After having received her PhD in Communication at the Università della Svizzera Italiana (CH), Laura Illia was postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge and at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where she also lectured from 2006-08. In 2008 she became assistant professor at IE University (IE HST and IE Business School) in Madrid where she got tenured in 2015. At IE University she has been responsible to design, accredit and launch the full time and part time (blended) Master programs in the area of Corporate and Marketing Communication.
In her research, Laura Illia focuses on how discourses and narratives contribute to our understanding of business. Specifically, she looks into questions of legitimacy, reputation and corporate social responsibility. By applying new digital methods such as machine learning to big dataset she analyzes the legitimation of organizations on social media and the use of new media by companies in the dialogue with their stakeholders. Her works are published in journals like Journal of Business Ethics, British Journal of Management, Journal of Management Inquiry, Business and Society, Journal of Business Research, MIT Sloan Management Review, and others. In her academic career she has won numerous grants such as the post-doc fellowship from Swiss National Science Foundation (CH), research grant from IABC (US), regional grant from JCYL (ES), private grant from UniCredit and Universities Foundation (IT), individual grant from BBVA Foundation (ES).
She currently serves on the Editorial Board of Journal of Management Studies (Wiley), Journal of Business Ethics (Springer) Business & Society (Sage), Corporate Reputation Review (Palgrave) and Corporate Communication: An international journal (Emerald). She has taken part in numerous international academic, service, editorial, advisory, and committee activities, which have included volunteer and elected positions. In particular from 2014 to 2017 she has acted as International Rep-at-large from the Management and Organizational Cognition Division of the Academy of Management Conference.