PhD Defence: Ona Akemu
In his dissertation ‘Corporate Responses to Social Issues: Essays in Social Entrepreneurship and Corporate Social Responsibility’ ERIM’s Ona Akemu advances scholarship in entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and organisational ethnography
Ona defended his dissertation in the Senate Hall at Erasmus University Rotterdam on Friday, 17 February 2017 at 09:30. His supervisor was Prof. Gail Whiteman and his co-supervisor was Dr Steve Kennedy. Other members of the Doctoral Committee were Dr. Kenneth Amaeshi (University of Edinburgh), Prof. Joep Cornelissen (RSM), Prof. Nelson Phillips (Imperial College London), and Dr. Patrick Reinmoeller (RSM).
About Ona Akemu
Akpeki Onajomo ‘Ona’ Akemu (Lagos, 1975) received an MBA from London Business School and an M.Sc. in Engineering from Imperial College, London. He joined the Rotterdam School of Management (RSM) as a doctoral candidate in 2011 where his research was funded by ERIM. His research focuses on understanding how business organisations are implicated in the creation and erosion of value for proximate stakeholders, such as employees and shareholders, and for the broader societies in which the organisations are ensconced. In his doctoral dissertation, he examines the emergence of a technology/social venture founded to address a social problem and the implementation of corporate social practices by an established multinational enterprise (MNE). One of the three articles in the dissertation has published in the Journal of Management Studies while another article is under review at top organisational methodology journal. He has presented his research at various conferences including the Academy of Management Conference (Boston, 2012; Anaheim, 2016), EGOS (Rotterdam, 2014) and Process Organization Studies (Kos, 2015). He has also served as a reviewer for Journal of Business Ethics, Business Ethics Quarterly and Small Business Economics. He was awarded first prize (with Professor Gail Whiteman) in the social entrepreneurship category of the 2015 oikos teaching case competition.
Prior to his doctoral studies, Ona held positions as a technologist and technology consultant in two multinational companies in The Netherlands, United Kingdom and in Siberia, Russia. In addition to conducting social science research, Ona enjoys discovering Italian cuisine and watching his two daughters grow.
Thesis Abstract
The dissertation advances scholarship in entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and organisational ethnography. In the first study, based on a 15-month study of Amsterdam-based venture, Fairphone. I argue that effectual entrepreneurial agency is co-constituted by distributed agency, the proactive conferral of material resources and legitimacy to an eventual entrepreneur by actors external to the new venture. In the context of social movement activism, an effectual network pre-committed resources to an inchoate social enterprise to produce a material artifact because it embodied the moral values of network members. I theorise the role of artifacts in effectuation theory, suggesting that a material artifact served as a boundary object, present in multiple social words and triggering commitment from actors not governed by hierarchical arrangements.
In the second study, I investigate the implementation and public justification of corporate social actions (CSA) by an MNE. I show how a CSR programme that is developed in one country to acquiesce to local institutional demands is discursively justified by another subunit of the MNE to constituents removed from the site of those practices. I suggest that the paradox approach to legitimacy management by social action—an approach that has been theorised but not empirically examined—may not lead to inherent conflict as assumed in the literature if the MNE’s cost of acquiescence in one domain is low and institutional pressure in another weak.
In the third study, I investigate how organisational ethnographers may employ self-documenting practices in modern organisations to produce compelling accounts of organisational life. I argue that modern organisations produce voluminous amounts of documentary records and digital data that organisational researchers can exploit to increase the validity of ethnographic studies and produce compelling portraits of modern organisational life. Using Fairphone as a case, I suggest that by analysing digital and physical informant interactions, organisational ethnographers can expand the notion of the ethnographic field, which has historically being conceived as a bounded, physical space to include the virtual spaces comprising social worlds that characterise modern organisational life.
Photos: Chris Gorzeman / Capital Images
