Sophie Bacq
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Sophie Bacq, associate professor of management and entrepreneurship at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business, has received a top honor for her research from the Academy of Management.
Bacq, who also is an Institute for Entrepreneurship & Competitive Enterprise Faculty Fellow, shared the 2020 Academy of Management Perspectives Best Article Award with G.T Lumpkin of the University of Oklahoma. Their 2019 article, “Civic Wealth Creation: A New View of Stakeholder Engagement and Societal Impact,” was chosen after a rigorously review process by an independent committee that read papers published in 2019 and polled the members of the journal’s editorial review board.
In her article, she and Lumpkin examined how positive societal change happens when community members, supporters and entrepreneurially minded agents come together to aggregate resources and build new capacities. Their paper included a new “civic wealth creation framework” that provides another way to view societal impact.
Their “framework to understand societal impact shifts the conversation to a ‘civic’ level of analysis that captures the variety of local settings where many societal change initiatives take place — in neighborhoods, villages and communities where the people who are being helped are intimately involved in creating and implementing the solutions,” they wrote in the abstract to their paper.
“Civic wealth extends beyond the material resources and physical assets of a community to include intangibles such as health, happiness, and social justice.”
Dan Li, L. Leslie Waters Chair in International Business and chairperson of Kelley’s Management and Entrepreneurship Department, said of the paper, “In this important article, Professor Bacq and her coauthor posit that a community — or civic — level of analysis is suitable for understanding societal impact; focusing on societal change initiatives in neighborhoods, villages, communities, and cities where stakeholders across categories come together will bring fruitful avenues of future research on collaborative efforts targeted at societal change.”
Bacq came to Kelley in 2019 after teaching for seven years at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University. She received her doctorate and master’s degrees at Université catholique de Louvain’s Louvain School of Management.