An essay in honor of Hüseyin Leblebici and his contributions to research in professions and organizations
Journal of Professions and Organization, Volume 5, Issue 1, 1 March 2018, Pages 2–11,https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/jox014
Published:
10 January 2018
This essay is a tribute to the scholarly career of
Huseyin Leblebici, specifically his contribution to
the field of the professions and organizations. We
start from the premise that Huseyin’s work over
the past generation in many ways characterizes the
development of this field—an idea that struck us
when we began preparing to write this essay.
We noticed too how several aspects of his work
in terms of research themes, style, and outlets
evolved over almost three decades in tandem with
the field.
The structure of this essay is as follows. We
begin by presenting a brief background to
Huseyin’s early scholarship. Then, the heart of the
essay contains analyses of his contributions to the
field of professions and organizations research in
three chronological phases. For the first phase, we
examine earlier publications, which generally focus
on professional work. The second phase contains
papers with a more organizational and strategic orientation.
Finally, more recent projects explored the
changing context of professional work. The essay
concludes with thoughts of Huseyin’s broader contributions,
including his roles as a mentor, leader,
and editor.
Huseyin grew up in Turkey and completed his BS at
Middle East Technical University in Ankara. He
moved to the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign
in 1970, completing his MBA and PhD
in Business Administration in 1975. His thesis was
entitled, ‘Organizational Decision-Making: An
Exploration of Binary Choice Situations in Bank
Loan Decisions’, and his committee was composed
of three of the top organizational researchers of the
generation: Jerald Salancik (Chair), Louis R. Pondy,
and Barry M. Staw.
Huseyin initially moved back to Turkey with his
wife Ruth Yontz, taking a job at Middle East Technical
University in Ankara. Huseyin and Ruth decided to
return to the USA for Ruth to complete her PhD at
Northwestern University. They extended their stay in
the USA because of political turmoil in Turkey.
Huseyin eventually settled in at his alma mater, the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His career
there would last for almost 40 years. He would not
only be recognized for his scholarly achievements, his
excellence at teaching and mentoring students, but also
for his administrative and leadership skills. In addition
to their many academic achievements, Huseyin and Ruth raised their two very accomplished daughters,
Leyla and Sibel, in Champaign, Illinois.
His scholarly career quickly established itself,
beginning with publications with Jeff Pfeffer in Social
Forces and Administrative Science Quarterly (Pfeffer
and Leblebici 1973a, b), and continued with several
more influential publications in top-quality journals
such as Administrative Science Quarterly (Pfeffer,
Salancik, and Leblebici 1976; Leblebici and Salancik
1981, 1982), Organization Studies (Leblebici, Marlow,
and Rowland 1983; Leblebici 1985), and Social
Networks (Leblebici and Whetton 1984) within a decade
of completing his PhD. This stream of high quality
publications continued through the following
decade as well, with his highly influential historical
and institutional analysis of radio broadcasting in
Administrative Science Quarterly (Leblebici et al. 1991).
Huseyin’s work through the years showed considerable
variety and flexibility in thinking. He was fundamentally
an organizational theorist who eclectically
looked to various theoretical arguments, multiple
methods, and different research contexts. Early on, his
work looked at competition and organizational structure
(Pfeffer and Leblebici 1973a), horizontal hierarchy
and organizational networks (Leblebici and
Whetton, 1984), executive succession (Pfeffer and
Leblebici 1973b), and decision processes (Pfeffer,
Salancik, and Leblebici 1976; Leblebici and Salancik
1981). Much of his earlier work was quantitative in
nature, but he was always theoretically minded, and
later he conducted and became an advocate for historical
research (Leblebici and Shah 2004; Leblebici 2012,
2014). In addition to his interest in the professions, his
research spanned a number of different contexts,
including financial services (e.g., Leblebici and Salancik
1981, 1982), radio broadcasting (Leblebici et al. 1991;
Leblebici, 1995), and the restaurant industry (Salancik
and Leblebici, 1988). His career was marked with a
tremendous passion for thinking about what is versus
what there might be, and that took him beyond conventional
thinking and wisdoms.
