People

Our faculty members, research fellows and students are part of an ecosystem of thinkers aimed to advance the field of family business and entrepreneurship. By collaborating with peers, publishing scholarly works, and presenting ideas, they lead in and support the sharing of impactful knowledge.

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Vern Glaser focuses on understanding how organizations use analytics, arguments, and analogies to change routines and to create new capabilities. Using qualitative research methods, Vern has conducted studies in the predictive analytics and online display advertising industries. Vern earned his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and BA in Economics from the University of California. He is currently the Director of the Centre for Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise and Associate Professor in the department of Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Management at the Alberta School of Business.

Jennifer Jennings is one of Canada’s leading researchers at the intersection of gender, entrepreneurship, and the family embeddedness of entrepreneurial activity. She has published numerous academic journal articles and book chapters on family business, along with a co-edited research volume entitled “Firms within Families: Enterprising in Diverse Country Contexts”. In 2000, Jennifer launched the flagship “Managing Family Enterprise” course for the Alberta School of Business. In August 2021, her article (with H. Aldrich) on the family embeddedness of entrepreneurial activity received the “Foundational Paper Award” from the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management.  She received her Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia and a BCom from Carleton University. Jennifer is now a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Entrepreneurship, Gender and Family Business and a professor in the department of Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Management.

Trish Reay studies organizational and institutional change, organizational learning, professions and professional work, and identity and role identity. Her research in family business has focused on family business identity, family entrepreneurship, and the role of multiple logics in guiding family business decision-making. She earned her Ph.D. and MBA at the University Alberta. Trish is professor in the department of Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Management, a TELUS Chair in Management and associate dean, PhD and Research at the Alberta School of Business.

Lloyd Steier researches family business, strategic management, organizational theory, and entrepreneurship and is particularly interested in how entrepreneurs use family as a resource during new venture creation, as well as the ways in which “family based” approaches to organizing economic activity confer strategic advantage at both firm and societal levels. He is one of the founders and host of the international Theories of Family Enterprise Academic conference. In 2020-21, he was a recipient of the Family Enterprise Research Conference Lifetime Influence and Impact award bestowed to those “whose body of work, leadership, and contribution to the field of Family Business will leave a lasting legacy.” He is currently a professor in the department of Strategy, Entrepreneurship, and Management and past Academic Director of the Centre for Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise.

Jennifer Sloan looks broadly at how knowledge becomes constructed within organizations. She uses ethnographic approaches in family firm contexts and her current projects investigate how firms make strategic decisions, how futures become constructed by organizations, and how data are selected, categorized, and changed over time. Each of these streams seeks to understand how people make sense of their surroundings and how this sensemaking interacts with social structures. Jennifer earned her BEd and MBA from the University of Alberta and is currently a Ph.D. student at the Alberta School of Business.

Dirk Lindebaum (PhD Manchester Business School) is a Senior Professor in Management and Organization at Grenoble Ecole de Management (France), and a Visiting Professor at the University of Alberta School of Business in the Centre for Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise. In his pursuit of meaningful management research, he explores the theme of technology and emotions at work, with a particular interest in the construction of and struggle among values, and how they inform practices, routines, and organizations pro-socially (or not). His work consistently appears in academic journals of distinction, practitioner outlets, and in the media.

Deborah Anderson’s research falls at the intersection of strategy and organizational theory. She uses qualitative methods (including ethnography, interviews, and historical methods) to study the implications of technological change and innovation on knowledge work, organizational learning, professional judgment, and the creation of new routines. Deborah earned her DPhil from the University of Oxford, where she was a Clarendon Scholar. She earned her Masters in Taxation, BA in Philosophy, and BS in Accounting from the University of Alabama.