Profile

Mari Sako is Professor of Management Studies at Saïd Business School and Professorial Fellow at New College, University of Oxford. Her main areas of expertise include global business strategy and comparative political economy of business. At Oxford, she teaches on a number of programmes, and directs the Executive Diploma in Global Business.


Her most recent research is on the future of professional work and AI venture ecosystems, following a UKRI-funded research programme on Unlocking the Potential of AI in English Law. Since 2016, she has conducted a study of alternative legal service providers with Thomson Reuters. During 2011-12, she was President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE). She is a Fellow of the British Academy and Vice President for Waseda University.


Mari earlier made a significant contribution to the analysis of the Japanese economy, business, and labour. In the 1990s and 2000s, she was a researcher for the MIT International Motor Vehicle Program (IMVP). This gave her a valuable opportunity to observe lean production and quality control at automakers and their suppliers in Japan, Europe and the United States. Fieldwork insights inform

her more recent work on how artificial intelligence (AI) is impacting the work of professionals such as lawyers. Her research has been published in the form of five books and numerous journal articles.