PHASE 1: PROFESSIONAL WORK
Nature of employment and internal labor markets
in professional organizations
Huseyin’s contribution to research on the professions
and organizations arguably begins in 1990 with a short piece in the Proceedings of the Forty Third
Annual Meeting of the Industrial Relations Research
Association (Leblebici 1990). In a number of ways,
this piece would foreshadow much of Huseyin’s
work and that of organizational scholars interested in
professions and their organizations.
Huseyin began the paper by embedding his argument
in the notion of internal labor markets (ILMs),
administrative mechanisms firms use to make internal
allocation and pricing decisions regarding
employees (Doeringer and Piore 1971). While craft
ILMs had been viewed as a way to conceptualize
professional work (Doeringer and Piore 1971),
Huseyin argued that professionals differed from craft
workers in important ways. A key difference highlighted
by Huseyin was in the nature of ownership,
with professionals in organizations often acting as
partners in professional partnerships.
Huseyin proposed a model of professional work
and organization that specified key relationships.
The first was the client–professional relation. The
second was the organization–profession relation,
which entailed management and the like over professionals.
Huseyin did not specify but it was implied
that a third relation was the specific linkage between
the firm and the client, which was outside of the
direct relationship between the client and profession.
Three spheres of activity guided and influenced
these relations in organizations. The first was the ideological
sphere, by which Huseyin referred to issues
regarding the division of labor in professional organizations.
He argued that decisions such as selecting
only those managers who themselves did the work
was ideological, based on the belief that you had to
work in the profession in order to effectively manage
other professionals. Ideas here would come to be further
developed in Kor and Leblebici’s (2005) article
in Strategic Management Journal which looked at how
law firms’ development and deployment of human
capital and their diversification strategies affected firm
performance. The second was the economic sphere,
which tied to issues about how to make reward allocations,
especially given the uncertainty about revenues,
an issue that Huseyin would delve much deeper into
in his chapter in Laura Empson’s (2007) book,
Managing the Modern Law Firm. The third sphere was
that of political, by which Huseyin was speaking to
the governance of the professional service firm.
Governance too would become an important theme
in later work, particularly in Leblebici and Sherer
(2015) which went beyond existing perspectives to
take a legal normative view of governance.
The ideas in this short piece would continue to
intrigue Huseyin, and they would be reflected in subsequent
work on professions and organizations.
Peter Sherer was also a presenter in the session and
he vividly recalls how Huseyin’s ideas got people
interested in thinking about professions. While there
were theoretical pieces at the time by agency theorists
like Fama and Jensen (1983a,b) that opened up
new ways of thinking about professions, there was
little in the way of renewed thinking in organizational
theory and neo-institutionalists’ perspectives
on professions and organizations. Huseyin’s thinking
in this short and modest piece provided a different
lens for thinking about the professions and organizations,
one that was ahead of its time, and that would
contribute to the renewal we now see in theory and
research on professions and organizations.
Bringing variety and change into strategic human
resource management research
Huseyen’s early work in the professions with Peter
Sherer was aimed at infusing the field of strategic
human resource management (HRM) with a greater
sense of the variety that existed in the way human
resources were or could be managed. Sherer and
Leblebici (2001) argued at the onset of their chapter
that strategic HRM had landed on a best practices
approach, with a focus heavily on ‘high commitment’
HRM practices, such as promotion from within and
firm-specific skill development being paramount. The
idea behind these set of practices largely came from
an industrial model of ILMs. They argued that there
was considerable more variation that existed or could
possibly exist than this best practice approach suggested.
Moreover, they argued that without seeing the
real or potential variety in how organizations manage
their human resources, there was little meaning to taking
a strategic view, as it implied that firms make
choices among different approaches. Their focus on
variety, as detailed below, lead them to look at professions,
and the distinct ways their organizations manage
human resources.
