Hanna Lehtimäki

University of Eastern Finland | UEF · Department of Business

There are social enterprises operating in rural areas in developing countries with solutions and practices that address economic, social, and environmental challenges, all at once. The founders of these enterprises build close connections with communities, create collectives, and demonstrate potential for transforming the enterprise and the very co...

Sustainability poses an increasingly pressing issue of our time, yet the transformation of organizations, despite commitments and extensive attentions, appears limited. Our qualitative study analyses the arising tensions when pursuing sustainability. Building on 65 interviews with established and incumbent organizations, we adapt a stakeholder pers...

Purpose Social practices of work humor among engineering workers are a lesser studied phenomenon. We examine the social practices of an engineering work team through acts of a peculiar form of humorous expression we identify as installation humor. In these cases of installation humor, an anonymous member of the team created a temporary, inappropria...

JOHTAMINEN JA TYÖELÄMÄ • Johtamisen teoriat ja käytännöt muuttuvat ajassa • Perinteisissä johtamisopeissa korostetaan yksilön johtajuutta ja organisaation hierarkiassa mää-riteltyyn asemaan perustuvaa tehtävää ja roolia • Uusi johtamistutkimus näkee johtamisen kollektiivisena ja vuorovaikutteisena toimintana, johon osallistuvat myös työntekijät ja...

Arts-based methods refer to various ways of using, analyzing, and appreciating arts and art-making in learning. Arts-based methods include reflection, skill transfer, apprehending tacit knowledge and fostering an experience of presence and connection. Arts-based innovation pedagogy refers to learning specific competencies, such as topic understandi...

In this chapter, we discuss how imagination plays an important role in pursuing more sustainable futures, both as individuals and as societies. We take as a starting point that all forms of art can greatly inspire and nurture our imaginative capabilities needed for change. The idea of this chapter finds inspiration from photographs taken by Mark Is...

It would be typical for social scientists to conclude a book like this with a framework that brings together all of the insights of the various chapters. But, as we think the book makes clear, regular social science—even with clear conceptual models based on empirical data—is not enough. As Renza, Andersen, and Fielser (Chap. 4) suggest, the social...

We have all heard about the environmental problems caused by human activity. Environmental problems that contemporary societies are now facing include the loss of biodiversity, climate warming, resource depletion, and excessive pollution. They are caused by unsustainable production and consumption patterns. Furthermore, our electricity, constructio...

This entry delves into the fundamental elements of business models, examining the vital interconnected components of value creation, proposition, and delivery. By emphasizing the relationship between these elements, the entry highlights their collective significance in constructing a resilient business model that is essential for informed strategic...

A circular economy is a sustainability transition that seeks to establish a novel techno-economic and socio-cultural model in society. It is a systemic and complex change that moves slowly. Thus, to understand and influence the sustainable circular economy transition, we need new and continuously updated tools. In this chapter, we introduce the con...

The paper contributes to the discussion on valuation in organization studies and strategic management literature. The nascent literature on valuation practices has examined established markets where producers and consumers are known and rivalry in the market is a given. Furthermore, previous research has operated with a narrow meaning of value as e...

Considering the grand challenges related to the on-going sustainability transition, we are addressed with the urgent need for cross-cutting, sustainable innovations which encompass the triple-bottom line of social, economic, and environmental factors. Existing definitions for innovation and sustainability are recognized as separate approaches; howe...

While the role of projects in sustainability change is widely recognized, the understanding of project managers’ behaviour in sustainability projects is limited. We examine project champions who act without hierarchical and authoritative power as environmental leaders and drive sustainability-related changes in the mindsets of actors and in city ad...

The rise of environmental sustainability concerns, such as climate change and the need to save natural resources through the circular economy, compels educators to incorporate environmental sustainability issues into entrepreneurship education. In doing so, the next generation of entrepreneurs will be educated on how to conduct business in a more e...

Recent circular economy research has emphasised that stakeholder engagement and mutual support of stakeholders is needed to implement the idea of a circular economy. While stakeholder engagement is often considered as something positive, a deeper understanding of what constitutes the positive in stakeholder relationships is needed. The purpose of t...

In this paper, we examine fringe stakeholders in the context of transitions towards sustainability. Fringe stakeholders refer to marginalised and non-collaborative stakeholders whose voices are not easy to account for. Our conceptual study integrates extant knowledge about the concept of fringe stakeholders to provide valuable insights into studyin...

This at-home ethnographic research examined acts of resistive humor in a cross-functional medical device innovation team. The worker level participants reacted as a resistive, dissonance to a managerial initiative and its enactment. These acts of resistive humor are at the intersectionality of work, work life, and personal expression. These acts tr...

