Prof. Tammar Zilber

Tammar B. Zilber is a Full Professor in the Organizational Behaviour Department at the Hebrew University Business School and currently serves as head of the Department.

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 the University of Gothenburg and as a Visiting Scholar at the University of California-Berkeley, Boston College’s Carroll School of Management, MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and the University of California San Diego. She is a part-time full professor at the Copenhagen Business School. She co-authored 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, among other outlets, in the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Management Inquiry, Organization Studies, Organization Science, Organization Theory, Organizational Research Methods, Qualitative Inquiry, and Research in the Sociology of Organizations.

Zilber recently won the Hebrew University Rector Prize for Excellence in Research, Teaching, and Service. Students have also elected her 15 times for the Outstanding Teacher Award. She is co-editor-in-chief of Organization Studies, served as Associate Editor of the Academy of Management Journal, and has been elected twice to the board of the European Group for Organization Studies (EGOS).

Zilber’s most recent research focuses on how we are allowed to die and how societal-level understanding of the “good life” and “good death” shape and organize the end of life. She teaches an MBA course titled “For Life and Death Are One: Institutional Dynamics at the End of Life.”