Overview

Samantha Fairclough is the Deloitte & Touche Post Doctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta’s School of Business, and an Associate Post Doctoral Fellow of Oxford’s Novak Druce Centre for Professional Service Firms. She completed her doctorate, “Magic, Myths and Media: The Maintenance of an Institutionalized Professional Elite” at the Saïd Business School in 2009.

Samantha’s research focuses on the processes by which institutions, categories, and collective identities are created and reproduced, with a particular focus upon the identities and elite reputations of the most highly-regarded professional service firms (PSFs). She is also interested in the organization and decision-making processes of PSFs, and how they create successful client management systems. 

Prior to embarking on an academic career, she worked as an environmental lawyer with Simmons & Simmons, a “top ten” commercial law practice in London, and as a litigator with Eversheds, one of Europe’s largest law firms. She also spent two years with the leading New Zealand firm of Russell McVeagh McKenzie Bartleet & Co, as a senior solicitor advising and representing clients in the chemical, biotechnology and energy sectors on issues of resource management.

Thesis title:

The secrets of the Magic Circle: an investigation into stable reputational groups and their effect on firm performance and stakeholder perceptions in elite UK law firms.

Refereed journals and books:

Lounsbury, M., Fairclough, S. and Lee, M.D. (forthcoming 2011) ‘Institutional Dynamics’. In A.J. Hoffman and T. Basal (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Business and the Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Greenwood, R., Morris, T., Fairclough, S. and Boussebaa, M. (2010). 'The Organizational Design of Transnational Professional Service Firms'. Organizational Dynamics, 39(2): 173-183.

Morris, T., Greenwood, R., and Fairclough, S. (2010) ‘Decision Making in Professional Service Firms’. In D. Wilson (ed.), Handbook of Organizational Decision Making. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, pp. 275-306.

Fairclough, S. (2004) Book review of Grieves, J. (2003) Strategic Human Resource Development, in Human Resource Management Journal, 14 (3): 93-94.

Work in progress:

Fairclough, S., Greenwood, R., and Morris, T. ‘Myth and Magic: The Quiet Reproduction of
Cognitive Institutions.’ Under review at Administrative Science Quarterly.

Fairclough, S. and Micelotta, E. ‘The Italian Resistance: The Influence of Institutional Logics of Family on Non-Family Firms in the Italian Legal Market.’

Fairclough, S. ‘Panel Games: How Do Clients Select and Retain Their Preferred External Legal Advisers?’

Boussebaa, M., Greenwood, R. Morris, T., and Fairclough, S. ‘Building the Transnational Enterprise: The Case of Professional Service Firms’.