Home / Lectures / Oana Branzei, University of Western Ontario

How Social Innovation Can Help Organizations Attain and Sustain Competitive Advantage at the Intersection of Markets and Social Movements

Oana Branzei, University of Western Ontario

Description

Semester:

  • Winter 2013

Speakers:

Oana Branzei, General Management, Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario (visiting scholar at Ross School of Business)

Lecture Time:

Fri, April 19, 2013 @ 1:30 pm to 3:00 pm

Lecture Location:

Room K1310, Ross School of Business

Speaker Webpage(s):

http://www.ivey.uwo.ca/faculty/directory/oana-branzei/

Introduced By:

No introduction available.

Abstract

This study highlights the social architecture of compassion by revealing the emergence of ecologies of compassionate roles, relations and resources in response to enduring and recurring pain. Using a multi-method ethnography set in post-genocide Rwanda, which combines archival research, participant observation, and repeated individual and group interviews, we trace and compare the emergence of ecologies of compassion and their effects across four different communities.

We identify three collective processes: 1) collective stewarding, which selects and motivates voluntarily undertaken compassion roles, especially when these are costly and/or ambiguous undertakings; 2) collective servicing, which gathers and allocates compassion relations; and 3) collective scaffolding, which elects and creates compassion resources to keep pace with the evolving needs of the community.
Each collective process includes multiple sub-processes that first restore and then strengthen individual agency in the face of pain: collective stewarding helps individuals replenish roles they had relinquished in the face of pain and reframes the repeated obstructions encountered to anticipate a better future; collective servicing helps individual overcome fear and separation so they can become welcoming and willing to connect with others; lastly, collective scaffolding helps individuals who had internalized repeated deprivation to seek and find new resources. As emergent ecologies of compassion become more nuanced, members witness and try on additional roles, relations and resources. Individual agency, initially disabled by the pain, is eventually enabled by how each community had collectively responded.

The study contributes a new framework for understanding how communities in distress or crisis can collectively facilitate the resurgence and strengthen the resilience of agency for their members. We specifically explain how collective processes of compassion help restore agency to pain-disabled individuals and how progressively richer ecologies of compassion continue to reinforce the agency of pain-enabled individuals.

Recording & Additional Notes

Introducer: Ashley Hardin, Management & Organizations