Join us for a Grand Challenges research seminar.
Abstract
While research on organizational purpose has begun to focus more attention on purpose discovery and change, we lack an in-depth understanding of the ideological underpinnings of the struggles that purpose-driven organizations tend to experience when facing new social and societal circumstances over time. Drawing on extensive archival, observational, and interview data, our longitudinal study of the fair trade social movement organization Weltladen Germany (1960 – 2024) reveals how purpose may be repeatedly contested, reinterpreted, and renegotiated over time. We identify four distinct phases—surge, radicalization, fatigue, and rediscovery—each marked by different modes of purpose work characterized by specific types of ambiguity both enabling and constraining purpose work. Our findings offer a historically grounded perspective that helps move the conversation about purpose work from individual settlements to a dialectical understanding of the forces shaping understandings of purpose from one settlement to another. By doing so, we emphasize the temporal, ideological, and ambiguous nature of purpose struggles, offering a historically grounded framework for understanding the dynamics of purpose work in organizations.
This seminar will be followed by a discussion and Q&A session. As always, a few 1:1 sessions are offered to meet with the speaker, as well as the opportunity to come along for lunch and dinner. The sign-up for meetings, lunch, and dinner can be found here: GCRS Series - Google Sheets.
