Johanna Kujala

Johanna Kujala
Tampere University | UTA · Faculty of Management and Business

Dr. Sc., Professor

About

119
Publications
100,035
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Introduction
Johanna Kujala is Professor of Management and Organizations and Vice Dean for Research at the Faculty of Management and Business, Tampere University. Her current research focuses on stakeholder engagement and value creation, business-stakeholder-nature interaction and sustainable business practices. She has an extensive teaching and supervising experience that covers courses at all university levels as well as adult and continuing education. She has published over 50 scholarly articles in international peer-reviewed journals and volumes. She is a member of the review boards of Journal of Business Ethics and Business Ethics: A European Review. Her current projects are B2N Business to Nature: Stakeholder-driven Value Creation in Ecosystem Services and CICAT2025 Circular Economy Catalysts.

Publications

Publications (119)
Article
Full-text available
Stakeholder theory has become an influential framework for addressing organizational challenges, including those related to sustainability. Yet, the inclusion of nonhuman stakeholders in stakeholder theory is complicated by ontological and epistemological obstacles. To overcome these, we turn to art and posthumanist practice theory and examine arti...
Book
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The purpose of this open access edited collection is to discuss the role and importance of stakeholder engagement in a sustainable circular economy from multiple theoretical and practical perspectives. Developing and maintaining a circular economy is an essential step to a more environmentally friendly and socially inclusive society. In addition to...
Chapter
Full-text available
The circular economy has been presented as a means to promote ecological, economic, and social sustainability. However, the connection between the circular economy and sustainability remains undefined in both theory and practice. In this chapter, we examine how a circular economy and its connection to sustainability are understood among key stakeho...
Chapter
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A circular economy is considered one of the most pertinent solutions to contemporary socioeconomic and environmental sustainability challenges, such as climate change, biodiversity loss and resource depletion. The transition from a linear to a circular economy requires the support and participation of various organisations and institutions as well...
Chapter
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This chapter examines relationships among stakeholders seeking to promote the transition to a circular economy. We ask what kinds of relationships there are among circular economy stakeholders and how the transition to a circular economy is accelerated through these relationships. Our empirical material consists of 35 semi-structured interviews wit...
Chapter
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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...
Article
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How is leadership communicated? Finnish CEOs on Twitter Twitter offers CEOs the opportunity to communicate with a wide audience. For corporate stakeholders, CEO communication is important because it can affect, for example, the corporate image or the information that company’s stakeholders receive about the company’s vision or values. So far, howev...
Chapter
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Tässä tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan sitä, miten vastuullisuus konkretisoi- tuu sidosryhmäsuhteissa, miten yritysjohtajat suhtautuvat sidosryhmävas- tuullisuuteen, ja miten johdon näkemykset muuttuvat toimintaympäristön muuttuessa. Tutkimus perustuu sidosryhmäteoriaan, jonka mukaan yritykset ovat olemassa luodakseen arvoa sidosryhmilleen ja sidosryhmi...
Article
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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...
Article
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This case study examines how stakeholder engagement supports the process of generating urban ecosystem services. As our empirical case, we study the Vuores stormwater system in a new urban residential district in Finland. The Vuores site is interesting and valuable for a case study, as it is one of the most comprehensive urban stormwater systems in...
Article
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Stakeholder engagement has grown into a widely used yet often unclear construct in business and society research. The literature lacks a unified understanding of the essentials of stakeholder engagement, and the fragmented use of the stakeholder engagement construct challenges its development and legitimacy. The purpose of this article is to clarif...
Chapter
Stakeholder engagement refers to the aims, practices, and impacts of stakeholder relations in businesses and other organizations. According to a general framework, stakeholder engagement has four dimensions: examining stakeholder relations, communicating with stakeholders, learning with (and from) stakeholders, and integrative stakeholder engagemen...
Article
Full-text available
Stakeholder engagement refers to the aims, practices, and impacts of stakeholder relations in businesses and other organizations. According to a general framework, stakeholder engagement has four dimensions: examining stakeholder relations, communicating with stakeholders, learning with (and from) stakeholders, and integrative stakeholder engagemen...