They used Scott and Meyer’s (1991) distinction
betweeen institutional and competitive environments
to argue that under different institutional and competitive
environments we would see more or less
variety in HRM systems. Scott and Meyer posed
four possibilities: low institutional, low competitive
environments; high institutional, low competitive
environments; low institutional, high competitive
environments; and high institutional, high competitive
environments. Sherer and Leblebici argued that
low institutional, low competitive environments
were perhaps not empirically observable, but there
were many examples from the other types of environments.
They looked to the professions to highlight
the variation that existed in two of those
environments. They discussed the early days of the
US tenure system at Harvard under conditions of
high institutionalism and a low competitive environment.
And, they looked to large law firms and their
HRM practices as highlighting what occurs when
environments are both highly institutionalized and
competitive.
Sherer and Leblebici (2001) was one of many
pieces in which Huseyin sought to uncover the vast
differences that we might see, if only we looked.
Rather than focus on the uniformity and stability suggested
by the highly influential work of DiMaggio and
Powell (1983), Huseyin sought to go beyond what
was conventional, dominant, and taken for granted.
Instead, he tried to understand what was possible and
what might be there if we looked for it. The professions
provided a unique context for this work because
they used different practices, organizational forms,
and governance structures than large scale industrial
organizations, which were the main focus of organizaitonal
and managerial research at the time. Huseyin’s
study of the professions from here would take him to
other interesting and novel places.
Editorial introduction to the special issue:
Knowledge and Professional Organizations
Hinings and Leblebici’s (2003) short essay introducing
the special issue spoke to the wide diversity in
thinking and approaches to the topic of Knowledge
and Professional Organizations. Even with this variety,
they saw two distinct approaches in the six studies
that were accepted into the special issue. The first was for work to make use of the professional context
to argue for new theories, specific to the professions,
given their argued unique qualities. The second was
for work to make use of the professional context to
challenge, refine, and augment extant theories. These
two approaches continue to provide a healthy debate
in research on the professions and organizations.
Rather than attempt to ‘solve’ or end this debate,
they encouraged the diversity. In the end, they state
‘It is this [diversity] that makes for a rich study and
holds out considerable promise for the future’ (p.
830). In this regard, Bob Hinings related to us,
‘Indeed that existence of, and interest in, diversity is
typical of Huseyin’s approach to understanding professions
and professional organizations. His encouragement
in that leaves a long-term legacy.’
PHASE 2: THE PROFESSIONAL
ORGANIZATION
The origins of strategic practice: product
diversification in the American Mutual Fund
Industry
Lounsbury and Leblebici (2004) show how a sociological
approach, with a focus on the role of professionalization,
contributes to strategic management
beyond economic arguments in our understanding of
product diversification. They do so in the context of
the diversification of mutual funds that occurred over
the 20th century. They examined how larger institutional
forces, namely, the professionalization of money
managers, were critical in the shift to product diversification.
They historically trace mutual funds from
offerings of single funds of multiple blue-chip stocks
to wealthy families, to the riskier growth funds of the
1950s, and then on to the multi-product family funds
that now dominate the industry and which are routinely
being further diversified. Their work is an
impressive multi-method approach that blends
together historical research, interviews, and an event
history analysis. Their work highlights how the professionalization
project of money managers, both by
practitioners and academics, was the catalyst that
moved the industry from its staid offerings to the
multi-product fund families that now dominate and
that are the equivalent of branded consumer goods.
Their work also as they state (p.85), ‘... contributes to efforts to examine the co-evolutionary dynamics of
professions and organizations’.
Michael Lounsbury related to us:
We provide an institutional ecology that counters
more simplified economic approaches to
strategic decision making. In addition, we
show how professionalization projects, while
often aiming to gain status and autonomy, can
have unintended consequences; in our case,
they provide the motor for marketization that
creates heightened transparency and market
discipline on their activities. As in other markets
organized by rankings and ratings, the
result for money managers is anxiety produced
by the need to generate short-term performance.
Overall, our project, like much of
Huseyin’s work, highlights the power and
promise of organization theory.
How do interdependencies among human-capital
deployment, development, and diversification
strategies affect firms’ financial performance?
