A PhD student in the Naveen Jindal School of Management and his faculty adviser have won a Best Paper Award from the Eastern Academy of Management at the organization’s annual conference.
Amirsalar Jafari Gorizi, a student in the Jindal School’s International Management Studies PhD program; and Dr. Mike Peng, O.P. Jindal Distinguished Chair and a professor in the Organizations, Strategy and International Management Area, won the award for their paper “Property Rights, Power, and Socio-Environmental Conflicts.”
“It feels awesome to finally taste the fruits of a tree I have planted and taken care of,” Gorizi said. “It was the first time I was the recipient of a scholarly award in this field. This encourages me to keep going, especially since I started this project as my first independent summer paper.”
The researchers looked at how property rights allocation and power distribution influence socio-environmental conflicts between firms and local communities.
“These conflicts are ubiquitous, prolonged and multilayered,” Gorizi said. “This study’s neo-configurational lens provides a holistic analysis of the conditions underlying these conflicts.”
Gorizi said the spark that motivated him to study company-community conflicts in Africa dates back to a class he took in graduate school at American University where he used to replicate articles of economics of culture and institutions in the African continent.
“I eat data for breakfast,” Gorizi said. “I love exploring less-explored contexts, new tools and novel methods of analyses.”
He pointed out that large language models have become an additional tool for researchers.
“I referred to some very novel research at the intersection of computer science, law and political science for using LLMs to analyze a large corpus of specialized textual data,” he said.
Gorizi said that one surprising or important insight from his research that business leaders or policymakers should pay attention to is that community-level institutions, such as historical property rights and jurisdictional power are still vibrant.
“They are very influential factors that must be accounted for in a firm’s relationship with its community stakeholders,” he said. “These factors are not exclusive to developing societies and must be understood in all contexts.”
The next step for Gorizi and Peng is submitting their paper to a top-tier management journal.
“Right now, I am working on my second independent summer paper, which has already been nominated for the best PhD award at the strategic management society conference,” Gorizi said. “This is perhaps the most prestigious award in the field of strategic management a student may receive. I cannot be more excited to have the nomination as a second-year student, and for a single-authored submission.”
Peng said this award is indicative of the caliber of JSOM and OSIM PhD students.
“Amisalar’s deep curiosity about wide-ranging contexts of the world — in the case of this award-winning paper, Africa — and his strong ability to leverage LLMs (large language models) have a lot of potential to propel his research career further,” he said.
