Media Release - For Immediate Release
September 15 2010
Saint Mary's Grad Thesis Wins International Award
Dr. Gabrielle Durepos is glad Dr. Albert Mills convinced her to submit her thesis in an international competition. |
A Saint Mary's grad, now teaching business at StFX, has been recognized with a prestigious, international award for the thesis she wrote while finishing her PhD here in 2009.
Dr. Gabrielle (Gabie) Durepos won the Critical Management Studies (CMS) Dissertation Award at this year’s Academy of Management conference held in Montreal from Aug. 6-10. Her thesis explored a unique approach to looking at how companies develop history to tell stories about themselves
“The people who award this prize are very well established scholars, the most established scholars in their field, so you value their opinion,” said Dr. Durepos.
Shocked when she heard the good news about her win, she said she nearly didn’t enter the competition as she had heard of many people applying, but knew no one who had won it.
“My supervisor Albert Mills had to convince me to submit a proposal,” she says.
In her thesis, she developed an alternative approach to historiography, or the methods used to inquire and get knowledge about the past.
Dr. Durepos says businesses often draw on their past or history to derive a sense of legitimacy, with the idea that consumers may be more likely to buy a product from an organization that has a long established history of making that product.
How the company communicates that history – what stories they tell about themselves – has a lot of implications on how that organization gets to be viewed in the eyes of other stakeholders, she says.
She developed a methodology called ANTi,History, which tries to voice alternative narratives.
Dr. Durepos is now in her second year at StFX where she teaches classes in organizational behavior, industrial relations, women in management, and introduction to business.
-Courtesy StFX News
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For More Information:
Steve Proctor
External Affairs
Saint Mary's University
(902) 420.5513
E-mail: steve.proctor@smu.ca
www.smu.ca
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