Accolades come home for FIU graduate

Abrahim Soleimani is gone, but not forgotten, from FIU.

After graduating from FIU in 2011, Soleimani continued to receive awards well into 2012 for the work he had done at the university.

Soleimani, who received his doctor of philosophy degree from the College of Business Administration, was cited for his dissertation on “Essays on Corporate Reputation: Antecedents and Consequences.” The three-part essay was a joint winner of the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation Best Dissertation award and a finalist for the Academy of Management International Management Division’s Barry M. Richman Best Dissertation Award.

“Essays on Corporate Reputation” explore the impact of multi-faceted factors on reputation of a company as well as the consequences, benefits and impact of company reputation. For example, the financial and social performance of a company is important to everybody, but social consequences have more weight in forming Europeans’ perception about a business, Soleimani points out. And the more well-regarded a company is, the more that company will be penalized for adopting unpopular practices. “The stock market will react more negatively to merger and acquisition announcements of more reputed firms,” he says.

Soleimani is currently at Eastern Washington University as assistant professor of management. He recalls his time at FIU fondly. “FIU has played an important role in my successes. It was a very good five years,” he says, praising in particular his faculty advisors William Newberry, William Schneper, Nathan Hiller and James Jaccard as well as his fellow doctoral students.