Two Oxford academics elected to prestigious Academy of Social Sciences Fellowship
Professor Bettina Lange, Professor of Law and Regulation in the Faculty of Law, and Professor Eric Zhao, Professor of Strategy and Associate Dean for Research at Saïd Business School, are among the outstanding social scientists elected to the fellowship of the Academy of Social Sciences today.
Professor Eric Zhao
Professor Zhao, who is also a Fellow of St Hugh's College and a researcher at the Gradel Institute of Charity, New College, examines how firms create and capture value amid technological and institutional change, and how organisations adapt in the age of AI. His recent work focuses on AI-driven transformation, human-machine collaboration, organisational resilience and shifting sources of competitive advantage. A second strand examines how societal institutions such as social class, gender, race and religion shape entrepreneurship and firm performance.
His book Optimal Distinctiveness (Cambridge University Press, 2022) is widely regarded as a definitive treatment of the field. He received the Academy of Management Emerging Scholar Award in Entrepreneurship in 2019 and the Strategic Management Society Emerging Scholar Award in 2022, making him the first scholar recognised by top career awards in both strategy and entrepreneurship, and has also won the Academy of Management Research Impact on Practice Award. He holds editorial board positions at journals including the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, and the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, and serves as a senior advisor to boards across Europe, Asia and the US.
Professor Zhao has taught strategy, organisation theory, entrepreneurship and AI-related courses on undergraduate, MBA, Executive MBA, executive education and doctoral programmes, and has mentored more than 30 doctoral students and early career researchers.
“I am deeply honoured to be elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. At a time when AI is transforming organisations and society, social science is essential to understanding not only what technology can do, but how it should be governed and used. I see this Fellowship as both recognition and responsibility: to help turn rigorous research into wiser, more accountable action.”
Professor Bettina Lange
Professor Lange, who is also a Governing Body Fellow of Wolfson College, researches how nature and society become linked through environmental law in action, analysing the potential and the limits of state law as a form of regulation. Her work is based on qualitative empirical data and has engaged policymakers and regulators, including the co-production of drought management guidelines with the Rivers Trust and consultancy work for the Environment Agency on trust-based environmental regulation.
Her major research projects have included the Leverhulme Trust-funded 'Floods and pandemics – a socio-legal study of evidence in regulation', which explored crisis governance through the lens of two core challenges: the risk to public health posed by pandemics such as COVID-19, and the increased risk of flooding due to climate change.
Her first book, Implementing EU Pollution Control: Law and Integration (Cambridge University Press), was nominated for the Peter Birks Prize for outstanding legal scholarship. She has supervised dozens of graduate research students and received a Teaching Excellence Award from Oxford's Social Sciences Division in 2023.
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