Kor and Leblebici identified and conceptualized the
organizational challenges that increasing diversification
and lateral hiring posed for professional service firms
in terms of interdependencies in their human capital
development and deployment strategies. To examine
these interdependencies, they tested the effects on
profitability of product and geographical diversification
in its interaction with the leveraging practices of large
US law firms. Their study showed that, while leveraging
and diversification by themselves lead to higher
profitability, there was a negative interaction effect
between high leveraging practice and heavy reliance on
external acquisition of human capital through lateral
hiring. Also, while lateral hiring had significant benefits
such as enabling growth and diversification into new
areas of legal practice, when it was combined with high
partner leveraging, it diminished the profitability of the
firm. They attributed this finding to the difficulties
faced by these firms in properly socializing and transitioning
the laterally hired lawyers into the firm, especially
when partners are already stretched thin as a
result of managing large teams of associates. The study
made use of both quantitative analyses and in-depth
post hoc interviews with partners and lawyers in large law firms. The interviews further revealed that partners
are often unaware of these interdependencies, and are
thus vulnerable to their potential negative effects on
performance.
Yasemin Kor, Huseyin’s coauthor, conveyed how
much she enjoyed working with Huseyin and how
much she learned from him about professional service
firms and their particular value for empirical testing
the resource based view of the firm:
We had fascinating conversations throughout
the study. He approached the subject as an
organization theory scholar and I was a strategic
management doctoral student at the time
... . I appreciated his relaxed, inquisitive
approach– we regularly met and he never
rushed the conversations. He was careful not
providing all the answers and encouraging me
to explore and think about them. The paper
we produced is one of the studies I am most
proud of.
Determining the value of legal knowledge: billing
and compensation practices in law firms
Huseyin’s chapter in Managing the Modern Law Firm
(2007) spoke to billing and compensation practices
in law firms with the aim of understanding and
potentially challenging the institutionalized dominance
of the billable hour as the means for lawyers
to be paid by clients. As the editor, Laura Empson,
states, ‘Huseyin agreed to write the chapter on the
billable hour – the topic of revenue being particularly
close to lawyers’ hearts.’
Huseyin provided a critical insight into the billable
hour in his argument that the billable hour was
an institutionalized practice that was actually part of
a larger business model. As Huseyin stated (2007, p.
119), ‘... the billable hour has not only become the
means of charging clients but also a critical administrative
tool in managing law firms’. Moreover, he
argued (2007, p. 134): ‘... the institutional practices
of cost-plus pricing, hourly billing, deferred compensation
[for those that achieve partner), and the
tournament ownership structure [as reflected in upor-out
partnership promotion systems] provide a
tightly integrated system that is very difficult to disentangle’.
In this regard, Huseyin suggested that the billable hour had more to do with internal concerns
than that of external concerns with clients. He notes
that management consultants even went so far as to
advise law firms that they should determine their
income and how to raise it by first deciding on how
much they wanted to make and then calculating their
hours and billing rate.
There is a great deal more to this chapter.
Huseyin goes so far as to trace the history of billing
practices all the way back to the Romans in 200 BC.
From there, he traces the genesis of the billing
through medieval times, the 1800s, and to the
present. Huseyin shows too there is more variety in
billing practice than just the billable hour.
Nonetheless, it is an institutionalized practice that
dominates and it will not go away without a fight
given that it is embedded in a larger business model
and set of internal administrative practices. As
Huseyin stated (2007, pp. 135 and 136): ‘... it is
not possible to establish a more diverse billing system
without rethinking pricing, compensation, and
ownership practices’.
As Laura Empson states, ‘It is testament to the
quality and originality of Huseyin’s chapter that,
while targeted at a practitioner audience, it has
nevertheless been well-cited by academics also. Ten
years after it was written, it remains a cracking
good read.'
Understanding professionals and their workplaces:
the mission of the Journal of Professions and
Organization
In 2012, Huseyin joined David Brock and Daniel
Muzio as founding editors of the Journal of Professions
and Organization. They felt that this research area was
now sufficiently developed to merit its own journal.
And they were concerned that papers on professionals
and their workplaces published in other management,
organizational, public, and sociology journals often
were stripped of their implications for professionals
by lack of editorial interests in these contexts.
