Rate My Professor Michael Smets

Professor Michael Smets is Professor of Management at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, and Senior Research Fellow at Green Templeton College. He holds the equivalent of a BA in Business and Economics from Cologne University, Germany, an MSc in Management Research from 2002, and a DPhil in Management Studies from 2003, both from Saïd Business School. Following a postdoctoral fellowship jointly at Saïd Business School and the University of Alberta School of Management, he was Lecturer in Strategy at Aston Business School before rejoining Saïd Business School full-time in 2013. Smets' research centers on professional service firms, particularly their internationalisation, innovation, and regulation in sectors such as global law, consulting, and reinsurance. He employs innovative qualitative methods including video-ethnography and team-ethnography to examine institutional complexity, practice theory, and organizational dynamics. His seminal 'fly on the wall' study of reinsurance trading at Lloyd’s of London and analysis of cross-border services in law firms have advanced understanding of professional work and its broader implications for hybrid organizations and servitisation trends.

Smets has earned the 2012 Academy of Management Journal Best Article Award for his paper on global law firms' regulatory impacts, the 2013 ESRC Award for Outstanding Impact in Business, three Best Paper Awards from the Academy of Management and European Group for Organization Studies, and three OMT Division ABCD Awards for reviewing excellence. A Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, he ranked among Poets&Quants' top 40 under 40 MBA professors in 2016 and appears on Thinkers50 Radar. Key publications include 'Handling Resistance to Change When Societal and Workplace Logics Conflict' (Administrative Science Quarterly, 2020), '‘God at work’: Engaging central and incompatible institutional logics through elastic hybridity' (Academy of Management Journal, 2019), '25 Years since P2: Taking Stock and Charting the Future of Professional Firms' (Journal of Professions and Organization, 2017), and recent Harvard Business Review pieces such as 'Is Your Organizational Transformation Veering Off Course?' (2024) and '6 key levers of a successful organizational transformation' (2023). His work features in Financial Times, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and others, and he delivers executive education for legal, consulting, reinsurance, and healthcare firms while serving on the Journal of Professions and Organization editorial board and the Centre for Professional Service Firms.