{"id":500,"date":"2020-07-15T11:09:23","date_gmt":"2020-07-15T16:09:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/saraheaster\/?page_id=500"},"modified":"2021-07-29T12:55:01","modified_gmt":"2021-07-29T17:55:01","slug":"scholarly-profile","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/saraheaster\/scholarship\/scholarly-profile\/","title":{"rendered":"Scholarly Profile"},"content":{"rendered":"

Examining how individuals work together across differences in support of social change <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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As background into my research interests, I have always been fascinated by how people work together across differences in pursuing goals, particularly as it relates to attempting to solve complex societal challenges. Growing up in active faith-based communities, I witnessed firsthand individuals from churches working alongside nonprofits, businesses, and local residents to address significant societal issues such as poverty, locally as well as globally. As an adult, I continue to encounter situations where seemingly disparate groups are brought together to address challenges facing society, personally through my continued involvement in faith communities as well as professionally. Specifically related to the professional sphere, the year I spent working closely with a Vietnamese training and employment center for people with disabilities, which partnered with a variety of nonprofit, governmental, and business players, further showed me the importance of individuals and organizations working together across different sectors, cultures, and institutions. Collectively, these experiences resonate strongly with me as I believe they truly illustrate both the power as well as the many challenges involved with bringing together diverse individuals and groups to address pressing issues faced by society.<\/p>\n

My research focuses on how individuals, groups, and organizations work together (e.g., cross sector partnerships in support of social change, scholars bridging research and practice arenas) across complex differentiated contexts (e.g., organizational, sectoral, geographical). I conduct in-depth qualitative research in important substantive domains such as poverty and homelessness, with a particular emphasis on sustainability-focused phenomena. Projects include working with a coalition to end homelessness in Western Canada and a social enterprise for people with disabilities in Central Vietnam.<\/p>\n

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Dissertation research<\/em><\/strong> – My dissertation, \u201cHomelessness Through Different Lenses: Negotiating Multiple Meaning Systems in a Canadian Tri-Sector Social Partnership\u201d, investigates how diverse organizations and individuals work together over time in support of social change efforts. While research has shown that cross-sector partnerships – comprised of governmental, business, and nonprofit players – are necessary in order to effectively address pressing societal issues such as poverty, in these complex organizational contexts, there is often variability within and between involved organizations as it relates to basic assumptions around work and the meanings given to practices at macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis. To understand these phenomena, I conducted a multi-site, sixteen-month ethnographic study of a coalition to end homelessness in Western Canada. My findings elucidate how cross-sector partnerships collaborate in the face of different belief systems and associated practices, including the development of a process model of meaning-related negotiation in cross-sector partnerships and the elucidation as to how individuals bridge across different perspectives within such multi-faceted settings.<\/p>\n

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Much of my research efforts since arriving at ACU has focused on advancing my dissertation work. My aim has been to work to publish in top tier management journals and to present this work at top international and national management conferences. Currently, I have one dissertation paper under revise and resubmit at Journal of Business Ethics<\/em> (a Financial Times 50 journal) and I have presented my findings at the Academy of Management (the top international management research conference) and the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (a well-respected international conference geared toward bringing together ethnographic scholars and practitioners). At the Academy of Management Conference in 2017, a co-authored paper which stemmed from my dissertation work, was included in the Best Paper Proceedings (10% of accepted papers) and I was honored to receive a best paper award at the conference. Here is an ACU Optimist article<\/a> <\/span>and College of Business blog post<\/a><\/span> about this award.<\/p>\n

