Jennifer Howard-Grenville

Education

• BSc (Queen''s University),
• MA (University of Oxford),
• PhD (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Research interests

Organisational and social change processes; business strategies for environmental sustainability; industrial ecology and industrial symbiosis; qualitative research methodology.

Professional experience

Professor Howard-Grenville’s research is focused on how people and organisations generate and navigate change. She has conducted in-depth qualitative studies in a variety of sectors, including manufacturing, apparel and energy.

Professor Howard-Grenville has published more than 40 academic journal articles, several books, and contributes to publications like Harvard Business Review and the Financial Times. She teaches on change management and sustainability topics at all levels (undergraduate through PhD), including executive education, and is active in advisory work.

She has served as both Deputy Editor and Associate Editor at one of the management field’s flagship academic journals, Academy of Management Journal, and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and a Fellow of Trinity Hall college, Cambridge. She received her PhD at MIT, her MA at Oxford, and her BSc (Eng) at Queen’s University, Canada.

Previous appointments

• Jennifer Howard-Grenville was previously Associate Professor of Management at the University of Oregon’s Lundquist College of Business.

Awards & honours

• Elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, 2021
• Best Paper Published in 2019 Award (for “Sensemaking from the body: an enactive ethnography of rowing the Amazon” with Mark de Rond and Isaac Holeman), Academy of Management (OMT Division), 2020
• Best Paper Award (for “Role regeneration as a pathway to ‘powerless’ category persistence” with Matthew Lee Metzger), Academy of Management (OMT Division), 2018
• IACMR Presidential Award for Responsible Research in Management, 2017
• Best Paper Award, Sustainability, Ethics and Entrepreneurship (SEE) Conference, 2015
• Faculty Excellence Award (14 across the University), University of Oregon, 2013
• Thomas C Stewart Distinguished Professor, Lundquist College of Business, 2013
• James E Reinmuth MBA Teaching Excellence Award, 2012
• James E Reinmuth MBA Teaching Excellence Award, 2010
• Faculty Pioneer Award Finalist, Aspen Institute, 2008

Selected publications

• Galdon, C., Haanes, K., Halbheer, D., Howard-Grenville, J., Le Goulven, K., Rosenberg, M., Tufano, P. and Whitelaw, A. (2022) ”Business schools must do more to address the climate crisis.” Harvard Business Review, 1 February 2022

• Howard-Grenville, J., Nelson, A., Vough, H. and Zilber, T.B. (2021) “From the editors: achieving fit and avoiding misfit in qualitative research.” Academy of Management Journal, 64(5): 1313-1323 (DOI: 10.5465/amj.2021.4005)

• Empson, L. and Howard-Grenville, J. (2021) “How has the past year changed you and your organization?” Harvard Business Review, 10 March 2021

• Howard-Grenville, J. (2021) “ESG impact is hard to measure – but it’s not impossible.” Harvard Business Review, 22 January 2021

• Howard-Grenville, J., Lahneman, B. and Pek, S. (2020) “Organizational culture as a tool for change.” Stanford Social Innovation Review, 18(3): 28-33 (DOI: 10.48558/qt3w-na41)

• de Rond, M., Holeman, I. and Howard-Grenville, J. (2019) “Sensemaking from the body: an enactive ethnography of rowing the Amazon.” Academy of Management Journal, 62(6): 1961-1988 (DOI: 10.5465/amj.2017.1417)