The Emergence of Green Chemistry as an Occupational Change Project
A lecture by Jennifer Howard-Grenville
Associate Professor of Management
Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon
Date: Friday, November 8th, 2013
Time: 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
Location:
Bronfman Building
Room 210
1001 Sherbrooke St. West
Montreal, Quebec
Occupational identities, understood as ‘who we are’ merged with ‘what we do,’ shape both individual experiences and the occupation’s standing in the world. While organizational scholars have studied how members recast occupational identities to adapt to social conditions or technologies, or elevate stigmatized work, we have limited understanding of how members attempt to create internally-driven occupational identity change. This talk explores such an effort, focusing on how chemists perpetuated green chemistry as a shift in both ‘what chemists do’ and who they are. The implications for occupational identity change, interactions between individual and occupational identity, and the relationship between occupational identity and social change are discussed.
About Jennifer Howard-Grenville
Jennifer Howard-Grenville is an Associate Professor of Management and 2013 Thomas C. Stewart Distinguished Professor at the University of Oregon’s Lundquist College of Business. Jennifer studies processes of organizational and institutional change and has explored the role of routines, issue selling, and culture in enabling and inhibiting change. She is particularly interested in how people change their organizations in response to environmental and social demands. Her work has been published in Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Organization & Environment, and several other journals. She is the author of Corporate Culture and Environmental Practice (Edward Elgar, 2007), which documents her in-depth study of a high-tech company, and co-author or editor of two other books on Industrial Ecology. Jennifer is currently an Associate Editor at Academy of Management Journal and has previously served on the editorial boards of Academy of Management Journal and Organization Science. She received her Ph.D. at MIT, her MA at Oxford University, and her B.Sc. at Queen’s University.
A light lunch will be served.
If you have any questions, please contact Ariane Guay-Jadah at: ariane.guay-jadah [at] mcgill.ca.