - Academy of Management, Aug 1, 2023

Pluralist perspectives and diverse responses: Exploring multiplexed framing in incumbent responses to digital disruption

Long Range Planning, Oct 1, 2021

This is a PDF file of an article that has undergone enhancements after acceptance, such as the ad... more This is a PDF file of an article that has undergone enhancements after acceptance, such as the addition of a cover page and metadata, and formatting for readability, but it is not yet the definitive version of record. This version will undergo additional copyediting, typesetting and review before it is published in its final form, but we are providing this version to give early visibility of the article. Please note that, during the production process, errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.

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Managing Status Conflicts: A Case Study of a University Press

Public Enemy Number One: Understanding and Managing Corruption in Organization and Society

Readiness and Institutional Breakthroughs: A Study of the Fight Against Corruption in Brazil

Academy of Management Annual Meeting, Nov 30, 2017

Text me! New consumer practices and change in organizational fields

ERIM Top-Core Articles, Nov 1, 2011

W hile scholars have provided increasingly well-developed theoretical frameworks for understandin... more W hile scholars have provided increasingly well-developed theoretical frameworks for understanding the role of institutional entrepreneurs and other purposeful actors in bringing about change in organizational fields, much less attention has been paid to the role of unorganized, nonstrategic actors in catalyzing change. In particular, the role of consumers remains largely uninvestigated. In this article, we draw on a case of the introduction of text messaging in the United Kingdom to explore the role of consumers in catalyzing change in organizational fields. Text messaging has become a widely diffused and institutionalized communication practice, in part changing mobile telephony from a voice-based, aural, and synchronous experience to a text-based, visual, and asynchronous experience. As consumers innovated and diffused new practices around this product, their actions led to significant changes in the field. We suggest how and under what conditions consumers are likely to innovate at the micro level and, with the subsequent involvement of other actors, catalyze change at the field level. Our primary contribution is to show how the cumulative effect of the spontaneous activities of one important and particularly dispersed and unorganized group can lead to changes in a field. By showing how change can result from the uncoordinated actions of consumers accumulating and converging over time, we provide an alternative explanation of change in organizational fields that does not privilege purposeful actors such as institutional entrepreneurs.

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Contextual ""Readiness"" and Institutional Breakthroughs: A Study of the Fight Against Corruption

Proceedings - Academy of Management, Aug 1, 2017

While there has been increasing attention in institutional theory on how purposeful actors can di... more

Understanding Management Models: Going Beyond “What and Why” to “How” Work Gets Done in Organizations

Time, Temporality, and Process Studies

SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks, 2016

Serendipity and Framing in the Emergence of a Platform for Responsible Innovation

Proceedings - Academy of Management, Aug 1, 2020

Why would an academic research project turn into a platform for responsible innovation despite in... more Why would an academic research project turn into a platform for responsible innovation despite incentives to focus on publishing research papers? To address this puzzle, we draw on the case of Patient Innovation, a non-profit medical platform, focusing on innovations by patients and caretakers to find affordable solutions for rare and chronic diseases by creating a 'knowledge commons'. Initially set up as a 'research platform' aimed at generating scientific publications, it turned into a 'help-society platform' to create a wider social impact, despite not initially targeting such a goal. Using a framing lens, we explore the role of moral emotions and serendipitous inspiration in the creation of this medical platform. We examine how the reframing towards socially responsible innovation occurred despite strong institutional pressure to focus on publishing scientific research. In doing so, we develop a model illustrating how interactional framing in situations lead actors to shift towards responsible innovation. We explain how actors frame and reframe situations in which they interact and transcend their immediate self-interests in order to serve collective interests.

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Fighting wars from cubicles: how workers cope with technologies that disrupt the meaning and morality of their work

Technologies are known to alter social structures in the workplace, reconfigure roles and relatio... more Technologies are known to alter social structures in the workplace, reconfigure roles and relationships, and disrupt status hierarchies. However, less attention has been given to how an emerging technology disrupts the meaning and moral values that tether people to their work and render it meaningful. To understand how workers respond to such an emerging technology, we undertook an inductive, qualitative study of military personnel working in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drone operations, for the U.S. Air Force. We draw on multiple data sources, including personal diaries kept by personnel involved in drone operations. We identified three characteristics of drone technology: 'remote-split' operations, remote piloting of unmanned vehicles, and interaction through iconic representations. Our analysis suggests that drone technology has revolutionized warfare by 1) creating distanciated intimacy, 2) dissolving traditional spatio-temporal boundaries between work and personal life, and 3) redefining the legal and moral parameters of work. Drone program workers identified with these changes to their working environment in contradictory ways, which evoked emotional ambivalence about right and wrong. However, their organization gave them little help in alleviating their conflicting feelings. We illuminate how workers cope with such ambivalence when a technology transforms the meaning and morality of their work. We extend theory by showing that workers' responses to a changed working environment as a result of a remote technology are not just based on how the technology changes workers' tasks, roles and status, but also on how it affects their moral values.

