Mauro Guillén

Guillén graduated in 1987 from the University of Oviedo in his native Spain with a BA degree in Political Economy and Business Management. He went to the United States in 1987 to pursue a PhD in Sociology, sponsored by the Bank of Spain and the Fulbright Program. He graduated from Yale University in 1992.

During his time at Yale, he also completed the requirements for the doctoral program in Political Economy at the University of Oviedo, which awarded him a Doctorate in 1991 after defending a thesis on health inequalities in Spain. At Yale, he wrote his dissertation under the direction of sociologists Charles Perrow, Paul DiMaggio, and Juan J. Linz, which later became his book, Models of Management (University of Chicago Press, 1994).

His professors Jesús M. de Miguel and Alvaro Cuervo were his earliest intellectual mentors. Aside from his advisors, he considers the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz and the political economist Albert Hirschman to be his most important intellectual influences, whom he met while a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton University.

His first faculty appointment was at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught between 1992 and 1996. He moved to the Wharton School in 1996 following his wife, Sandra Suárez, who took that year a faculty position at Temple University. At the Wharton School, Guillén was promoted from assistant to associate professor with tenure in 2000, and from associate professor to full professor in 2003. He was appointed as Dr. Felix Zandman Endowed Professor in International Management that same year, a chair established in honor of the chemist who founded the Fortune 500 semiconductor company Vishay Intertechnology. He was certified by the Spanish Education Ministry as a Full Professor (Catedrático) in 2010.

Guillén is an Elected Fellow of the Sociological Research Association and of the Macro Organizational Behavior Society, a former Guggenheim Fellow, and a Member in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2005 he won the IV Fundación Banco Herrero Prize, awarded annually to the best Spanish social scientist under the age of 40.[5] In 2013 he received the Aspen Institute's Faculty Pioneer Award. He delivered the 2014 Clarendon Lectures in Management at Oxford University.

At Wharton, Guillén teaches undergraduates, MBAs, PhD students, and executives. He has received a Wharton MBA Core Teaching Award, a Wharton Graduate Association Teaching Award, a Wharton Teaching Commitment and Curricular Innovation Award, and a Wharton “Goes Above and Beyond the Call of Duty” Teaching Award. As the Anthony L. Davis Director of the Joseph H. Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies, he launched many programs and initiatives, including the Global Knowledge Lab, the TrendLab on Globalization, the Lauder Culture Quest, the Global Program, and the Lauder Entrepreneurship Modules.[6]

His professional activities include being, or having been, Vice-Chair of the Global Agenda Council on Emerging Multinationals at the World Economic Forum, trustee of the Madrid Institute of Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, and member of the advisory boards of the research department of Caixabank, Conciban, and the Escuela de Finanzas Applicadas (Grupo Analistas). He also serves or has served on the editorial boards of over ten scholarly journals, and as Associate Editor of the Administrative Science Quarterly. He is a member of the Jury for the Princess of Asturias International Prize for the Social Sciences.[7] Since 2015 he has served as trustee of the Fundación Princesa de Asturias.

An avid traveler, Guillén’s hobbies include history and architecture. In 2006 Princeton University Press published his book, The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical, which explored the connections between scientific management and modernist architecture between 1890 and 1940 in various parts of the world. He was a member of the University of Oviedo team that won the Spain National Basketball University Championship in 1987, and of Club Baloncesto Elosúa León from 1980 to 1983.