Fabio Fonti, PhD
Assistant Professor - Organization Studies Department
Fabio Fonti earned a Laurea (B.A.) Summa Cum Laude in Economics and Business from the University of Urbino, Italy, and a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He joined the Department of Organization Studies at Boston College in 2002.
Professor Fonti research interests are in the areas of organizational networks, regional economies, institutional theory and social cognition. His dissertation looked at how an organization’s multiplex embeddedness (i.e., embeddedness defined concurrently for its critical relationships, namely communication, trust, and knowledge transfer) influences its performance by simultaneously enabling and constraining its behavior. He also examined how this link is affected by physical and socially constructed space. More in general, his projects examine the influence of network structure on organizational variables and entail survey development and data collection in several different industries, such as software development, transportation, professional sports, ceramics manufacturing, haute-couture fashion, and large public utilities. His most recent projects look at mechanisms behind the creation and transfer of knowledge and skills in organizations by investigating the world of professional sports (in particular, basketball and the America’s Cup) and the elements contributing to the success and failure of communities of practice across various contexts and industries. He is also interested in how network change: here, he has written on the determinants of the evolution of communication networks and is currently investigating the longitudinal implications of his dissertation findings using an agent-based model approach as well as the joint determination of multiplex network structure on part of economic and social determinants. In the near future, he will also look at the determinants of the social construction of reputation within an industry and the influence of network ties and individual perceptions in high-end fashion designer workgroups.
He is a member of the Academy of Management and EGOS (the European Group for Organizational Studies).
Dr. Fonti has taught organization theory, organization structure and design and organizational behavior. At Boston College, his teaching interests focus on organizational behavior and organization theory.
Carroll School of Management
Fulton Hall 432
140 Commonwealth Ave.
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467
fabio.fonti.1@bc.edu
phone: 617-552-6822
Personal Web page: http://www2.bc.edu/~fontif