Preprint
Stakeholder engagement refers to the aims, practices and impacts of stakeholder relations in businesses and other organizations. According to a general framework, stakeholder engagement consists of four dimensions: (1) examining stakeholder relations, (2) communicating with stakeholders, (3) learning with and from stakeholders, and (4) integrative...
Book
Full-text available
The purpose of this study is to find out how business morality and its change can be described and understood by examining stakeholder relations and moral decision­ making. This task is achieved by answering four research questions: (1) how can moral issues in business be examined with the stakeholder approach? (2) what are managers' perceptions of...
Chapter
Full-text available
The purpose of this chapter is to examine how business sustainability is consid- ered and legitimated in stakeholder value creation studies. Based on a review of stakeholder value creation literature, a stakeholder value creation typology is presented. The typology consists of four categories, which are (1) focal firm orientation with economic valu...
Article
In this article, we ask in what ways stakeholder engagement can accelerate the transitions towards a circular economy (CE). The empirical material consists of 35 semi-structured interviews of CE stakeholders at local, regional and national levels in Finland. The CE stakeholders include private, public and third sector organizations fostering the ci...
Chapter
In the postmodern age of social media, chief executive officers (CEOs) have become the public faces of their organizations on Twitter. Therefore, CEOs’ use of Twitter can be assumed to influence the social capital of the organizations they represent. In this mixed-methods study, this possibly influential relation is examined using the framework of...
Article
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Kujala, Johanna, Battista, Valentina, Lucianetti, Lorenzo & Paavilainen, Anni. The influence of cultural context in managerial decision-making: legitimacy views of Finnish and Italian managers. International Journal of Human Resources Development and Management. Online first. Abstract: This study examines the influence of cultural context in manag...
Chapter
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Sidosryhmävuorovaikutus, eli yritysten ja sidosryhmien välinen kommunikaatio ja yhteistyö, on liiketoiminnan kestävyyden kehittämisen kannalta ensiarvoista. Kestävyys edellyttää yrityksiltä oman toiminnan ja sen vaikutusten arvioimista sekä eri sidosryhmien arvojen ja tavoitteiden huomioimista. Tässä artikkelissa tarkastellaan sidosryhmävuorovaikut...
Article
Full-text available
A circular economy (CE) is a promising solution to the looming sustainability crisis. Previous research has shown that a systemic transition from a linear economy to a CE requires stakeholder collaboration across all levels of society. Yet, little is known about stakeholder interests in a CE. The purpose of this study is to examine stakeholder inte...
Article
Full-text available
Abstract: This study examines the influence of cultural context in managerial decision-making by comparing the legitimacy views of Finnish and Italian business managers. In the business context, managers often make decisions based on economic interests only; but for moral decisions, other means of legitimacy are required. Although both Finland and...
Chapter
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This chapter aims to provide a humanized understanding of stakeholder engagement. In doing so, we first revise the assumptions of human nature within the conceptualization of stakeholder engagement, and define stakeholders as resourced humans with personal resources such as different values, capabilities, interests, and emotions, which they can act...
Chapter
Resource depletion, environmental degradation and waste issues are some of the most pressing sustainability challenges of our time. These problems are largely caused by the linear economy and its so-called take–make–dispose model in which resources are wasted. A circular economy (CE) is presented as a problem-solving alternative to the linear model...
Chapter
Full-text available
The purpose of this chapter is to examine how business sustainability is considered and legitimated in stakeholder value creation studies. Based on a review of stakeholder value creation literature, a stakeholder value creation typology is presented. The typology consists of four categories, which are (1) focal firm orientation with economic value...
Preprint
Full-text available
This study examines the influence of cultural context in managerial decision-making by comparing the legitimacy views of Finnish and Italian business managers. In the business context, managers often make decisions based on economic interests only; but for moral decisions, other means of legitimacy are required. Although both Finland and Italy are...
