Seminar – Why am I here? Meaningfulness in unsettled times

Dr Madeleine Rauch, Visiting Fellow at Stanford University, and a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Copenhagen Business School

The (ongoing) global health pandemic has put a strain on the healthcare system and its workers around the world. In this paper, we study how the pandemic challenged nurses’ meaningfulness at work, and how nurses addressed these challenges. To examine how nurses addressed a perceived change in meaningfulness, we study 51 unsolicited personal diaries of nurses working in Covid wards across different hospitals in the US, as well as interviews, documents, and observational data. We describe the ways in which nurses struggled with meaningfulness as their work changed, and they were confronted with new tasks and roles, goal conflicts, and emotional and physical exhaustion, resulting in an experience of moral injury and a void of meaningfulness at work. To resolve this dilemma, nurses reclaimed meaningfulness by (1) expanding their work practices, (2) building new collaborations, and (3) receiving (new) external recognition and interactions. By doing so, we advance the theory on meaningfulness and emotions by showing how nurses reconceptualise meaningfulness at work amid prolonged dire situations.

Speaker bio

Madeleine Rauch is a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University, and a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Copenhagen Business School (on leave). Her research interests include topics associated to strategy processes in international settings and strategising in extreme contexts. For example, Madeleine conducts research in extreme contexts and challenges faced by people both working and living in challenging contexts, such as undocumented in the US, medical professionals during the pandemic and soldiers in war-zones, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea, Yemen and South Sudan. Her research has been published in Organization Science, Journal of Management Studies, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Strategic Organization, and HBR, among others, and has been featured in The Stanford Daily, FAZ, the ASA blog and CBS Wire.