The purpose of this paper is to add a contextual understanding of care ethics to the nascent literature on ethics in social entrepreneurship. To this end, an interpretive study of social bricoleur entrepreneurs in rural India is presented and the constitutive effects of the enactment of care ethics are articulated. First, this enactment is examined...

Our ways of organizing, managing and running businesses need fresh perspectives because business and society need to meet the sustainability criteria in an urgent manner. While there is an increased interest in sustainability research and practice (Tapaninaho & Kujala, 2019), complex sustainability challenges, such as climate change, social inequit...

This study aims to explore the main drivers of recognizing a circular economy business opportunity. In this multiple case study with six entrepreneurs from the wood construction industry is a relevant part of the circular economy because its essential component is a sustainable and renewable material (trees/wood) that reduces carbon emissions. This...

The aim of this study was to explore employee-driven circular economy innovations in the context of waste management. The study investigates the role of waste management employees in innovation processes and shows how the innovative practices of waste management employees can accelerate sustainability. Previous research on employee-driven circular...

In this review, we develop the idea of social entrepreneurship as sustainability agency. We review literature on social entrepreneurship and examine what it means as a contested concept and hybrid logic, how it implicates the sustainability space, and how that makes the social entrepreneur a change agent in sustainable economy. As a result, we arti...

Circular economy (CE) entails a radical change in companies because new ways of thinking and doing business are required for value-creation opportunities. There is a lack of empirical studies on how companies themselves see and develop the CE business. Furthermore, the dynamics between the changes required when pursuing a circular business model (C...

"The purpose of this paper is to add to the nascent literature on ethics in social entrepreneurship by extending contextual understanding of care ethics. We present an ethnographic study on social bricoleur entrepreneurs in rural India, and as a result, introduce an integrative framework for contextual care ethics. The study shows that context is n...

Purpose-The purpose of this study is to add to discussion on conceptualising social entrepreneurship. This paper contributes to the cluster concept of social entrepreneurship proposed by Choi and Majumdar (2014) by drawing on an empirical case study, a Finnish start-up specialized in cricket farming technology and food made from crickets. The case...

This study examines commercialization in the context of biomedical R&D, biobanking and personalized medicine as a manifold and transformative texture of socio-material relations in which an innovation—or even a prospect of innovation—is conjoined with and put to the test by multiple human and non-human actors. The empirical study of a Finnish bioba...

The purpose of this paper is to examine lean service development and to show how appreciative inquiry and lean thinking can be combined in a service development context. In the study, the positive core and the life-giving forces of the case organisation are identified and explored in relation to the ongoing innovation and new service development pr...

In this paper, we utilize actor-network theory (ANT) to contribute to research on commercialization of innovation. Based on a qualitative study on emerging innovative biomedical business we demonstrate how innovative research and development (R&D) is entangled with business and commerce through a texture of socio-material relations. The empirical s...

This chapter builds on the notion that in contemporary societies, leaders need to pay attention to a broad array of stakeholders and understand how value is created in stakeholder relationships. Stakeholder research considers how firms can create value simultaneously for multiple stakeholders (Freeman, Harrison, & Wicks, 2007), and how value is cre...

Lehtimäki and Silvast offer an encouraging account on using arts-based-intervention (ABI) with multiple arts-based-methods (ABM) as part of mainstream curriculum in higher education. The detailed case study from a university course on innovation management in Finland elaborates how ABI can be used to foster experiential student-centred learning and...

The purpose of this study is to examine how different logics of commercialisation are part of sustainable value creation in an emerging area of healthcare. This paper presents an inductive interpretative case study to examine the emerging field of personalised medicine from the perspective of a biobank seeking to create value on its depository of t...

The purpose of this study is to examine how different logics of commercialisation are part of sustainable value creation in an emerging area of healthcare. This paper presents an inductive interpretative case study to examine the emerging field of personalised medicine from the perspective of a biobank seeking to create value on its depository of...

The purpose of this study is to add to the existing momentum of contextualizing social entrepreneurship in Finland. This research explores social entrepreneurship in the Finnish context with a case study of a start-up, EntoCube, developing cricket farming technology and offering food made from crickets as an easy alternative food for solving world...

*Johtamisen teoriat ja käytännöt muuttuvat ajassa *Perinteisissä johtamisopeissa korostetaan yksilön johtajuutta ja organisaation hierarkiassa mää-riteltyyn asemaan perustuvaa tehtävää ja roolia *Uusi johtamistutkimus näkee johtamisen kollektiivisena ja vuorovaikutteisena toimintana, johon osallistuvat myös työntekijät ja muut sidosryhmät *Johtamis...

