Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Valerie Appleby, our Senior Commissioning Editor at Cambridge University Press, for her enthusiasm and support for our book project, as well as Senior Editorial Assistant Carrie Parkinson for helping us get our manuscript ready for print. We also benefitted from two anonymous reviewers’ feedback on our initial submission and Wilhelm Retief’s skilled copy-editing.
We are grateful to our mentors, who have influenced our thinking on organizational control since our dissertation days: Christoph Lechner (University of St. Gallen), who introduced both of us to academic research and served as our formal (Markus) and informal (Jorge) dissertation advisor; Günter Müller-Stewens (University of St. Gallen), who served as a role model for both of our academic careers; Laura B. Cardinal (University of South Carolina) and C. Chet Miller (University of Houston) for their inspiration and the countless organizational control-related discussions during prior collaborations; Sim Sitkin (Duke University) for suggesting that we write an academic monograph on organizational control; and last, but not least, Steven Floyd (University of Massachusetts Amherst), who passed away during our work on this book, and whose boundless curiosity, intellect, and kindness have left a lasting influence not just on us but on scores of well-known scholars across the strategic management field.
We would also like to acknowledge the support and advice we have received from a number of colleagues – Herman Aguinis (George Washington University), Chaomei Chen (Drexel University), Stefan Haefliger (Bayes Business School), Fabrice Lumineau (University of Hong Kong), Kirsten Martin (University of Notre Dame), Jorge Rivera (George Washington University), Alexander Souza (Algomia), and Piers Steel (University of Calgary) – and we owe thanks to a number of current and former PhD students for their help with proofreading the manuscript and serving as sparring partners for bouncing around ideas – David An, Hala ElShawa, Pascal Engelmann, Pia Kerstin Neudert, Valentin Pfeffer, Maximilian Rinn, and Marius Weber. Jorge also promised to acknowledge the support he received from his son Maximilian and his daughter Sophia, who helped proofread the data coding and the results tables. All remaining errors are our own.
Markus would like to thank EBS University of Business and Law. Jorge is grateful to the George Washington School of Business, especially Dean Anuj Mehrotra, Vice Dean Jiawen Yang, and his department chair Ernie Englander, for their generous support during the writing of this book.
A project like this would not be possible without the unwavering support from our families – Karin with Moritz, Marlene, and Philipp, and Erin with Sophia and Maximilian – who provided us with support and encouragement during the almost two years of work on this manuscript. This book is dedicated to them.
