Nathan Wilmers

Nathan Wilmers has won the Academy of Management, Organizational and Management Theory Division 2020 Best Paper Award. Wilmers was honored for his paper, “Wage Stagnation and Buyer Power: How Buyer-Supplier Relations Affect U.S. Workers’ Wages, 1978-2014.” This award recognizes “the empirical or conceptual paper submitted to the Academy of Management annual meeting that offers a significant contribution to the field of organization and management theory.”

Nathan Wilmers has won the 2021 ASQ Dissertation Award, which recognizes a paper published in Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ) in the previous year that was based on a dissertation and best exemplifies the criteria for publication in ASQ, combining significant theoretical advances with extensive data collection and rigorous analysis. Wilmers’ sole-authored winning paper, published in ASQ in 2020, is entitled “Job Turf or Variety:  Task Structure as a Source of Organizational Inequality.”

The award, usually announced in person during the Academy of Management Annual Meeting, (due to the pandemic) was announced recently in an ASQ letter from the Editor, which states that Wilmers’ “novel paper reveals the importance of the job itself—and the task structure within the job—to explain pay inequalities.” The award committee noted that Wilmers identifies “a really intriguing research question, develops novel theory to explain it, and writes with the requisite clarity for those not doing research on labor markets to read, understand, and appreciate.”