Published on: November 5, 2026 at 8:15 am
Academy of Management (AOM) Scholar Anne Sigismund Huff of Dublin City University, the 54th president of AOM, passed away in October at the age of 80. She was best known for her groundbreaking work in managerial and organizational cognition, strategic change management, and guiding scholars in academic research and writing. But many female colleagues hailed her viral underground critique of the invisible exploitation of women in the workplace, “Wives of the Organization.” That series of polemics that she wrote or curated exposed how modern organizations rely on an underappreciated and often disrespected class of female professionals to do their unglamorous systemic “housework.”
Huff wrote influential books including Mapping Strategic Thought, Writing for Scholarly Publication, and Designing Research for Publication. AOM Scholar Anne-Wil Harzing of Middlesex University, London, said Huff made enduring contributions in the field of strategic management, managerial cognition, and open innovation. But Harzing noted she also helped generations of academics to do better research.
“Her books on academic writing and research design are legendary,” Harzing said. “Interestingly enough, though, it might well be an unpublished piece that has reached the largest number of people.
“As a young academic in the early 1990s, I received a copy of Anne Huff’s ‘Wives of the Organization,’ which describes how gendered interactions in the workplace may subvert success for female academics—and with ‘copy’ I do mean an actual paper copy that was grey from being photocopied again and again!” she said. “The web didn’t really exist back then, and few people regularly used email.
“Its messages have accompanied me throughout my academic career and are as relevant today as they were more than 35 years ago.”
The “Wives of the Organization” collection of articles, which also included contributions from Alison Konrad, Joyce Fletcher, Marta Calás, and Linda Smircich, included arguments that—across both academia and the corporate world—women are disproportionately funneled into vital, relationship-sustaining roles that keep institutions running. However, this crucial labor remains structurally devalued.
For the feminist movement, the research offers a reminder that achieving equality requires dismantling institutional power dynamics that expect women to act as organizational “tradwives” doing chores—carrying the emotional and administrative burden while others, usually male colleagues, achieve career advancements.
Key takeaways of Huff’s and her collaborators’ assertions include:
- Identifying the wife strategy: Women disproportionately inherit maintenance labor, allowing male counterparts to focus on high-status, career-advancing projects.
- Calling out the devalued expertise of women: Essential professional soft skills such as relational and emotional intelligence are dismissed as innate female traits, leaving women stretched thin or even penalized by systems that rely on their emotional labor.
- Inspiring change via active citizenship: Effective reform requires organizations to formally reward community-sustaining work that benefits colleagues and organizations as a whole.
Warm remembrances of Huff
AOM Executive Director Terese Loncar wrote a tribute to Huff, while AOM Scholar Frances Milliken of New York University Stern School of Business offered this remembrance:
“I admired Anne Huff for her intelligence, wisdom, and scholarly contributions to the fields of managerial and organizational cognition and strategic management,” Milliken said. “In her scholarly work, Professor Huff made important contributions to the sub-field of strategy that focuses on the process by which managers make strategic decisions for their organizations. “But, most of all, I admired Anne for her warmth, graciousness, and supportiveness,” she said. “Despite being an eminent scholar in the field of strategy, she would always listen carefully to everything anyone had to say and take the time to reflect on it.
“She was an admirer of good ideas and would always give people credit for their ideas. I feel very fortunate to have known her and to have had her support during my career. She was a shining light in our field, and I will miss her very much.”
