Top of the profs: a round-up

Every week, a different business school academic contributes three to five definitions to add to FT Lexicon, the FT’s online glossary of financial, economic and business terms and becomes ‘professor of the week’.

While professors take a break over the summer, we look back at some of their best contributions from the past academic year. FT journalists and other experts also regularly add definitions, but here we are concentrating on contributions from academics.

It was a strong year for organisational management terms, kicked off in September 2011 by Chiu Shih-chi of Nanyang Business School. Among others, Prof Chiu offered definitions for ‘corporate divestiture’, ‘CEO succession’ and ‘board composition’ – all popular terms.

Also on the subject of boards and chief executives, Raghavendra Rau of Judge Business School, University of Cambridge defined terms including ‘staggered board’ and ‘CEO duality’ – “the situation when the chief executive also holds the position of the chairman of the board”.

In December, Pamela Lirio, of Edhec Business School, wrote definitions around the theme of global work. Prof Lirio’s current research investigates emerging configurations of “global managers” in dual-career families. She contributed ‘global work’, ‘global manager’, ‘global career’, ‘expatriate’ and ‘flexpatriate’ to FT Lexicon, making clear how the reality of working abroad has changed significantly over the past few years.

Sustainability and corporate social responsibility were recurring themes this year and in January Judi Marshall of Lancaster University School of Management contributed new terms including ‘carbon footprint’, ‘environmental sustainability’ and ‘internal activist’.

‘Hard finance’ terms proved to be among the most popular and the most searched for and in March Walt Woerheide from The American College wrote clear, concise definitions of useful terms including ‘call price’, ‘bond ladder’ and ‘capital gains distribution’.

Finally, thanks to the work of three Islamic finance specialists who featured as ‘professor of the week’, we now have a comprehensive set of terms and definitions around this topic, which was not covered previously.

In May, Cedomir Nestorovic of Essec added ‘riba’, ‘sharia board’, ‘murabaha’ and ‘gharar’ to the glossary. And Omneya Abdelsalam of Aston Business School added terms including ‘Islamic index’, musharaka’ and ‘mudaraba’. In June, Mehmet Asutay of Durham Business School defined ‘Islamic corporate social responsibility’ and ‘ Islamic microfinance’ among other terms.

You can read full definitions of all the terms mentioned and around 12,000 more, on FT Lexicon.

You can also follow @ftlexicon on Twitter.