During this year’s Academy of Management Annual Meeting, Dr. Katrin Heucher, who conducted her doctoral research at CSM (2017-2021), was awarded the prestigious AOM ONE Best Dissertation Award for her dissertation on "Living with Paradoxical Tensions in Corporate Sustainability".

Katrin’s dissertation takes an ethnographic approach to research to open the “black box” between what sustainability efforts aim to achieve and the (non-)realization of their positive impacts on the societal, ecological and economic challenges. Within the black box, different paradoxes exist and shape the organizational and team reality. Teams respond to these tensions with different approaches, such as shifting the paradox across levels, engaging in team identity work, and individual issue selling behaviours. However, the actors are unaware of the subsequent processes that lead to their efforts ‘getting stuck’. These include the back-and-forth of the hot potato, the team identity repair, and unintended intensification of paradoxes through attempts to ‘manage’ experienced tensions.

The ONE Division is a group of scholars that research, teach and engage with business managers and policymakers on a wide variety of topics related to sustainability. The award was sponsored by the University of Alberta.

Katrin extends her special thanks also to her doctoral supervisors Thorsten Gruber, Alex Wilson, Ibrahim Abosag, and her examiners Michelle Richey and Garima Sharma. She will continue to develop and extend her work during a Postdoc at the Erb Institute, at the University of Michigan with Sara Soderstrom.