"Developing a theory of fate, destiny, and luck in organizational context is about giving ourselves as academics an opportunity to reflect on some of the discourses that often go unaccounted in our theory development.”
The winners of the 2023 AOM Carolyn B. Dexter Award are Muhammad (Aqeel) Awan and Niranjan (Ninja) Janardhanan of the London School of Economics for their paper Work Engagement and Multiple Work Identities: Livelihood Construction Amidst Precarity. Their innovative research explores how workers construct identities and develop meaning toward work amidst multiple precarity.
“Winning the 2023 Dexter Award is an immense honor. For us, it is a positive nod from the scholarly management community that the experiences and voices of workers from such extreme and precarious contexts matter—they matter because they have the potential to teach us something more about management than what we already know.”
The Dexter Award is an All-Academy award given to the paper that best meets the objective of internationalizing the Academy of Management. Each of AOM’s Divisions and Interest Groups nominate one annual meeting submission for this prestigious award each year; up to three of these nominations may be selected to receive the award. This year’s winning submission was nominated by the Managerial and Organizational Cognition (MOC) Division.
Aqeel and Ninja collected qualitative research—including 60 interviews, 45 informal conversations, and 100 hours of observation—from fisher folk of Karachi, Pakistan, and are developing a management theory around the notion of fate/destiny and luck—how and when do workers turn towards a fate/destiny focused meaning of work, what role does this notion play in helping them understand their past and present work-lives as well as prepare and anticipate for the future work, and how does it influence their work identities.
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