Huseyin coauthored this editors’ essay (Brock,
Leblebici, and Muzio 2014) in the inaugural issue of
JPO, which reviewed relevant scholarly work in the
area, noting a dearth of recent publications in leading
management and organization journals that include
findings that foster a better understanding of professional organizations. This essay also sets out the
journal’s mission, philosophy, and policies and outlines
several areas in which JPO intends to promote
research and understanding of professions, professionals,
their work, and organization.
JPO could not have been created without
Huseyin. Building on the Hinings and Leblebici’s
(2003) special issue, Huseyin brought his global stature
as a scholar, along with his editorial experience,
and his knowledge of researchers and their relevant
projects. In crafting JPO’s scope and strategy,
Huseyin always stressed the community-building
aspect: as a new journal—initially unknown,
unranked, and unproven—Huseyin argued that we
had to compete for scholars’ attention and time. On
the one hand, he understood and stressed the joy
many researchers would get from writing (and/or
reviewing) a paper for a niche journal that celebrated
the law firm or HMO context in which the study was
based. On the other hand, he knew that busy people
in competitive academic careers would be hesitant to
invest their time in an unranked journal. One very
successful community-building effort was a workshop
in Chicago organized by Huseyin in May, 2013.
Almost all the papers selected by Huseyin for presentation
at this workshop were subsequently published
in JPO and established the journal’s early impact;
and the scholars that he selected to attend the workshop
went on to become essential members of the
community—not just as authors, but as reviewers
and editorial board members.
Governance in professional service firms
Leblebici and Sherer (2015) argued there is a complexity
and variation to governance in professional service
firms (PSFs) that has not been sufficiently addressed in
the extant cultural or structural views on governance in
PSFs such as the agency, the partnership, the stakeholder,
and the trustee perspective. Their view was that
these perspectives provided us with insights on a number
of key issues regarding governance, but a number
of critical issues remained. Instead, they took a legal
normative view of governance defined as the legal and
non-legal rules, norms, conventions, standards, and
managerial practices that facilitate the coordination and
conflict resolution among the critical constituencies of
PSF for the firm as an institution. As such, they argued
that governance spoke to ... the nature of financial and professional
relationship among partners; it structures the
career progressions of associates as they move
towards partnership and clarifies the compensations
practices; it provides the guidelines on
how various participants within the firm
should interact with each other and with clients;
it may provide procedures for succession
planning; and, it shapes the incentives for
developing and protecting the intellectual capital
of these firms (p. 190).
Their legal normative view led them to identify a
major unexplored issue in the study of governance
PSFs from a legal-normative view: ‘the definitions of
rights and obligations among critical constituencies
and how that plays into the nature of conflict resolution
mechanisms built into PSF governance’ (p.190).
They argued that taking such a legal normative view
approach was important to broadening our understanding
of governance in PSFs.
Peter Sherer wrote:
Huseyin was excited to write this paper. The
notion of a legal-normative view of governance
was central to Huseyin’s thinking. It captured
the critical role of the firm as an institution, with
its rules, norms, conventions and the like, which
were missing from extant views of governance. It
also allowed for examining a much larger range
of relationships than the dominant perspectives
did. Huseyin was clear that this was not a stakeholder
view but instead a perspective that
brought meaning to what constitutes the firm.
We worked a lot on this paper and had great discussions
about what we wanted to say with it.
The paper was written specifically about governance
in PSFs, but Huseyin and I believed the
proposed legal-normative perspective spoke
more broadly to understanding governance in
many different forms of organizations.
PHASE 3: CHANGING CONTEXT OF
PROFESSIONAL WORK
The evolution of professional careers
Among his many interests in the context of professionals
and their work, Huseyin was interested in changes and influences on professional career structures.
