The IM Division Outstanding Service to the Global Community Award recognizes continuous excellence in serving the international community. While the IM Division provides opportunities to serve the global community, this is not an award for service to our division. Rather, the award scope is sufficiently broad to recognize service made via many organizations, including international institutions, governments, and/or non-governmental organizations. The award favors longstanding service, but impactful service in a concentrated period of time will also be considered.
The award is selected by the division's Professional Awards Committee, chaired by the Past Division Chair and consisting of the three past chairs and two recent winners of the IM Division Hyundai Motor Eminent Scholar Award. This year, the committee was comprised of Nandini Lahiri (Chair, 2025 IM Division Past Chair), Julian Birkinshaw (2025 Eminent Scholar), Yadong Luo (2024 Eminent Scholar), Grazia Santangelo (2024 IM Division Past Chair) and William Newburry (2023 IM Division Past Chair). The IM Division thanks them for their fantastic efforts overseeing our division's professional awards selection process.
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Alain Verbeke of the University of Calgary's Haskayne School of Business has been selected as the recipient of the 2026 IM Division Outstanding Service to the Global Community Award! Please join us at the International Management Division Awards & Recognition Session during the 2026 AOM Meeting tentatively scheduled for Monday, August 3, where Dr. Verbeke will be recognized. More details will be provided closer to the conference dates.
Alain Verbeke PhD, FRSC, holds the McCaig Chair in Management and is a Professor of International Business Strategy at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. For the past decade, he has served as the Inaugural Alan M. Rugman Memorial Fellow at the Henley Business School, University of Reading and he is also an Adjunct Professor at the Solvay Business School, Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Several of his novel concepts, inter alia location-bound firm-specific advantages, subsidiary-specific advantages, bounded reliability, bifurcation bias, and MNE regional-strategy focus (developed with the late Alan Rugman), are now widely used in multinational management thinking. As part of his vast oeuvre, he has authored or edited over 30 international business books and contributed over 65 substantive pieces to AJG 4/4* journals.
Alain has served two full terms as Editor-in-Chief of JIBS (2017 – 2022), during which he led an expert editorial team that positioned the journal as the hub of an ecosystem of IB/IM journals and the premier venue for respectful, intellectual dialogue on critical IB/IM challenges. He has received the double Gold Medal for intellectual and service contributions to JIBS as well as the Exemplary Service Award from the AIB. His many service contributions to various professional organizations include his role as Co-Chair and Principal Program Organizer of the SMS 2023 Global Conference in Toronto: Aligning Strategy, Corporate Governance, and Resource Allocation in Turbulent Environments. He also co-edited 11 volumes of the Progress in International Business Research (PIBR) book series in service of EIBA. Alain has successfully supervised 30 doctoral students. As a Reading School scholar, he is an advocate for evidence-based IB/IM research and teaching, and an ardent defender of globalization and the efficiency-properties of multinational enterprise governance.
He was elected a Fellow of the AIB (2007), EIBA (2019) and the Royal Society of Canada (2024).
Once again, please join me in congratulating Alain Verbeke as the 2026 recipient of the IM Division Outstanding Service to the Global Community Award!
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Nandini Lahiri
Associate Professor
American University
Washington DC
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