This week, Douglas Creed, Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Institute for Organization Studies, presented an inspiring paper at the Department of Management research seminar. The study, titled “Resourcing Agency for Sustained Collective Action Amid Creeping Crises”, analyses how a group of scholar-activists organized to support ongoing collective action in the wake of the tragic Beirut blast in Lebanon 2020. Using the lens of resourcing theory the context of a creeping crisis, it develops the concept of “resourcing agency” and proposes a process model that points out a sustaining and a transformative ampliative cycle that are implicated in resourcing agency. With this, the paper makes several important theoretical contributions in the very extreme Lebanese context.

The presentation was followed by a PhD workshop that focused on the issue of scholar-activism, its definition, scope – and if it should be part of researchers’ “job descriptions” or not.

We thank Doug for a very interesting afternoon!