Jaco Lok, UNSW Australia Business School: "Some Things Can Never Be Unseen: An Institutional Perspective on the Psychological Cost of War"

Location

:  TC.5.12

Time and Date: Tuesday, September 15, 2015, 16:30

Using a unique ethnography of a tour of duty of a military medical team in Camp Bastion, Afghanistan, we deploy an institutional perspective to analyze the lived experience of war. We find that work at war can invoke deep anxiety due to sustained experiences of senselessness, futility, and surreality, which threaten people’s existential grounding. We show how both people’s personal coping responses, as well as a number of institutional factors, can exacerbate this experience, and discuss the practical and theoretical implications of these findings for the grand societal challenge of better managing the psychological cost of war.

Jaco Lok is Associate Head of School, School of Management, at UNSW Australia Business School in Sydney. Since earning his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2008, Jaco's research has focused on developing the microfoundations of Institutional Theory by examining different ways people relate themselves to institutions. His work has appeared in journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Management Inquiry, or Research in the Sociology of Organizations, and he currently serves as a member of the Editorial Boards of Academy of Management Review and Organization Studies. Jaco is currently working on developing an existentialist theory of organizations that can complement the functionalist, cultural, and critical perspectives that have dominated the field of organization theory over the past decades.