Brown Bag: Professor Eero Vaara

The Chair of Strategic Management and Innovation of Prof. Georg von Krogh invites you to the brownbag seminar with:

Professor Eero Vaara
University of Oxford


Date: Thursday 2nd February 2023: 12:00-14:00
Location: HG F 33.1
Presentation title: “Navigating moral controversy: sensegiving and sensemaking dynamics in extreme contexts”

Abstract:

In this paper, we adopt sensemaking perspective to be able to illuminate the ways in which organizational members deal with moral controversy in extreme contexts. To this end, we conducted an ethnographic study of an organization engaged in a refugee rescue operation in the Mediterranean Sea with a focus on episodes where actors experienced moral controversy – especially related to their overall aim to rescue refugees on the one hand and to maintain crew safety on the other. As a result, we found that the episodes were characterized by a pattern of framebreaking and reconstruction when confronting new controversial situations. Interestingly, this was rarely ‘perfect’ but rather led to partial agreement, necessary to be able to carry on, as well as emotional frustration having an impact on the next episode. Thus, moving from one episode to another meant ‘navigating’ the moral controversies such that emphasizing one aspect of the dilemmas in one situation was often followed by a focus on the other side in the next one. By so doing, our analysis advances the conversation about the role of ethics of moral issues in organizations dealing with controversy in demanding contexts. Rather than seeing morals as a higher level issue, we offer a view that elucidates how they are dealt with in action. The resulting view is very different from the conventional cognitive-rational perspective but one that underscores the role of emotions and materiality in messy conditions, and by so doing we help to integrate the role of emotions into research on ethical sensemaking. The role of sensegiving is key, but it is more about imperfection and coping than policy-making or strategizing. In so doing, our study offers a new and important piece of the puzzle to better understand the role of morals in sensemaking and sensegiving, with specific implications on research on extreme contexts.

About the speaker: 

Eero Vaara is Professor in Organisations and Impact at Saïd Business School at University of Oxford. He also serves as Visiting Distinguished Professor at Aalto University. His research focuses on strategic and institutional change. This includes strategy process and practice research, studies of radical change such as mergers and acquisitions, work on institutional change and legitimation, and research on multinational corporations, nationalism and globalization. What cuts across these research interests is an attempt to better understand how communication, discourses and narratives are used in and around organisations and how they construct organisational reality. He has served in editorial roles (e.g., Associate Editor in Academy of Management Journal) and in leadership positions in international societies and associations (e.g., Chair of European Group for Organizational Studies, member of the Board of Governors in Academy of Management, and board member in Nordic Academy of Management, European Institute of Advanced Studies in Management, and Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research). He is an Academy of Management Fellow and a lifetime member in the Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters and the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters. 

We look forward to welcoming you!

Kind regards,
The Chair of Strategic Management and Innovation