Prof. Tammar Zilber

Tammar B. Zilber is a Full Professor in the Organizational Behavior Department at the Business School, and currently serves as head of the Business School’s BA program and the Organizational Behavior Department. Additionally, she is an Associate Editor for Academy of Management Journal, a member of the Editorial Review Board for Organization Studies, and an elected board member for the European Group for Organization Studies.

Zilber is an expert in organization theory. Her research, informed by anthropology, focuses on how individuals, groups, and organizations come together to create a shared reality that they experience as given, and how they maintain or change this social world. She uses Institutional Theory to understand how broad social meanings – e.g., feminism in the context of a rape crisis center, Modernism in the context of Israeli high-tech, capitalism in the context of CEO compensation in the USA, and science in the context of academic research – influence organizations and are influenced by them. Her studies are based on qualitative methodologies such as ethnography, narrative, and discourse analysis; and span various levels of analysis, including the individual, organization, field, and society.

Prof. Zilber has served as a Research Fellow at University of Gothenburg, and as a Visiting Scholar at the University of California-Berkeley and USC, Boston College’s Carroll School of Management, and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. She published the books Narrative Research: Reading, Analysis, and Interpretation (Sage) and Peace Entrepreneurs and Social Entrepreneurship: Life Stories from Israel and Palestine (Edward Elgar).

Zilber’s research has been published in Academy of Management Journal, Organization Studies, Qualitative Inquiry, Journal of Management Inquiry, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Journal of Organizational Ethnography, European Management Journal, Organization Theory, Organizational Research Methods, and Information and Organization.

Zilber won the A. Berger Prize for Academic Excellence, the Michael Milken Prize for Excellence in Teaching, a Golda Meir Fellowship, and a Ginsberg Postdoctoral Fellowship from Hebrew University; and the Alon Fellowship for Young Scholars from the Planning & Budgeting Committee of the Council of Higher Education of Israel. Additionally, she has been elected by students 15 times for the Outstanding Teacher Award. She has received academic grants from the Israel Science Foundation (four research projects), the Council for Higher Education and the Planning and Budgeting Committee, the Danish Agency for Science and Higher Education, the Halbert Center for Canadian Studies, the Levi Eshkol Institute for Social, Economic, and Political Research in Israel, the Asper Center for Entrepreneurship, and the Harvey L. Silbert Center for Israel Studies.

Prof. Zilber earned her Ph.D. in Social Psychology at Hebrew University. She holds an MA and a BA in Psychology from Hebrew University’s Amirim Honors Program in the Humanities.

Prof. Zilber teaches the courses For Life and Death Are One: Organizational Aspects at the End of Life, Organizational Studies, Theories of Organization, and Qualitative Research: Methods and Skills.