About Eleanor Westney

Eleanor Westney is Sloan Fellows Professor of Strategy and International Management Emerita at MIT Sloan School of Management, where she taught for twenty-five years. After completing a B.A. and an M.A. in Sociology and Japanese studies at the University of Toronto, 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.  In 1982 she joined the International Management group of the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management.  From 2007 to 2014 she was the Scotiabank Professor of International Business and Professor of Organization Studies at the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto.

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 the organization of multinational corporations, on Japanese MNCs, and on the internationalization of research and development.  She has been a visiting researcher at Hitotsubashi University and the University of Tokyo in Japan, a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, a Fellow of the Academy of International Business since 1997, Chair of the International Management division of the Academy of Management, and Dean of the AIB Fellows from 2008 to 2011.