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Bridging research-practice tensions to investigate sustainable development<\/em><\/strong> – While there is a large body of scholarship dedicated to the research-practice divide, this study emerged out of a discovery that the extant literature did not seem to reflect the nuances and challenges the authors (including myself) experienced in working to bridge research-practice tensions. Through conversations reflecting on our PhD studies as junior faculty (with Dr. Kim Ceulemans at Toulouse Business School and Dr. Dara Kelly at Simon Fraser University), we realized that there were many similarities in our research orientations; we each used engaged scholarship to address a focal sustainable development challenge, namely: homelessness, Indigenous approaches to economics and development, and sustainability reporting in higher education. Utilizing autobiographical examples from our PhD dissertations, our article builds on the engaged scholarship approach by illuminating some of the day-to-day tensions that researchers encounter in attempting to bridge the research-practice gap in actuality while investigating sustainable development challenges. We published this work<\/a><\/span> in European Management Review<\/em>, a respected management journal with strong European roots, and we presented our findings at the Academy of Management Meeting <\/em>in 2018.<\/p>\n

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Sustainable-focused activities at ACU<\/em><\/strong>. In Spring 2017 I began working on a project to explore how individual and group actors seek to incorporate sustainability-based activities and values in a university setting, with a particular focus on ACU. Upon returning to Abilene and beginning my role at ACU, I sought out others on campus who had an interest in sustainability. I was particularly struck with the variety of different initiatives that individuals across campus were passionately pursuing in attempts to advance sustainability in spite of setbacks faced. Dr. Monty Lynn came on board this project in Fall 2017 and Dr. Kim Ceulemans (Toulouse Business School) joined the project in Fall 2019. Findings from this research project have been presented at the European Group for Organization Studies<\/em> in 2018 and the Academy of Management Meeting<\/em> in 2020. This research was published<\/a><\/span> in to Business & Society<\/em> (a respected specialty journal focused on topics at the intersection of business and society) and an A journal (according to the ABDC list<\/a><\/span>).<\/p>\n

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Interdisciplinary Focus<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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I believe in the importance of taking up an interdisciplinary approach in my research projects in order to investigate and understand phenomena in a multi-faceted manner. In fact, I chose my PhD program, in large part, because it would expose me to a variety of International Management topics (Cross-Cultural Management, International Business, Strategic Management, Sustainability, Organizational Behavior) and methods (qualitative and quantitative) in a very collegial and interdisciplinary scholarly environment. Plus, all of my cohort members were from different national country contexts (Canada, China, Poland, Ethiopia, India), which afforded me with additional opportunities with which to see my PhD content from different angles and perspectives. My dissertation was borne out of a desire to better understand complex phenomena (cross-sector partnerships tackling societal challenges), which I believe necessitated an interdisciplinary theoretical lens. I was also encouraged to take an interdisciplinary lens by my PhD committee members. At the same time, I have learned that while taking up an interdisciplinary lens may work well for a dissertation study that is presented as a monograph, it becomes much more difficult to tightly craft a 40-page journal article for a specific academic audience with such an approach. I believe this is one reason I have repeatedly struggled to successfully publish out of my dissertation work. I have frequently obtained reviewer feedback that they appreciate and find interesting the empirical context and general findings. However, at the same time, reviewers often comment that they believe the findings are not well situated within one particular theoretical framework.<\/p>\n

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Interdisciplinary hymn project. <\/em><\/strong>In summer 2019, Dr. Monty Lynn asked me to collaborate on an interdisciplinary and mixed-method research project with Dr. Ryan Jessup and Dr. Greg Straughn given my qualitative research training and experience in this area. This was a fun collaboration using archival hymns as the primary source of data. This work has been presented at the 2020 Academy of Management Meeting<\/em> (virtually due to COVID-19) and the 2019 Christian Business Faculty Association<\/em>. We are currently exploring possible publication outlets for this work. Here is a College of Business blog post about this project<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

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>Next Page: Perseverance in the Research Journey<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Examining how individuals work together across differences in support of social change   As background into my research interests, I have always been fascinated by how people work together across differences in pursuing goals, particularly as it relates to attempting to solve complex societal challenges. Growing up in active faith-based communities, I witnessed firsthand individuals…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14750,"featured_media":0,"parent":85,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-500","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/saraheaster\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/saraheaster\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/saraheaster\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/saraheaster\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14750"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/saraheaster\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/saraheaster\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":887,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/saraheaster\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/500\/revisions\/887"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/saraheaster\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/85"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/saraheaster\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}