According to Young-Chul Jeong, a coauthor in
this area, Huseyin was interested in the construction
of professional careers within specific professional
and organizational communities, and viewed these
careers as social artifacts providing information about
historical circumstances of given times and given places
in the system of professions (Jeong and Leblebici
2017). To address this issue, they studied how the
career profiles of law school deans evolved under
changing historical conditions in the USA from the
late 19th century to recent times (Jeong, Leblebici,
and Kwon 2015). They asked what distinct field level
forces identified in institutional and ecological perspectives
explain the changes in time. They examined
the tensions between professionalization of legal
education as a homogenizing force in deans’ career
profiles and the tremendous growth and attendant
diversity in law schools as a force driving heterogeneity.
They conducted the study looking at the professional
career profiles of 1,396 deans in American law
schools from 1894 to 2009. The study is both historical
and quantitative and looks to the context of law
school deans, one that has been overlooked in the
research on professions and organizations. It shows
how the two macro-level forces conflict among
themselves and also how these forces link to the
more micro-level process of individual professional
careers.
Young-Chul Jeong adds that Huseyin’s work on
professional careers contributes to our understanding
of the link between macro field-level transformations
and individual professional career profiles and
extends research on the dynamics between professional
and organizational environments. Huseyin
believed that interactive mechanisms between actors
and social institutions in today’s knowledge-based
economy can be fully understood only if we do not
limit ourselves to the abstract study of a knowledgebased
economy, but analyze the ways in which those
mechanisms are activated through the linked sequences
of career movements in people’s work histories.
Hugh Gunz tells of several conversations with
Huseyin concerning this professional career project:
Those conversations had me impatiently waiting
to see the results, because the study represents a major contribution to the fields
both of the professions and of careers. In terms
of the latter, it belongs in a long and very distinguished
tradition pioneered by Everett
Hughes and his colleagues at Chicago, who
drew to our attention the way that careers are
both the products of, and create, the institutions
in which they happen. Huseyin’s
approach to the study of career is one the field
badly needs and has seen far too little of. That
we have lost the opportunity for more from
him on this is just one of so many reasons to
mourn the loss of this wonderful man, who
had so much yet to contribute. Huseyin’s contributions
to the study of organizations and
professions cover a lot of territory; his was a
major and seminal voice in those fields.
From contested professional logics to hybrid
organizations: the emergence of alternative
litigation financing firms in the USA, 2007–16
Our final example of Huseyin’s pushing the
boundaries of the field is presented at the EGOS
and PSF conferences in July, 2017 (Kim and
Leblebici 2017a, b) in his work with Hyunsun Kim
on alternative litigation financing (ALF). This work
proved to be Huseyin’s last conference presentations.
The core project was a historical case study
about the emergence and growth of ALF firms in
the USA, and explored how new organizational
forms are institutionalized in a hybrid space where
multiple professional logics are contested. They
identified three stages in these processes; and the
primary finding was that the discourse in each
period has distinctive elements, professional origins,
and implications.
Hyunsun Kim relates that he and Huseyin had
learnt about the ALF phenomenon, which evoked an
interest in the topic of entrepreneurship in the confluence
of multiple professions where each profession
comes with established expectations and norms.
Huseyin thought a great deal about entrepreneurial
activity, and was involved in several other projects
on how new things (i.e., new categories, new organizational
forms, or new professional practices)
emerge. He saw the value of studying an ongoing
case where the consequence—success or failure—of the entrepreneurial work is not known, thus freeing
the researchers from retrospective bias. Kim maintains
that Huseyin’s interests in the discourse and
narratives are also reflected in this work, emphasizing
the ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ aspects of the research as
well:
Often after carefully listening to what I prepared
for our meeting, he would ask me:‘so,
what’s your story?’ It took a while for me to
really understand and respond to that question,
and I still think about it a lot. Huseyin
was exemplary in various ways, but he himself
was a very good storyteller, which showed in
his writing, presentations, and even in a meeting
where he would tell me a convincing story
with a piece of insight and wisdom.
LEGACY
Looking back at Huseyin’s career in our focus on his
contribution to research on professions and organizations,
we cannot help but be awed by the breadth
and depth of his contributions as a scholar.
