Dr. Eric Tsang

The Dallas World Salute Fund of Communities Foundation of Texas created the professorship in May 2006. Tsang filled the position in September 2011. The position supports the research and scholarly activities of a distinguished professor in global strategy in the Naveen Jindal School of Management.


“I think investiture helps to build the reputation of the school and UT Dallas as a university. Then, people gradually get to know more about UT Dallas in that not only do we have good teachers, but also good researchers. The top universities in the world are famous not only for teaching but also for their research.”

Dr. Eric Tsang was a corporate banker at HSBC in Hong Kong when he decided to pursue a different career path. He left HSBC to work at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, where he was an associate professor.

“I realized that was the career I would like to have for the rest of my life because I wanted to pass my knowledge to my students and, at the same time, I wanted to do research,” he said of his teaching experience.

After making his decision to join academia, he attended the University of Cambridge, where he earned his PhD in management in 1997. He taught at Wayne State University before arriving at UT Dallas in 2007. He was an honorary professor at Sun Yat-sen University in China and is a fellow of the Academy of International Business.

Tsang’s main research areas in management include organizational learning, strategic alliances and entrepreneurship. He is also a leading scholar in applying philosophy to solve methodological problems related to assumption, explanation, generalization, ontology, replication, and theory testing. Some of these research results were included in his book The Philosophy of Management Research.

His sole-authored article “Case Studies and Generalization in Information Systems Research: A Critical Realist Perspective” won the 2014 best paper award conferred by the Journal of Strategic Information Systems. His 2016 Academy of Management Review article “A Realist Perspective of Entrepreneurship: Opportunities as Propensities” (with Stratos Ramoglou) has contributed to the heated debate about the ontological nature of entrepreneurial opportunities.

A prolific scholar, Tsang has published extensively in leading business journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management ReviewJournal of International Business StudiesMarketing Science, MIS Quarterly and Strategic Management Journal. His article “Social Capital, Networks, and Knowledge Transfer” (with Andrew Inkpen) won the 2015 Academy of Management Review Decade Award.

Tsang said he enjoys grooming future researchers.

“Because they are doctoral students, they are the future of our field, and they find my papers useful,” he said. “That gives me a sense of satisfaction to train the future generation of management researchers.”

Tsang earned his bachelor of social sciences degree in economics from the University of Hong Kong, his MBA from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a law degree from Peking University.