Business faculty win presenter spots at conferences

Communications/Media Management , Faculty Management | Apr 30, 2013 | Nicole Gesualdo

Students typically think of their professors in the context of the classroom. For full-time academics, however, sharing knowledge outside of Fordham is a primary responsibility.

Three business faculty members — James Stoner, Frank Werner and John Carey — will meet that expectation in high-visibility ways this summer.

Professor Carey takes the stage first, presenting to media industry players at the Maxxcomm Global Media Collaborative in Manhattan this June. His topic? “The Untold Story Behind Mobile Phones.”

How much do you know about how that cell phone’s path to your pocket? Professor Carey will tell his audience of executives the backstory, including “why this powerful technology, invented in the first half of the 20th century, took so long to come to market” and how text-messaging came to be.

Professor Carey is cited in the conference summary as a “favorite” of the Media Collaborative, which won’t be a surprise to many students.

Next up, in August, Professors Werner and Stoner will lead a session at the Academy of Management conference in Orlando, Florida. Along with fellow researchers from Cornell University and the Capital Institute, they will advocate for a change in the way finance is taught at the university level. Their theory is that “finance’s dominant conventional wisdom,” the principle of shareholder wealth maximization, “is actively harmful to people, organizations, the environment, and even the shareholders it claims to privilege and serve.”

Professors Werner, Stoner and their colleagues will argue that universities should support finance faculty who are carving out new paths in finance instruction and moving away from a laser-like focus on shareholder wealth maximization, “a fundamental cornerstone of so many of the failings of present-day capitalism.” Doing so, they say, will pave the way to return corporations to “their role of serving society in ways that preserve and enhance the capacity of the planet to support all species, including our own.”

The theme of this year’s Academy of Management conference is “Capitalism in Question,” and Professors Werner and Stoner were selected to be part of the prestigious All-Academy Theme Program because of their presentation’s “outstanding quality and relevance to this year’s conference theme.” And in prioritizing people and planet over profit, it is in line with Fordham’s Jesuit principles. This August will give them an opportunity to spread those principles a bit further.