Next Monday, May 14th, USI’s communication science faculty is hosting its fourth young scholars research day, or EpiDay. Four young researchers of IMCA will present their doctoral research projects. Who wants to learn more about what Ana Javornik, Lakshmi B.Nair and Simone Mariconda are doing should visit the second morning session, starting at 11:00 and chaired by Alessandra Zamparini. Later in the afternoon, Irina Lock will participate in the poster session.

The EpiDay takes place in the auditorium in the main building (3rd floor).
Download the EpiDay-program.

Davide Nicolini from Warwick Business School will give a talk at IMCA’s next Forethought Seminar with the title “Using the concept of practice to the study of organization. Why and what for?”. Thursday, 29. March, 16.30 – 18.00, room A24. In this presentation Davide Nicolini will discuss why to use the concept of practice to study organisational phenomena, how this can be done, and what for. He will argue that practice theories can offer a radically new way of understanding and explaining social and organizational phenomena. He will build on his work in this area conducted

over several years using examples drawn, albeit not exclusively, from some of his recent publications (Nicolini, 2009a; Nicolini 2009b; Nicolini 2011; Nicolini, Mengis and Swan, in press).

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We will start this semester’s IMCA seminar series with a particular highlight. Deirdre McCloskey, Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication of the University of Illinois at Chicago and Professor of Economic History at Gothenburg University, will come to Lugano to give a talk about Ethics, Bourgeois Virtues and Economics.  Monday, 19. March, 16.30 – 18.00, room A 22. “Deirdre McCloskey is a well-known economist, with a reputation for originality or, depending on how you like to see it, being a maverick renegade. She is a neoclassical Chicago economic historian by training. But she has been asking about the rhetorical underpinnings of economics for some time. [...] She argues that capitalism, far from being immoral as much of the left think, or amoral as many libertarians believe, is in fact

fully compatible with human and ethical flourishing. And its record on actually encouraging flourishing is much better than the alternatives.”
(from Big Sky Ideas)

Liisa Välikangas from Aalto University gave us a very interesting talk on Organizational Resilience. She built on a longitudinal case study of Best Buy to develop the destinction between operational and strategic resilience and the importance of change reservoirs, which enable organizations to collectively rehearse change before it happens. Watch the video abstract of her talk:

IMCA Forethought Seminar – Liisa Välikangas on Organizational Resilience from IMCA, Uni Lugano on Vimeo.

Liisa was co-founder and later research director of the Woodside Institute, a consulting company. She is also Founder and President of Innovation Democracy, Inc., a non for profit organization committed to supporting innovative entrepreneurship in countries such as Afganistan, Somaliland, or Nepal. She published in high-impact practioner journals such as Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, or the Wall Street Journal.

Michael Gibbert and Duncan Guest (USI and Nottingham Trent University), Zachary Estes (Bocconi University) and David Mazursky (Bocconi University and Jerusalem School of Business Administration) have conducted a number of studies that inquired in the effects of taxonomic and thematic similarity of brand extensions on the perceptions of consumers. Their paper has just been accepted at the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

A dual-process model of brand extension: Taxonomic feature-based and thematic relation-based similarity independently drive brand extension evaluation

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The Practice Monitor, launched for the first time in 2010 by the Swiss Corporate Communication and Public Relations Observatory, is a joint initiative by BPRA, HarbourClub, pr suisse, SPRI and USI.

The research was conducted by an IMCA research team comprising:

   • Francesco Lurati, Professor of Corporate Communication
   • Simone Mariconda, Teaching Assistant
   • Jost Reinhold, Teaching Assistant

Its scope was to investigate the profession’s practices and their evolution, explore the different communication structures in organizations, evaluate the integration of communication practice within management practice, identify trends and ascertain the need for education and personal development. This year, almost 500 communication professionals throughout Switzerland responded to the survey.

Download the 2011 report from SPRI.

This semester three new faces have joined IMCA. We recently welcomed Rogelio Garcia, Ana Javornik and Irina Lock. While Rogelio will support Michael Gibbert in his current research in consumer psychology, Ana will focus on digital communication, digital marketing and social media (with Andreina Mandelli and Ivan Snehota), and Irina will contribute to the field of corporate social responsibility and business ethics (with Peter Seele and Francesco Lurati).

On November 11^th USI will host the joint-event of the Lugano Sustainability Forum and the annual Meeting of EBEN-Switzerland, the Swiss chapter of the European Business Ethics Network.

The panel discussion addresses “CSR and sustainability as drivers in finance and investment?” and brings together practitioners from the BSI, Credit Swiss, Social Business Earth and the World Bank.
A second panel addresses the standardization of CSR and business ethics with regard to the newly published ISO 26.000 on Social Responsibility. Furthermore a company presentation workshop opens perspectives in the professional field of CSR and sustainability. Finally a PhD Workshop brings together PhD students from Switzerland to discuss projects in the field and to connect different research institutions in the emerging field of business ethics.

See the detailed schedule of the event.

With the support of SNF funds, IMCA will further push research activities in marketing and communication management. Soon, three new projects will start.

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