Mari Sako

Moderator

Mari Sako is Professor of Management Studies at Saïd Business School and Professorial Fellow at New College, University of Oxford. She is a socio-economist, and leads the international business area within Saïd’s Strategy, Innovation, and Marketing (SIM) group. Her teaching and research focus on global strategy, corporate diplomacy, and professional services.

Mari is interested in how and why firms and markets are configured in different ways in different parts of the world. This lens led her to conduct comparative research about work organization and supply chains in the auto industry the 1990s and 2000s as part of the MIT international Motor Vehicle Program, and on outsourcing and offshoring of professional services more recently.

Mari currently researches about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on legal business models and lawtech startups, funded by the UKRI-ESRC programme “Unlocking the Potential of AI for English Law”. She has also conducted studies of Alternative Legal Services Providers in 2016 and 2018, with another survey ongoing in 2020, with Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute. During 2011-12, she was President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE).

Before joining Saïd Business School in 1997, Mari was Lecturer, then Reader, at the London School of Economics. She read Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Oxford, and holds a PhD in Economics from the University of London. She also held visiting positions at Kyoto University, Tokyo University, Waseda University, Ecole Polytechnique, RIETI (Research Institute of the Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry in Tokyo), and MIT Sloan School of Management.