Hüseyin Leblebici is Merle H. and Virginia Downs Boren Professor
of Business Administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Business Administration.  He received his MBA and PhD in organizational behavior from University of Illinois.  He teaches courses and conducts research dealing with macro organizational behavior, particularly with organizational design, inter-organizational relations, and organizational forms.

Between 1999 and 2010, he served as the Department Head of Business Administration at University of Illinois with sixty faculty members representing diverse disciplines ranging from organizational behavior, strategy, information systems, operations management and marketing.  He has served on a number of editorial boards including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Journal of Management, Academy of Management Review, and Organization Studies.  He served as an Associate Editor for the Academy of Management Review and a special issue editor for Organization Studies on professional organizations with C.R. Hinings.  He is also serving as the acting director of the Office of Business Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which focuses on the role of social and economic infrastructure that leads to business innovations and the development of high growth firms.

Professor Leblebici’s recent research focuses on three interrelated macro organizational domains: the co-evolutionary processes in the professions and organizational fields; the sociology of professional careers; and, the evolution of business models and how they impact on the industry evolution and the firms’ competitive advantage.  He is currently working on the historical evolution of business models in two-faced markets such as credit cards and its implication for the development of strategic business groups and institutionalization of industry practices.  He is also investigating career trajectories of law school deans since 1900 to see how the legal profession and the academic structure of US universities have influenced their career patterns.  The focus of his empirical work within the professions and professional firms is the growth patterns of large corporate law firms in the US during the period of 1978 and 2007.  He investigates how the institutionalized practices of the legal profession influences the long-term growth patterns of professional firms.  His work has appeared in journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Social Forces, Organization Studies, Strategic Organization and Strategic Management Journal.