Huseyin’s life-long interest in studying variety, breaks
from conventions, and alternative organizational
forms naturally paralleled the diversity in his own
thinking and research. Huseyin was a deep thinker;
he thought long and hard about issues, and he was
never content to accept that which was convenient,
popular, or conventional wisdom. Huseyin’s curiosity
was positively infectious; he passed this curiosity on
to everyone he worked with. His work and his personal
legacy will live on with us. Thus, to bring this
brief tribute to an end, we add just a few thoughts
concerning Huseyin as a person, mentor, leader, and
editor.
First, we were astounded by the quantity and
quality of unsolicited messages (see Table 1)
received in response to announcements of Huseyin’
passing, revealing the emotional attachment and
respect he had engendered among so many people.
In preparing to write this essay, we contacted a
number of Huseyin’s coauthors and colleagues, and
often received quite emotional reminders of our late
friend’s character. One example from Jeff Pfeffer:
‘What a truly lovely, gentle, kind, and generous
human being.’
In addition to established scholars, Huseyin
always made time for graduate students and younger
researchers. For example, Rany Salvoldi writes of
how Huseyin helped her at her very first conference
(EGOS 2017):
I had met Professor Leblebici just once before,
but when I arrived at the conference he treated
me like a dear friend. He knew it was my first
international conference and that I came alone
without my supervisor and he made me feel
welcome and at ease. He was always so kind to
me, accessible and encouraging. His gentleness,
his humility and his smiling face
impressed me, as well as the natural inspiring
and captivating way in which he spoke, presented,
and even gave critique ...
Central to Huseyin’s legacy is the role he had in
the development of many generations of PhD students.
The following quote by Jun Ho Lee captures
Huseyin’s approach to advising as well as the affection
and esteem felt for him:
As my academic advisor and role model in life,
Professor Huseyin Leblebici always inspired
me and made me consider what it means to be
a scholar. With his insight and wisdom, he
always helped me see the big picture. With
endless trial and error in my PhD, he encouraged
me not to give up and move forward.
Sometimes we took a walk together around
the quad at the University of Illinois, he shared
with me stories in his career and life and
encouraged me to be more courageous when I
struggled with my work and other issues. I also
remember whenever we submitted a paper to
a journal or had some achievements to celebrate,
we had dinner with a glass of wine at
our favorite restaurant in the downtown of
Champaign, Illinois. Huseyin, I will miss you
and all the moments with you!
Another aspect of Huseyin’s career was his role as
an academic leader. He served with distinction in
various academic leadership roles for extended terms.
His achievements in this area are highlighted by
Table 1. A sample of unsolicited responses from JPO editorial board members to the announcement
of Huseyin’s passing
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A great loss for JPO and academia in general
What a fine ‘gentleman’! I always ‘learned something’ when I chatted with him at various conferences ...
He always had a smile on his face which had been so encouraging for everyone
What a terrible loss. He was a lovely guy, and made such a difference to the fields he worked in
This is heartbreaking news
Huseyin was always so supportive and encouraging
An intellectual giant moved on
He was a great person and scholar. This is a great loss for his family and for our community
Huseyin always was kind, engaging, insightful and inclusive. I will surely miss him
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Jeffrey R. Brown (Dean, College of Business,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign):
Huseyin served with great distinction on our
faculty for 38 years ... He was one of our
most highly regarded scholars, most effective
teachers, and most dedicated servants.
Huseyin served as Head of the Department of
Business Administration for 10 years. He was
the Director of the Office of Business
Innovation and Entrepreneurship from 1997
to 2003. He has continued to mentor students
and take leadership roles in the field, including
starting a journal, up to the present.
Finally, as we write this essay for the fifth volume
of the Journal of Professions and Organization, we are
reminded of Huseyin’s legacy—not only in establishing
this research field—but also in launching this
important journal. It is in this role that we saw a confluence
of Huseyin’s gifts as a scholar, an editor, a
leader, a mentor, and a person. Earlier we mentioned
his crucial community-building vision that helped to
create the ecosystem for this journal to thrive. It is
our hope that JPO will continue to thrive in a way
that would make Huseyin proud. JPO is a part of
Huseyin’s legacy—one of his many contributions,
and a significant reminder of what a great person he
was.
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