Gal Blatman
Strategy scholar · Post-Doctoral Researcher, Zage Business of Energy Transition Initiative · USC Marshall School of Business
I study how the structure of an institutional environment shapes what organizations and individuals do, often more than the content of the demands themselves. Environments are built things. Demands come in some number, not just some content. Activities are governed under arrangements that assign who answers for them. Conduct is tracked by measurement systems that stand between what organizations do and what the world concludes.
Much of my empirical work sits in the energy transition, where firms are pressed at once to decarbonize and to deliver. I am on the 2026-27 academic job market.
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Governance
When strategic direction is publicly contested, firms do not retreat from the activity. They recompose who is positioned to answer for it.
Job market paper → -
Multiplicity
Where more immigration policies are in force, education converts into business ownership at lower rates among immigrants, whatever the policies say.
The paper → -
Measurement
An authorized measure can keep its force after it stops tracking what it was built to represent, because no actor governs the whole chain.
In progress →
Job market paper
Same Activities, Governed Differently: Governance Mode as a Structural Response to Institutional Complexity
Using deal-level data on governance arrangements among the world's integrated oil and gas majors, this paper shows that public contestation does not push firms out of the contested activity. Firms keep doing it and shift toward joint arrangements, moving from the exclusive governing entity to one among several. Whether that repositioning changes what a firm answers for depends on audiences, since it works only insofar as they allocate some accountability beyond the focal firm.
Background
Before academia, I spent nine years in marketing and advertising strategy, working with leading global brands. That practitioner grounding shapes both what I study, how organizations act when the demands on them compete, and how I teach strategy to people who will soon have to act on it. I hold a Ph.D. in Strategic Management from the University of Pittsburgh, an M.Sc. in Management Science from Tel Aviv University, and a B.A. in Social Science and Communication from The College of Management. I am a member of the Academy of Management, the Strategic Management Society, and the International Network for Social Network Analysis.
If our interests overlap, whether for a seminar, a collaboration, or simply a conversation, I would welcome hearing from you at Gal.Blatman@marshall.usc.edu.