Affiliation: MIT
Bio: From 1982 to 2007, Eleanor Westney was a member of the faculty of the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, where she held the Sloan Fellows Chair in the Strategy and International Management group. She returned home to Canada in 2007 to become the Scotiabank Chair of International Business at the Schulich School of Business at York University, retiring from that position in 2014. She was a Visiting Professor at Aalto University School of Business from 2014 to 2017. She is now Professor Emerita at the MIT Sloan School of Management and at the Schulich School of Business.
She received a Ph.D. in Sociology in 1978 from Princeton University, and began her teaching career in the Department of Sociology at Yale University. She moved to MIT and the International Business field in 1982. Her first book, Imitation and Innovation: The Adoption of Western Organizational Forms in Meiji Japan (Harvard University Press, 1987), explored the patterns of cross-border organizational learning, a theme that has continued to be a major focus of her interests. With Sumantra Ghoshal, she edited Organization Theory and the Multinational Corporation (Macmillan, 1993; second edition 2005). She has written extensively on Japanese organizations, on the internationalization of R&D, and on institutional theory and multinational enterprise. She served as the Dean of the AIB Fellows from 2008-2011, and has received two awards from the IM Division of the Academy of Management (Eminent Scholar Award, 2013, and Outstanding Service to the Global Community Award, 2021).
Last Updated: September 2021