From ‘Publish or Perish’ to Societal Impact: Organizational Repurposing Towards Responsible Innovation through Creating a Medical Platform

Journal of Management Studies, 2021

Why would an academic project incentivized towards scientific publications be repurposed to becom... more Why would an academic project incentivized towards scientific publications be repurposed to become a medical platform for responsible innovation? Patient Innovation, a non‐profit medical platform that focuses on the sharing and dissemination of innovations to find solutions for rare and chronic diseases, was initially set up as an academic research project. However, team members reframed their core purpose from conducting research on user innovation to providing global access to these innovations and creating societal impact. Using a framing lens to understand organizational repurposing, we illuminate how serendipitous inspiration, moral emotions and the power of socially conscious users and catalysts drove this emergent reframing of core purpose and develop a model of organizational repurposing. We show how a frame drift towards a change in purpose occurs spontaneously in interactions, as actors frame and reframe situations and feel inspired and morally motivated to transcend their...

Diaries as a Methodological Innovation for Studying Grand Challenges

Research in the sociology of organizations, Mar 29, 2022

We illustrate the potential of diaries for advancing scholarship on organization studies and gran... more We illustrate the potential of diaries for advancing scholarship on organization studies and grand challenges. Writing personal diaries is a time-honored and culturally sanctioned way of animating innermost thoughts and feelings, and embodying experiences through self-talk with famous examples, such as the diaries written by Anne Frank, Andy Warhol, or Thomas Mann. However, the use of diaries has long been neglected in organization studies, despite their historical and societal importance. We illustrate how different forms of analyzing diaries enable a "deep analysis of individuals' internal processes and practices" (Radcliffe, 2018) which cannot be gleaned from other sources of data such as interviews and observations. Diaries exist in different forms, such as "unsolicited diaries" and "solicited diaries" and have different purposes. We evaluate how analyzing diaries can be a valuable source to illuminate the innermost thoughts and feelings of people at the forefront of grand challenges. To exemplify our arguments, we draw on diaries written by medical professionals working for Doctors Without Borders as part of our empirical research project conducted in extreme contexts. We show the value of unsolicited diaries in revealing people's thought world that is not apprehensible from other modes of communication, and offer a set of practical guidelines on working with data from diaries. Diaries serve to enrich our methodological toolkit by capturing what people think and feel behind the scenes but may not express nor display in public.

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Why does Faithful Epistemic Representation Matter for Management Practices? The Case of the Natural Environment in Management Theory

Philosophy of Management

Management theory is a diverse field where multiple theoretical perspectives coexist and coevolve... more Management theory is a diverse field where multiple theoretical perspectives coexist and coevolve, leading to conceptual pluralism. While conceptual pluralism is useful for grasping different aspects of the complex reality we live in, it may limit the further development of knowledge on elemental concepts. In this article, we focus on knowledge on the natural environment (NE) in management theory. We argue that management scholars and practitioners often rely on theoretical lenses that tend to reify the NE, thereby limiting the conceptualization of some of the essential properties of the NE. Drawing on the example of the conceptual development of the ecosystem services (ES) at the intersection of economics and biology, we identify the advantages and the limits of interdisciplinary theory-building and testing. Finally, we discuss how tools from the philosophy of science can be useful for proposing a way forward for integrating reliable knowledge on the natural environment in manageme...

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Confronting Power Asymmetries in Partnerships to Address Grand Challenges

Organization Theory

Much of the literature on multistakeholder partnerships that addresses grand challenges has extol... more Much of the literature on multistakeholder partnerships that addresses grand challenges has extolled the virtues of such partnerships as a means of reducing uncertainty, acquiring resources, and solving local and global wicked problems. These virtues include opening up “access and agendas to wider participation” (Gray, 1989, p. 120), coordinating across jurisdictional boundaries, mobilizing diverse and heterogeneous actors, and generating novel solutions to address these complex problems. Yet partnerships are not panaceas, and the reasons they fall short of their stated aspirations remain underexplored. We argue that attention to the political landscape, and particularly who has power and who does not, can account for the shortfalls of many partnerships. Theory and practice can improve by considering power dynamics in the institutional field that shapes the context in which partnerships unfold and influences the problems partnerships are designed to affect. We consider four field co...

Competition and Governance Strategies of B2B Platforms

Academy of Management Proceedings

The Dynamics of VALUE in the Adoption of NOVEL Practices: A Study of OPEN Access Self-Archiving in Academic Institutions

28th Annual Meeting, Jun 26, 2016

Organizational Learning, Innovation, and Growth in an Uncertain World: The Role of Serendipity

Proceedings - Academy of Management, Aug 1, 2023

The Re-Adoption of Management Ideas