Emilio J. Castilla

Emilio Castilla (NTU Professor of Management and Professor of Work and Organization Studies) has received two honors for his book, "The Meritocracy Paradox: Where Talent Management Strategies Go Wrong and How to Fix Them” (2025, Columbia University Press).

First, Castilla won the 2026 George R. Terry Book Award from the Academy of Management (AOM). This annual award recognizes “the book judged to have made the most outstanding contribution to the global advancement of management knowledge”—in management theory, conceptualization, research, or practice—during the last two years.

Award committee member comments include noting the book’s “synthesis … of two decades of original mixed-methods research … that advances theory, conceptualization, research, and practice within one volume, which is rare”; its interdisciplinary distinction, with “extensive references to sociology, psychology, organizational behavior, and economics”; “it not only provides a solid research grounding but also recommendations for implementation and therefore not only advances the understanding of management but also has the potential for having a real impact on managerial practice”; “scholarly yet practical in equal parts and highly relevant to business and society.”

The award was presented in August in Philadelphia during the 2026 Annual Meeting of the AOM. A 2025 Q&A with Castilla also has more information about the book.

This book was also a Gold Winner in the Business & Leadership (Large Publisher/Large Hybrid) category of the 2026 Nautilus Book Awards, which celebrate “Better Books for a Better World.” For more than 25 years, the Nautilus Book Awards have been recognizing works that contribute to social change, social justice, conscious leadership, and the creation of a better world.
 

Sinan Aral, Emilio Castilla, Andy McAfee, Zeynep Ton, Geoff Parker, and Marshall Van Alstyne have each received Thinkers50 honors in 2025. Since 2001, Thinkers50 has recognized leading business and management ideas every two years with their Top 50 global rankings of the most influential business thinkers, emerging Radar ones to watch, and Distinguished Achievement Awards in specific management categories—“the Oscars of Management Thinking” (Financial Times). 

The top 50 honorees on the Thinkers50 2025 Ranking of Management Thinkers include:

Sinan Aral (David Austin Professor of Management; Professor of Information Technology and Marketing; Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy—IDE), who “forensically and persuasively gets to the reality inside social media and tech”; 

Andy McAfee (Principal Research Scientist and Co-Director of the MIT IDE), who with Erik Brynjolfsson (former IDE Director) “launched into the thought leadership stratosphere in 2014 with ‘The Second Machine Age’”; 

Zeynep Ton (Professor of the Practice, Operations Management), “a leading voice on the case for good jobs,” who “explores how companies can satisfy customers, employees, and investors simultaneously”;

Marshall Van Alstyne & Geoffrey Parker (Digital Fellows at MIT IDE), who “developed the concept of two-sided markets, which is used extensively in platform business models, and delivered the first comprehensive analysis of platform technology.”

Emilio Castilla (NTU Professor of Management; Professor of Work and Organization Studies) is on the Thinkers50 2025 Talent Award Shortlist, recognizing “thought leaders who have illuminated the complexities and opportunities of the dynamic talent marketplace,” for his book entitled, “The Meritocracy Paradox: Where Talent Management Strategies Go Wrong and How to Fix Them.”

Andy McAfee is also on the Thinkers50 2025 Future Readiness Award Shortlist, celebrating “a visionary thinker who has profoundly advanced our understanding of what it means to be future ready,” for his books with Erik Brynjolfsson “exploring how digital technologies are transforming the economy, workforce, and society.”

The honors above were celebrated at the Thinkers50 London Summit & Awards Gala in November 2025.

Emilio J. Castilla has received the 2017 Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize, awarded to the most outstanding MIT Sloan Management Review article on planned change and organizational development published in the period from fall 2015 through summer 2016. Castilla’s winning paper is entitled “Achieving Meritocracy in the Workplace.” The prize was established in 1984 by MIT Sloan faculty in honor of Professor Richard Beckhard, a faculty member for over two decades, who was a founder and an architect of the field of organizational development. The MIT Sloan judges thought Castilla’s article was “well aligned with the thinking of Richard Beckhard, who knew that organizational change was often more complicated than it seemed … Castilla’s call for continuous monitoring and evaluation of the outcomes is very much in line with what Dick would have recommended.” The award was announced in an MIT Sloan Management Review blog post and in the fall 2017 issue.