Article
Full-text available
This study aims to extend the understanding of stakeholder influence in megaprojects by examining a controversial pulp mill project in Uruguay. The theoretical framework is based on stakeholder theory, focusing on stakeholder influences in international megaprojects. The research data comprise 96 newspaper articles from 2005 to 2009, and qualitativ...
Conference Paper
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A transition from linear economy towards sustainable circular economy (CE) is high on the political agenda in many countries at the moment (Geissdoerfer et al., 2017; McDowall et al., 2017). Planetary boundaries and climate change are major reasons for the transition towards CE (Ellen McArthur Foundation, 2020; Korhonen, Honkasalo & Seppälä, 2018a)...
Article
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Ilmastonmuutoksen hillintä, luonnon monimuotoisuuden säilyttäminen ja luonnonvarojen turvaaminen seuraaville sukupolville ovat esimerkkejä tämän hetkisistä globaaleista kestävyyshaasteista. Kiertotalous on nostettu esiin yhtenä ratkaisuna näihin haasteisiin. Kiertotalouteen siirtyminen tarkoittaa laajaa ja koko yhteiskuntaa koskevaa muutosta, jossa...
Article
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This study discusses how ethical human resource management practices have developed over time. The study asks: How did ethical HRM practices change in industrial companies in Finnish society from 1994 to 2014? Did the changes in the economic situation in the society influence the changes in ethical HRM practices. To answer these research questions,...
Chapter
Stakeholder theory is currently having a broad impact on a variety of topics in organizational research. Stakeholder engagement has become the term for practicing stakeholder theory in business and other organizations. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a structure for current work in stakeholder engagement based on a general framework as we...
Chapter
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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...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the debate on how nature can be understood as a stakeholder and to develop the idea of nature-inclusive stakeholder engagement. While acknowledging the arguments against the stakeholder status of nature, we build on a growing stream of literature that argues that nature should and can have stakeholder s...
Chapter
The purpose of this chapter is to examine how business sustainability is considered and legitimated in stakeholder value creation studies. Based on a review of stakeholder value creation literature, a stakeholder value creation typology is presented. The typology consists of four categories, which are (1) focal firm orientation with economic value...
Chapter
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CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Leadership for Dealing with Complex Changes
Chapter
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This chapter highlights the importance of nature in urban environments. It discusses how future leaders in business, government and other organisations can foster openness and incorporate nature into the process of generating urban ecosystem services through stakeholder engagement. As an open and participatory process, stakeholder engagement highli...
Book
Full-text available
This transdisciplinary book offers tools for leaders and analysts of leadership to navigate complex and interconnected settings. It proposes an analytical framework based on complexity, relational leadership, and dynamic change. Individual chapters examine these ideas in relation to topical societal, organisational and business challenges such as t...
Chapter
Full-text available
The purpose of this study is to examine distinctive narratives of stakeholder value creation and discuss how they consider sustainability. Based on an extensive research review spanning over three decades of material, we present four categories of the stakeholder value creation literature: (1) a focal firm orientation with an economic value perspec...
Article
The aim of this study is to gain insight into stakeholder engagement in a non-profit network organisation; it contributes to the literature on collaborative and cooperative understanding of stakeholder engagement by presenting an issue-based perspective of a non-profit organization. The research is conducted as a qualitative case study, and multipl...
Article
The aim of this study is to gain insight into stakeholder engagement in a non-profit network organisation; it contributes to the literature on collaborative and cooperative understanding of stakeholder engagement by presenting an issue-based perspective of a non-profit organisation. The research is conducted as a qualitative case study, and multipl...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter calls for cities to meet the ecological challenges of the Anthropocene. This requires rethinking of how urban ecosystem services are generated in places where human and non-human stakeholders interact within the urban landscape. In line with strong sustainability, this chapter suggests a sustainable capability approach that expands the...
