Barger Family Professorship in Organizational Studies awarded to OS Director Rick Price

By Melisa Eljamal

The Barger Family Professorship in Organizational Studies was established by the UM Regents in 2005, with a generous gift to Organizational Studies from David Barger, President and COO of JetBlue Airlines.

Endowed professorships have long been used by institutions of higher learning to honor faculty members who have shown excellence in teaching, publication, and research. Rick Price was awarded this honor in the fall 2005 and gave his inaugural lecture on March 16, 2006 at the Alumni Center. Joining him on this very special occasion were family, friends, members of the Barger family, UM colleagues and OS staff and students.

The lecture, entitled Social Innovators as Leaders, focused on social innovators and the meaning of social innovation. According to Professor Price, social innovation involves generating and implementing new ideas on how people should organize their social interactions to meet a common goal.

Price told the story of Muhammed Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist who exercised his leadership to create a new social institution, the Grameen Bank, that helped impoverished women start their own businesses by making non-collateral microloans. Yunus’s insight came in his creation of a system based on mutual trust, accountability and participation, whereby peer pressure for success, and collective responsibility becomes an asset and “collateral.”

While working on the Kellogg Leadership for Community Change project, Price encountered more innovative leaders who stimulated change to improve education in the community and mobilize new leaders. Price’s research team traced emerging network structures in several US communities to focus on how innovation leaders create a “decision-making network” that influenced the success of the innovation.

Finally, Price discussed the JOBS innovation project in Finland and China that examined how innovators confront the dynamic problem of aligning goals and coordinating actions among competing groups. The Finnish innovator created intergovernmental consensus on adoption of a new program based on evidence, while the Chinese innovator leveraged key connections at the top of government to create new job training opportunities for the nations’ citizens. Each innovator engaged prevailing cultural norms to create trust, cooperation, and legitimacy for the project.