Marta Calás : Isenberg School of Management : UMass Amherst

Office

Isenberg 322

Tel.

413.545.5679

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As a feminist new materialist critical scholar in the field of Organization and Management Studies my current work focuses on how the production of certain forms of “legitimate knowledge” perpetuates, ontologically and epistemologically, illusions of human control over some very thorny contemporary global issues, such as climate change, poverty and inequality, social injustice, among many others. My work portrays the very difficulties of “doing otherwise” when “thinking otherwise” is fundamentally what this “legitimate knowledge” seems to be curtailing. How to question, thus, the very notion of “the human” supporting our field? Could we think with the-more-than-human beyond the limits of our disciplines? My hope is for the becoming of an Organization and Management Studies that would contribute to constituting a better world for the many… over and over again…

- Marta B Calás, Fall 2025

Education

PhD, Organization Studies, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 1987

MBA, Organizational Behavior, University of California at Berkeley, Graduate School of Business Administration, 1970

Academic Appointments

Professor (University of Massachusetts-Amherst), 1986-Present

Professor (University of Puerto Rico), 1972-1985

Assistant Dean for External Program Development (University of Puerto Rico), 1977-1979

Acting Dean, College of Business Administration (University of Puerto Rico), 1984-1985

Visiting Research Professor, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, March 2012

Fulbright Scholar, Åbo Akademi University, Åbo, Finland, Spring 2000

Visiting Associate Professor, School of Business, University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, Summer 1992

Recent Honors / Awards

All Dried Up: Mutual Mentoring Grant for Women Full Professors at UMass (OFD). Elizabeth L. Krause and Aline Gubrium, co-organizers, 2024-2025

Journal of Management Inquiry Outstanding Scholar Award (lifetime achievement award). Awarded by the Western Academy of Management (to M.B. Calás & L. Smircich) for scholarly contributions over the years, 2020

Rosa Luxemburg Award (lifetime achievement award). Awarded by the International Critical Management Studies Board for outstanding contributions to critical studies of organization (to M.B. Calás & L. Smircich), 2019

Pasmore-Woodman Award (lifetime achievement). Awarded by the Organization Change & Development div. of the Academy of Management to faculty whose work resulted in original & innovative work informing ODC theory & practice (to M.B. Calás & L. Smircich), 2017

Dean's Research Excellence Award, Isenberg School of Management University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2010

Sage Award for Distinguished Scholarly Contribution, for academic leadership and impact of scholarship in the area of gender and diversity. GDO Division of the Academy of Management, 2006

Research Interests

Sustainability, New Materialism, and Decoloniality

Gender and Feminist Theorizing in Organization Studies

Critical Perspectives on Globalization, Entrepreneurship and Sustainability

Teaching Interests

Undergraduate

Behavior in the Global Economy
International Management

Doctoral

Conceptual Foundations of Organization Studies
Advanced Organization Theory (Paradigms)
Research and Theory in International Organization Studies

Selected Publications

Ergene, S. & Calás, M.B. (2025) Sustainability-in-the-making: Enduring commitment to socio-ecological matters of concerns. Scandinavian Journal of Management, (accepted for publication July 4)

Calás, M,B. & Holgersson, C. (2024) Fifteen years of travels and translations: Does “diversity management” still matter? Scandinavian Journal of Management, 40(3).

Calás, M. B. (2024 – Lead Chapter). Feminist Theorizing in Management and Organization Studies – an Outline of the Field. In J. Helms Mills, A.J. Mills, K.S. Williams & R. Bendl. (Eds.). Encyclopedia of Gender and Management. Cheltenham: Elgar.

Ergene, S., & Calás, M. B. (2023). Becoming Naturecultural: Rethinking sustainability for a more-than-human world. Organization Studies, 44(12), 1961-1986. https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406231175293

Calás, M.B. & Smircich, L. (2023) Organization studies, feminisms and new materialisms: On thinking-saying-doing otherwise. Ch. 1 in M.B. Calás & L. Smircich (eds.) A Research Agenda for Organization Studies, Feminisms and New Materialisms, pp. 1-31. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

Jiang, X., Calás, M.B. & English, A.S. (2022), Constructing the “self”? Constructing the “place”? A critical exploration of self-initiated expatriation in China, Journal of Global Mobility, 10 (3), 416 439. https://doi.org/10.1108/JGM-06-2021-0064. .

Peredo, A. M., Abdelnour, S., Adler, P., Banerjee, B., Bapuji, H., Calás, M., Chertkovskaya, E., Colbourne, R., Contu, A., Crane, A., Evans, M., Hirsch, P., E. Osorio, A., Ozkazanc-Pan, B., Smircich, L., & Weber, G. (2022). We Are Boiling: Management Scholars Speaking Out on COVID-19 and Social Justice. Journal of Management Inquiry, 31(4), 339–357. https://doi.org/10.1177/10564926221103480

Calás, M.B. & Smircich, L. (2021) Mute, Mutation, and Mutiny: On the work of feminist epistemology. Journal of Management History, 27 (1) 141-162

Calás, M. B., & Smircich, L. (2018) Opening spaces and living in the limits: attempts at intervening in organization studies" In Research in Organizational Change and Development, 26, 389-420.

Calás, M. B., Smircich, L. & Ergene, S. (2018) Postfeminism as new materialisms: A future unlike the present? Ch. 10 in P. Lewis, Y. Benschop, & R. Simpson (eds.) Postfeminism and Organization. Oxford, UK. Routledge. 197-228.

Ergene, S., Calás, M.B., & Smircich, L.. (2018). Ecologies of sustainable concerns: Organization theorizing for the Anthropocene. Lead article, Special Issue: Gendering sustainability, the environment and organization. Gender, Work & Organization, 25 (3), 222-245.