Links
Areas of expertise
Biography
Juha Laurila was appointed to his current position as a Tenured Full Professor of Management and Organization at Turku School of Economics, University of Turku, in 2007. Before and after that he has
been qualified for a comparable position four times in three Finnish universities. He obtained a Master’s degree in Management and Organization from the Helsinki School of Economics in 1990 and a Master’s degree in Social Psychology from the University of Helsinki in 1993 and Doctoral degree in
Management and Organization from Helsinki School of Economics in 1995. During his post-doctoral career, he has obtained the Junior Research Fellow (from 1995 to 1998) and Senior Research Fellow (from 2000 to 2005) positions from the Academy of Finland. From 1998 to 2000 he acted as an Assistant Professor and from 2005 to 2007 as a Full Professor at Helsinki School of Economics (currently Aalto University School of Business). His international mobility includes research visits to Stanford University (USA), the University of Warwick (UK) and the University of Jena (Germany). In Finland, he has worked as a visiting scholar both at
Hanken School of Economics (2012-2013) and Aalto University School of Science (2014 onwards).
Teaching
Professor Laurila has extensive teaching experience at all academic levels. In addition to numerous visiting lectures, this experience consists of teaching of mass courses for first year undergraduate students as well as various types of Master’s and Doctoral level courses covering both substantial and methodological issues. He has also headed and participated in the development of curricula on several occasions during his career. As a part of his educational role, he has been the main supervisor of eight Doctoral theses and sole-supervised more than seventy Master’s theses. and. Moreover, several of his doctoral students with whom he has also written joint papers have become professional researchers and obtained permanent and internationally visible academic positions. Currently, in addition to the ongoing supervision of Doctoral and Master’s Theses students and visiting lectures to other courses, he teaches Master-level and Doctoral-level courses independently or in collaboration with other senior colleagues.
Research
In his internationally-oriented research work, Professor Laurila has mostly concentrated on technology and innovation with strong emphasis on the institutional conditioning of all types of change processes both at the level of individual organizations and industrial fields. His recent interests include issues such as organizational identity and resilience. Whereas Professor Laurila’s doctoral thesis appeared as a monograph published by Routledge in 1998, he thereafter has concentrated on publishing his research in prominent scholarly journals (e.g. International Journal of Project Management, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Management Inquiry, Journal of Management Studies, Organization, Organization Studies). Out of his four co-authored papers in Organization Studies one won the Roland Calori Prize for the best paper published in the journal between 2011 and 2012.
Throughout his career, Professor Laurila has been an active reviewer of papers submitted to prominent international academic conferences and journals. The latter include journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Human Relations, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies and Strategic Management Journal. Currently he the member of the editorial boards of The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science ans Scandinavian Journal of Management. Since the mid-1990s, he has also been an active member of both European Group for Organization Studies (EGOS) and the Academy of Management (AoM). Professor Laurila also has acted as an external examiner for several academic posts and as an examiner or opponent for sixteen doctoral theses. He has also obtained funding for and headed several large-scale research projects not to mention the large number of research grants and projects in which he has taken part as a collaborator or a member of their governing bodies. Since the beginning of 2023, he is leading a three-year research project on the breakthrough of collaborative models of building infrastructure funded by the Foundation for Economis Education.