Leadership Talk by Douglas Creed

Abstract

In the aftermath of the 2020 Beirut port explosion, we explored how loss, grief, and rage metamorphized into collective action and hope. Here, we ask how a group of scholar activists, through enacting an ethic of care, transformed grief and loss into action and hope in an extreme

context? We draw on insights from research and theorizing on: the facets and phases of grief; the enacting of an ethic of care in organizations; and resourcing agency in extreme contexts. Our empirical focus is Khaddit Beirut (“KB”), a grassroots initiative formed immediately after the explosion, comprising scholars, students, medical professionals, business owners, citizens and members of the Lebanese diaspora. Through focusing on a group birthed and largely peopled by scholar-activists from the American University of Beirut, we found that their shared commitments to science, evidence-based action, and civic engagement -- combined with their attention to each others’ pain, grief, vulnerability, expertise, and agency -- positioned them to heal collectively and to mobilize around putting their expertise into action outward a shared vision of hope for change. We pose questions about the intertwined roles of grief, ethic of care, epistemic privilege, and hope in animating collective action in extreme contexts and creeping crises. This paper is based on work with Lina Daouk-Öyry, Charlotte Karam, Rich Dejordy, Carmen Geha, Shawn Scott, and Alain Daou.

About the speaker

Douglas Creed is Professor Emeritus of Management, University of Rhode Island. His primary work focuses on the lived experience of institutional contradictions and the implications for peoples’ engagement in contested institutional change efforts. His current work recent focuses on the nature of collective action in extreme contexts and scholar activism. His work has appeared in Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, and Organization Studies. In 2020, he received -- with co-authors Maureen Scully, Gerardo Okhuysen and Bryant Hudson – the Joanne Martin Trailblazer Award of the Academy of Management’s Organizational Management & Theory Division for their ground-breaking research on LGBTQ employees’ grassroots efforts to end workplace inequities based on sexual orientation and gender identity. He has a Ph.D. and MBA from the Hass School of Business, UC Berkeley, an M.A. in Religion from Yale Divinity School, and a B.A. in English literature from Yale University.

What is Leadership Talks?

Leadership Talks is a series of seminars about topics related to leadership, change and sustainability, project management and organizational psychology, hosted by the Department of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at BI Norwegian Business School.