Professor Mari Sako

Mari Sako is Professor of Management Studies at Saïd Business School and Professorial Fellow at New College, University of Oxford. Her main areas of expertise include global business strategy and comparative political economy of business. During 2011-12, she was President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE). She is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Mari has made a significant contribution to the understanding of the Japanese economy, management and labour. Her research, published in books and articles, has been comparative and focuses on supplier relations, labour-management relations, and startup venture ecosystems. In the 1990s and 2000s, she was a researcher for the MIT International Motor Vehicle Program (IMVP). This gave her a valuable opportunity to be out in the field, observing and interviewing managers and workers at automakers and their suppliers in Japan, Europe and the USA. Insights from the fieldwork to understand lean production and quality control are also informing her more recent work on professionals and professional services.