DOUG CREED, a professor of management in the College of Business at the University of Rhode Island, received the Joanne Martin Trailblazer Award from the Academy of Management, an international professional organization of scholars and management associations. The award, which Creed received for his research of LGBTQ issues, is presented biannually to scholars who are trailblazers, opening new lines of thinking or inquiry in organization and management theory.
What was your reaction to being selected as the recipient of the Joanne Martin Trailblazer Award from the Academy of Management? My co-authors and I were all surprised. None of us were familiar with the award, so we Googled and then were even more shocked at the list of scholars who had received it in the past. In the arena of organizational theory, the past recipients were luminaries, so it took a while for us to get our heads around the idea that we would be seen in that way.
What inspired you to begin conducting research about LGBTQ issues? As a gay MBA student in the late 1980s, I was struck by the differences in LGBTQ visibility between the business school and the law school populations at the University of California at Berkeley. I started using the grapevine to snowball a sample of more-or-less-closeted students and alums of the MBA program to ask them about their experiences in the workplace and professional challenges facing LGBTQ people. A couple of years later … some progressive high-tech companies started offering domestic partner benefits to their gay and lesbian employees. Both DPBs and the ensuing backlash were making national and international news. I recognized that the battle over DPBs had empirical and theoretical importance in terms of management scholarship.
What challenges have you faced personally and professionally during the pandemic? I think 2020 has been hard on everyone, and so far has hit some people much harder than it has hit me and my family, so we try to be mindful of our blessings. In terms of my teaching, I miss the face-to-face of the classroom, but I am happy to say that good class discussions are possible on Zoom.
What do you hope to accomplish with your research on LGBTQ issues? One stream of research looks at how city resilience strategies engage with the problems of entrenched inequality in its many forms, and systemic racism. Both can be viewed as chronic stresses that directly weaken cities’ ability to cope with major shocks and disruptions, such as pandemics and extreme weather events. So, it is important to understand how these issues enter into cities’ strategizing around resilience.
The second stream … looks at an emergent social enterprise in Beirut that is working to rebuild schools, health care centers, small and medium enterprises, and information infrastructure in the blast zone. The people involved are inspiring. Their experiences will help us learn more about how people elsewhere can organize successfully in the face of shocks and major disruptions.
