Tal Simons

Tal Simons

Tal Simons

Country of origin: The Netherlands Visiting period: November 2015-December 2015 Faculty sponsor: Pamela Tolbert, Ph.D. Email: ts33@cornell.edu
Background and Previous Experience

Tal is a professor in the Management department at the Tilburg School of Economics and Management, TiSEM (Netherlands). Prior to her professorship at Tilburg, she had been a faculty member or visitor at various academic institutions including The Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, Columbia University, and Carnegie Mellon University.

Tal’s research focuses broadly on persistence and change of organizations, organizational forms, populations, and categories. Contestation, which accompanies such processes, and how various stakeholders address, strategize, and manage contestation has been central to a recent research stream that focuses on the tobacco industry as the empirical context. Among the papers of this research stream, her paper (with Patrick Vermeulen and Joris Knobem), “There’s no beer without a smoke: Community cohesion and neighboring communities’ effects on organizational resistance to anti-smoking regulations in the Dutch hospitality industry,” is forthcoming in the Academy of Management Journal, and an earlier version of the paper was the recipient of the OMT Best International paper and Carolyn Dexter awards at the AoM 2012 meeting in Boston. Other papers (with Ph.D. student Ana Aranda) focus on the US tobacco industry and investigate how different policies affect these organizations’ legitimacy and performance as well as how the struggles among pro- and against-tobacco/smoking interests affect those legislative efforts.

Looking at the evolution of identity at multiple levels—individual, leader (artistic director), organization (a modern dance company), and organizational field (cultural)—aims to enrich the identity research stream by incorporating multiple perspectives with respect to the creation, maintenance, and evolution (change) of organizations’ identity in a sector that is becoming more central in organization scholarship by taking a process perspective and incorporating novel methodologies such as video analysis (with Tamar Sagiv). Another project, which corresponds to the change and persistence of organizations' overarching subject, aims to incorporate history more fully into the study of organizations and as such examines how legacy and heritage are expressed/exercised in organizations and what their role is in sustaining or handicapping organizations. 

Current Research at ILR

While visiting the ILR School where Tal received her Ph.D., her main goal is to interact with various faculty members and in particular, those in the OB department. She hopes to discuss her projects/papers and receive some useful feedback as well as provide her own feedback on others’ papers/projects. Furthermore, benefiting from the Catherwood Library’s extensive collections and databases constitutes an additional goal of her visit.

Tal Simons