This research utilizes at-home ethnography (Alvesson 2009, Anteby 2013, Järventie-Thesleff et al. 2016) to examine a high tech cross-functional engineering team and their work setting in order to encounter organizational surprises during early stage medical device technology development. The purpose of this study is to examine co-creation of knowle...

JOHTAMINEN JA TYÖELÄMÄ • Johtamisen teoriat ja käytännöt muuttuvat ajassa • Perinteisissä johtamisopeissa korostetaan yksilön johtajuutta ja organisaation hierarkiassa määriteltyyn asemaan perustuvaa tehtävää ja roolia • Uusi johtamistutkimus näkee johtamisen kollektiivisena ja vuorovaikutteisena toimintana, johon osal-listuvat myös työntekijät ja...

The purpose of this article is to deepen our understanding of co-creation of value in stakeholder relationships. The authors present a case study on the process of strategic transformation in a medium-sized company providing industrial services. The purpose of the study is to analyze how different stakeholder perspectives join in determining what i...

Purpose This study examines how technology-intensive small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) engage in open innovation. The purpose of this paper is to add to the literature on open innovation in SMEs, which has received considerably less attention than open innovation in large companies. Also, the study adds on the literature on open innovation...

This paper examines the dynamics in organizational innovation processes, and in particular, the role blockages. The case covers the process of designing a joint-stock enterprise that is partly owned by the employees and partly by the federation of municipalities, and is to deliver primary health care services to a set of municipalities. After a pro...

The purpose of this study is to examine how sense is made in an organisation with regard to its future. This involves a case study of sensemaking that takes place in a continuous dialogue between the top management, middle management and shop stewards in a company preparing for international growth after the global financial crisis. By using a sens...

The purpose of this study is to examine how sense is made in an organisation with regard to its future. This involves a case study of sensemaking that takes place in a continuous dialogue between the top management, middle management and shop stewards in a company preparing for international growth after the global financial crisis. By using a sens...

This paper examines the dynamics in organizational innovation processes, and in particular, the role blockages. The case covers the process of designing a joint-stock enterprise that is partly owned by the employees and partly by the federation of municipalities, and is to deliver primary health care services to a set of municipalities. After a pro...

While the coexistence of trust and distrust has been acknowledged in previous literature, the understanding of their connection with organisational culture is limited. This study examines how trust and distrust construct the unity and fragmentation of organisational culture. Productive working relationships can be characterised by high trust, but s...

This research case examined a networked business model creation process to understand the dynamics in business model development. Due to digitalisation and globalisation, the business environment for young technology firms is changing rapidly. Firms must be flexible in strategic decision making and in adapting to changes in the business environment...

Tämä tutkimus kuvaa ja analysoi digitaalisuuden vaikutuksia kehittämistyön alla olevaan verkottuneeseen terveydenhuollon palveluun, aivovammakuntoutukseen. Digitaalisuudella tarkoitetaan tässä tutkimuksessa erilaisia laitteita, ohjelmistoja, sovelluksia ja keinoja, jotka vaikuttavat sekä nykyisiin palveluihin että mahdollistavat palveluiden ajattel...

This article examines technology commercialization as networked processes. It presents a longitudinal analysis of a technological invention called intelligent paper over a period of 13 years in 1997–2009. In the analysis, six technology commercialization phases are identified and the roles of various actors in each phase are depicted. The study sho...

Stakeholder theory has developed into a promising approach to understand the interests of business and society as joint rather than conflicting, but it has not been able to fully address the question of how value is created in stakeholder relationships. Our aim in this article is to contribute to our understanding of the ways by which firms create...

Stakeholder literature tends to presume that effective stakeholder dialogue, occurring directly or indirectly, among a focal firm, local communities, governments, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) is desirable for successful firm-stakeholder relationships. Even if theoretically desirable, effective dialogue does not always occur. There are t...

This paper focuses on empathy as a central but little researched aspect of the innovation process. We extend the discussion on innovators' empathy towards customers by adding a new angle: facilitators' empathy towards innovators. We elaborate on this new angle through the concept of 'empathic facilitation', which draws on a combination of diagnosti...

The purpose of the case is to illustrate how members of an organisation engage in shaping change in organisations. The case organisation faced a need to make changes in its organising and management practices to maintain cost efficiency and to improve leadership culture. The underlying dynamic of change was created in the intersection of maintainin...

The purpose of the study is to show how the appreciative approach can be applied to support post merger management. Appreciative Intelligence® and appreciative inquiry approaches were applied in a public organisation which had undergone an integration process where three government units merged into a single operating unit. An appreciative inquiry...

