Dr Sumati Ahuja was a top 3 finalist in the Grigor McClelland Doctoral Dissertation Award 2019 for her dissertation, "Professional Identity and Status: An Ethnography of Architects in Professional Services Firms", presented at a special event at the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) annual conference in Edinburgh in early July.
The annual global award with a prize of £5000 recognises innovative scholarship demonstrated within a PhD or DBA thesis in any discipline within management and organisation studies.
The award is supported by the Journal of Management Studies (JMS) and the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies (SAMS), a charitable organisation that supports capacity building in business and management research.
Grigor McClelland was the founder of SAMS, the founding editor of JMS, and the founding Director of Manchester Business School.
There was strong competition for the award this year with a high volume of submissions and ten candidates shortlisted.
Three finalists, including Dr Sumati Ahuja, were selected to present their work and although the prize went to another finalist for her PhD obtained at the University of Cambridge, the judges' comments on Dr Ahuja's dissertation were extremely positive, including:
"An insightful dissertation that combines a focus on practitioners dealing with the complexities and tensions of their day to day reality with a theoretically sophisticated framework. It is well written, elegantly argued and makes a clear contribution to the field." – M. Jenkins, Cranfield University
and
"A timely and innovative study of professional identities, which bridges macro and micro levels of analysis, and has significant implications for theory and practice." – B. Harley, University of Melbourne
"There were many renowned academics in the field at the award ceremony and getting their feedback on my thesis was totally awesome and exhilarating," says Dr Ahuja.
"I do feel like this is the icing on the cake after the long journey of completing a PhD."
UTS Business School congratulates Dr Sumati Ahuja on this excellent achievement.