William Ocasio

William Ocasio is the John L. & Helen Kellogg Professor of Management & Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management. He was educated at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez, MIT, Harvard Business School, and Stanford University, where he received his Ph.D. in organizational behavior in 1992. Prior to coming to Kellogg, he was Assistant Professor of Strategy and Organizations at the MIT Sloan School of Management, from 1992-1995. From 1995-2001 he was Assistant Professor at Kellogg, and he in 2001 he was promoted to Full Chaired Professor.

His research links organizational politics, cognition, and culture with the study of strategic processes, corporate governance, and organizational and institutional change. His varied research interests are brought together by a focus on explaining both the determinants of organizational and industry attention and its consequences for stability and change in organizations and institutions. Currently he is studying the determinants and consequences of attention through a variety of mechanisms including specialized vocabularies of organizing, decision making structures and processes, and the development and deployment of political capital by organizational executives. His research has been published in the Administrative Science Quarterly, American Journal of Sociology, Organization Science, Organization Studies, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Research in Organizational Behavior, and Strategic Management Journal. His research has won three major awards for three academic societies: the American Sociological Association, the Strategic Management Society, and the Academy of Management. In 2000, he won the W. Richard Scott Award for from the American Sociological Association for the Best Paper published in the area of Organizations, Occupations, and Work during the previous three years. He is Senior Editor at Organization Sciences and serves on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Management Research.

At the MBA level he teaches Power in Organizations and Managing Organizations for Growth. This first course brings together an innovative political capital perspective on managerial power with a focus on how the value of political capital is shaped by the organization's culture. In Spring of 2015 he will be teaching a new MBA elective on Managing Organizations for Growth. The second course is an innovative course part of the new track on Growth and Scaling, Central to Kellogg's Growth Initiative. For executives he teaches Political Capital, Managing Organizational Change, and Strategic Processes. His teaching philosophy is to provide students with frameworks that will foster critical thinking skills that will make them better managers and leaders in organizations. At the Ph.D. level he teaches a Seminar on Behavior in Organizational Systems as well as a special elective on Institutional Logics and Practices. 

Prior to becoming an academic, he served as Executive Director of the Governor's Economic Advisory Council in Puerto Rico from 1986-1990. A native of Mayaguez, Puerto Rico he lives in downtown Chicago.

Building on his research and organizational experience he provides consulting services, executive education, and expert testimony to Fortune 500 firms, law firms as well as to federal and state governments

Teaching Interests

• Organization Theory
• Business and Leadership
• Organizational Purpose

Honors and Awards

• Distinguished Faculty Recruitment Program, University of Illinois System, 2020 to present
  
• Distinguished Scholar, University of Melbourne, 2019
  
• Sandra Dawson Visiting Professor of Marketing and Management, University of Cambridge, 2018-2018
  

Grants

• Distinguished Faculty Recruitment Program, University of Illinois System, 2020 to present

Research Interests

• Organizational Attention
• Institutional Theory
• Corporate Governance
• Organizational Intelligence