Academics

Penn State Smeal’s Gray receives 2017 IACM Lifetime Achievement Award

Barbara Gray, left, professor emerita of organizational behavior in the Penn State Smeal College of Business and Penn State Executive Programs faculty fellow emerita, has received the 2017 IACM Lifetime Achievement Award for her contributions to the theory and practice of negotiation and conflict management. Credit: Photo provided. All Rights Reserved.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The International Association for Conflict Management (IACM) recently presented Barbara Gray, professor emerita of organizational behavior in the Penn State Smeal College of Business and Penn State Executive Programs faculty fellow emerita, with its 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award.

The IACM Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes Gray’s important interdisciplinary contributions over her career to the theory and practice of negotiation and conflict management. The award was presented at the 30th Annual Conference of the IACM in Berlin, Germany.

For more than 35 years, Gray has contributed to scholarship on conflict and collaboration, multiparty conflicts, framing and organizational conflict, environmental conflict, and mediation. Through these contributions, she was a pioneer and path-breaker in stretching the boundaries of conflict management studies and was among the first conflict researchers to examine multiparty disputes between organizations, particularly in business/non-governmental organization/community and environmental disputes.

Gray has written more than 100 publications in the areas of conflict management, inter-organizational collaboration, institutional theory, power and inequality, and organizations and environments. Her work has been funded by myriad entities and has appeared in a multitude of journals.

Her 1989 book, “Collaborating: Finding Common Ground for Multiparty Problems,” charted new ground for research on multiparty disputes in urban planning, cross-sector partnerships, public policy, and environmental conflict. A sequel (with Jill Purdy) is slated for early 2018. 

Gray joined the Smeal faculty in 1979 in the Department of Management and Organization. She led Smeal’s Center for Research in Conflict and Negotiation for 22 years. She has held visiting positions at six universities worldwide and consulted with public, private and non-profit organizations.

Gray served as president of IACM in 1998-99.

Last Updated July 27, 2017

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