R. Duane Ireland Lifetime Achievement Award for Research & Scholarship

R. Duane Ireland, Ph.D.’s academic record speaks for itself. A recent survey shows that he is the 18th most cited business and management scholar in the United States and 28th most cited in the world over the past six years. He has brought that same visionary, thoughtful, and grounded approach to his service in various Mays Business School leadership roles during the past 14 years.

His scholarly contributions along with outcomes associated with his leadership roles have influenced the increasingly positive perception of Mays Business School on both a domestic and international basis. In collaboration with the Mays’ Advisory Board and others, Ireland has also contributed to the school’s quest to become the preeminent public business school in America.

A Fitting Honor

Now Mays has honored the University Distinguished Professor’s legacy by naming the school’s highest faculty research award in his honor. Moving forward, Mays’ senior faculty who are pioneers in their field of study can be nominated for the R. Duane Ireland Lifetime Achievement Award for Research & Scholarship. “Being associated with an award that is given to recognize a body of work over the ‘lifetime’ of a career is powerful to me,” said Ireland, who was the 2017 recipient. “Receiving this award suggests that a scholar has been able to identify and examine important research questions time and time again over multiple years.”

The decision to honor Ireland’s scholarship and service also comes in the wake of his decision to retire during the 2022-2023 academic year. “He is a great scholar who led Mays as executive associate dean for five years and as acting dean and interim dean for close to two years,” said Mays Executive Associate Dean Sorin Sorescu, Ph.D. “We’ve advanced under his leadership. Considering his contributions to research and the leadership roles he has held at Mays, it seemed like the most appropriate retirement gift.”

Search for Knowledge

Ireland’s interest in joining the academic profession began during graduate school at Texas Tech University. “While pursuing my MBA degree, I became fascinated by the ability of some large organizations to engage with merger and acquisition activity successfully while others were unable to do so,” he explained. “I wanted to understand the differences between these types of firms and concluded that earning a Ph.D. would provide the skill set I needed to investigate this core issue.”

His career started at Oklahoma State University where he spent six years. In 1983, he joined Baylor University, where he soon began collaborating with Mays faculty. “As the 1990s came to a close, [Mays faculty member] Mike Hitt and I concluded that integrating an organization’s ‘strategic management practices’ with its ‘entrepreneurial activities’ was a true differentiator of performance across firms,” Ireland said. “This belief resulted in Mike and I developing the strategic entrepreneurship concept.”

The study of strategic entrepreneurship took off—as did Ireland’s career. Over the years, the current recipient of the Benton Cocanougher Chair in Business, who joined Texas A&M in 2004 after a four-year period at the University of Richmond, has co-authored or authored 20 books and numerous articles for top academic journals. His body of work has been cited over 75,000 times.

Ireland also served in editorial roles for top scholarly publications, including his service as the editor of the prestigious Academy of Management Journal. In 2014, he was the Academy of Management’s president, and received the group’s 2017 Career Achievement Award for Distinguished Service.

Advancing Mays’ Vision and Mission

His leadership at Mays has been equally impactful. Sorescu credits his colleague with leading and supporting initiatives that resulted in the following achievements:

• Increasing the number of Mays’ students and faculty while also recruiting top and promising business scholars
• Maintaining momentum for the construction of the Business Education Complex, conceptualized and launched by former Dean Eli Jones, Ph.D.
• Championing diversity, equity, and inclusion, most recently through the school’s charter membership in The Tenure Project
• Encouraging interdisciplinary work with other Texas A&M colleges around the area of entrepreneurship
• Assisting with the design of the emerging Aggies in Tech program, whose goal is to facilitate the placement of Aggies with top technology firms
• Assisting with raising more than $40 million in philanthropy to support Mays’ students, faculty, facilities, and programs

Ireland gratefully credits the school’s community and colleagues—including fellow Lifetime Achievement Award recipients Murray Barrick, Ph.D., Leonard L. Berry, Ph.D., Ricky Griffin, Ph.D., Mike Hitt, Ph.D. and Rajan Varadarajan, Ph.D. — for the opportunities he’s enjoyed during the last chapters of his career. “It is the faculty and the school’s leaders that have kept us here as well as Mays’ culture, which I think is quite unique and special,” he explained. “Indeed, a few years ago, a study concluded that ‘family’ is the word that best describes Mays Business School. Today, we are framing our family culture within the context of ONE—ONE School (Mays), ONE vision (to advance the world’s prosperity), and ONE spirit (the Aggie Core values). The family environment and the commitment to acting as ONE combine to make Mays a special place for faculty, staff, and students.”