The increasingly dynamic and global business environment calls for continuous and rapid innovation. Creativity and innovation are the key sources of competitive advantage in the globally connected knowledge economy. Organizations continuously face the need to introduce new technological, product, or service innovations. Such continuous and rapid in...

This research focuses on customer-oriented lean innovation and introduces the innovation empathy framework that has been developed for the early phases of innovation processes. The framework is based on the idea that increased empathy towards customers helps innovators gain a better understanding of customers' problems and needs, and increases the...

This research focuses on customer-oriented lean innovation and introduces the innovation empathy framework that has been developed for the early phases of innovation processes. The framework is based on the idea that increased empathy towards customers helps innovators gain a better understanding of customers' problems and needs, and increases the...

The purpose of this case is to deepen understanding about strategy implementation. The study draws on a network survey conducted in four internationally operating companies and presents analysis on the role of social relations in strategy implementation. As an outcome, the study provides insight into the ways by which social relations within the fi...

In the globalized neoliberal economy, business schools and business science has become a dominant societal institution and discourse. However, this has not directly strengthened the position of business schools in the societal networks of power. This paper examines this paradox by depicting who are the actors in the field and how these actors seek...

Purpose This paper aims to advance the authors' understanding about the functioning of intra‐organizational social connections in creating organizational advantage and operational efficiency in multinational enterprises (MNEs). The focus is on the structural dimension of social capital. Design/methodology/approach The study is an empirically groun...

Stakeholder dialogue is an effective way for a company to enhance its sensitivity to the operational environment and to increase stakeholders’ understandings of the dilemmas facing the company. An open and transparent dialogue process can create fertile ground for solving tensions in stakeholder relations. However, the process is not always straigh...

An internationally operating tyre manufacturer faced a challenge of a critically negative atmosphere caused by an abrupt insecurity in the market and recent layoffs. The Human Resources and Development Department called in a local university research team, and an organisation development (OD) intervention based on Appreciative Intelligence® and app...

The purpose of this case study is to increase our understanding of building strategic sensitivity and the ways by which internal social relationships contribute to it. Applying insights from social capital and social networks theories, the case explores the role of social relations in implementing a strategic initiative. The case study was conducte...

This article examines stakeholder relationships in a conflict situation. The focus of analysis is on how to understand stakeholder relationships as both ethical and strategic, and further, how the interests of different stakeholders become justified. To describe stakeholder relationships, we use media texts reporting on the case of a foreign invest...

The paper examines how the tensions of corporate responsibility are articulated and reconciled in a controversial situation of a foreign investment. We conducted a conventionalist analysis on the company press releases in a case where a Finnish forest industry company invested in a pulp mill in South America. The findings show that the use of langu...

This article contributes to the body of stakeholder literature by providing an in-depth analysis of the dynamics of stakeholder relationships as a part of change in value creation. The article presents an argument that the stakeholder salience model as a tool for analyzing stakeholder relationships is not sufficient for understanding business value...

The Nordic countries—Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—offer interesting material to investigate gendering processes. In these societies, gender equality policy has long traditions and many propagated goals have been researched: women and men participate in paid work almost to the same extent; women make a significant contribution to family inco...

The Nordic countries—Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—offer interesting material to investigate gendering processes. In these societies, gender equality policy has long traditions and many propagated goals have been researched: women and men participate in paid work almost to the same extent; women make a significant contribution to family inco...

This study aims at identifying and analysing the key challenges in managing a network business. The starting point of the paper is the alleged need for new kinds of theoretical frameworks which take into account value creation situations businesses face today. Hence, this paper introduces the value co-production framework as an alternative perspect...

The Nordic countries—Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—offer interesting material to investigate gendering processes. In these societies, gender equality policy has long traditions and many propagated goals have been researched: women and men participate in paid work almost to the same extent; women make a significant contribution to family inco...

Due to continual challenges in their external environment, corporations are facing an increased demand for public participation and stakeholder inclusion. As a result, companies are seeking ways to improve communication with their stakeholders. The emergence of the Internet has provided new corporate channels for offering information to stakeholder...

This book was written in connection to a research and teaching project on welfare services at a time the production of welfare services was in flux in the Finnish society and it was realized that there are diverse understandings of what welfare is, and need of interdisciplinary discussion on the topic.

This article focuses on the cultural and textual (re)production of the taken-for-granted assumptions of orthodox strategic management in city management practice. It is suggested that in order to make sense of the persistence of some of the classic difficulties of strategic management we need to study not only the strategy processes, but also the l...