Scholarship and Biography
Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld is the Florence G. Heller Chair and Professor in the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University, where he serves as interim director of the Sillerman Center for the Advancement of Philanthropy. Joel leads research on institutional agility to address societal challenges and teaches classes on strategy, operations, and negotiations. Previously he served as a professor and dean in the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois, United States. Joel is an award-winning author who has co-authored or co-edited twelve books, including: The Consortia Century (Oxford University Press, 2025); The Social Impact Case Collection (Brandeis University Press, 2024): Designing Reality: How to Survive and Thrive in the Third Digital Revolution (Basic Books, 2017), Inside the Ford-UAW Transformation: Pivotal Events in Valuing Work and Delivering Results (MIT Press, 2015), Multinational Human Resource Management and the Law (Edward Elgar, 2013), Valuable Disconnects in Organizational Learning Systems (Oxford University Press, 2005), Lean Enterprise Value (Palgrave, 2002), Knowledge-Driven Work (Oxford University Press, 1998), and Strategic Negotiations (Harvard Business School Press, 1994), and over one hundred articles, book chapters, and policy papers on high performance work systems, transformation in labor-management relations, negotiations and conflict resolution, economic development, and engineering systems. He has helped to lead large-scale change initiatives in public and private sectors in Australia, Bermuda, Canada, England, Iceland, Jamaica, Japan, New Zealand, Panama, and the United States. Joel’s current research is centered on stakeholder alignment in complex systems – a foundation for institutions in the 21st Century.