Barbara Czarniawska Book Prize
NFF Book Prize in honor of Barbara Czarniawska (1948-2024)
This bi-annual prize is dedicated to honoring the memory of the late Professor Barbara Czarniawska (1948-2024) who was a renowned writer and dedicated PhD supervisor who made significant contributions to the field of management and organization studies (MOS).
The prize will be awarded at the NFF conference every other year, starting from 2026.
The prize criteria is following:
- Awarded to the authors of a monograph in the fields of management and organization studies, addressing a societal phenomenon of contemporary relevance from a processual perspective.
- Monographs published in the two (2) full years preceeding a conference can be considered for the prize.
- The book prize committee will assess the proposed monographs.
- Scholars affiliated with NFF member institutions can nominate monographs for the prize. Nominations must be submitted to the prize committee by e-mail to: bc.prize@nordicacademy.org no later than February 1, in the year of the relevant NFF conference. In addition, the prize committee will look out for monographs to be considered for the prize.
Barbara Czarniawska was a prolific writer and a dedicated Ph.D. supervisor whose work and contributions inspired countless scholars within the field of management and organization studies (MOS). She contributed to the field in novel and profound ways. Barbara Czarniawska was born in Bialystok, Poland on December 2nd 1948. She studied at Warsaw University and graduated in 1970 with a degree in Social and Industrial Psychology. Thereafter, she went to Warsaw School of Economics where she obtained a Ph.D. degree in Economic Sciences. Barbara Czarniawska celebrated her 50 years anniversary as an academic only a few years before she passed away.
Among her novel contributions are:
- Her early and continuous emphasis on case-based, processual, qualitative field research, including her development of a field study approach to collect empirical materials inspired by anthropology, ethnography, the detective novel, and the actor-network theory approach (Bruno Latour, in particular).
- Her development of a narrative approach to management and organization studies.
- Her pragmatic-descriptive stance, inspired by pragmatist philosophy and emphasizing what is actually going on in organizations (rather than emphasizing a normative stance of what should be going on).
- Her development of a new distinctive brand of ‘Scandinavian institutionalism’ and by using the concept of translation to further our understanding of organizational stability and change.
- Her cross-disciplinary contributions, engaging with contemporary issues and topics, perhaps most notably; organizational reforms and paradoxes, gender, migration, city management, artificial intelligence, risk management and accounting.
- Her emphasis on the classical virtues of the book and monograph in an age where the journal article has become the dominating form of writing and disseminating research.