Article
The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the debate on how nature can be understood as a stakeholder and to develop the idea of nature-inclusive stakeholder engagement. While acknowledging the arguments against the stakeholder status of nature, we build on a growing stream of literature that argues that nature should and can have stakeholder s...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This submission aims to shed light on the debate on how nature can be understood as a stakeholder. More specifically, we seek to answer the question of how nature’s interests, demands and expectations can be engaged in organisational practices. We address the question of nature as a stakeholder by following the ideas of strong sustainability and bu...
Chapter
This study focuses on stakeholder influence strategies utilized in an international conflict that erupted up when a Finnish company decided to build a pulp mill in Uruguay. The data consists of 96 newspaper articles from the Argentinean newspaper El Clarín. A qualitative content analysis is used to analyze the strategies used during the conflict. T...
Chapter
The purpose of this research is to examine how cultural context influences managerial moral decision-making by comparing the ways managers legitimates their moral decisions in Finland and Italy. In the business context, managers make decisions based on economic interests only; but for moral decisions, other means of legitimacy are required. Althoug...
Chapter
Introduction Discourse, in the broadest sense, means a particular way of understanding and talking about a phenomenon (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002). In general, discourse analysis is a part of the social constructionist tradition. Accordingly, it relies on the ideas that knowledge is socially constructed and that our understanding of certain phenom...
Article
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While there is a large and ever-expanding body of work on the fields of business ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR), there is a noted absence of a single source on the methodology and research approaches to these fields. In this book, the first of its kind, leading scholars in the fields gather to analyse a range of philosophical and...
Article
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Yrityksen johtamisen professori Johanna Kujalan juhlaluento 5.9.2017
Chapter
Stakeholder approach brings together the ethical, social and economic aspects of doing business and it has become one of the most used frameworks in the context of corporate social responsibility. This study moves beyond stakeholder analysis to stakeholder relationship analysis and examines stakeholder engagement and stakeholder relationships in th...
Chapter
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...
Chapter
This chapter outlines key ideas of pragmatism and calls for management and organizational scholarship to look at business, which is rather practical in nature, from a pragmatist perspective. What this means is that research should be initiated, in the first place, with an intention to solve an important real-life problem, should be aimed to have so...
Chapter
Stakeholder theory has become one of the major ways to conceptualize and comprehend business organizations in the fields of strategy and management. According to stakeholder theory, the purpose of a business firm is to bring together employees and customers, suppliers and distributors, investors and communities and other actors in society for creat...
Article
Full-text available
The purpose of this paper is to present a review on stakeholder value creation and examine how stakeholder theory, and especially research on stakeholder value creation, relates to sustainability. Based on an extensive literature review spanning three decades of material, we present four categories of stakeholder value creation literature: (1) a fo...
Article
Purpose – Company stakeholder responsibility considers stakeholder engagement and management as key to long-term firm success. The purpose of this paper is to examine how top managers’ stakeholder responsibility attitudes change and how they balance stakeholder responsibilities and economic interests. Design – The authors conducted empirical resear...
Chapter
This chapter addresses the field of responsible brands and branding and explores core elements of buildinga responsible brand in a company. Existing literature on responsible brands and branding is reviewed, and as a result of this review, six key components of responsible branding are depicted: (1) integratingCSR into the core of the brand, (2) en...
Article
Building on a constructivist learning theory and a case teaching method, this article suggests a mixed learning approach for teaching business ethics in a multicultural group. The purpose is to present the objectives and implementation of the mixed learning approach in a case course with a multicultural group. Based on the students’ feedback, we al...
Article
Full-text available
Building on a constructivist learning theory and a case teaching method, this article suggests a mixed learning approach for teaching business ethics in a multicultural group. The purpose is to present the objectives and implementation of the mixed learning approach in a case course with a multicultural group. Based on the students' feedback, we al...
Article
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...
Article
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Book
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Empowering Organizations through Corporate Social Responsibility addresses the implementation of businesses’ ethical standards in both emerging and advanced economies, interpreting the social impact of this issue in a global context. Highlighting case studies, interdisciplinary perspectives, and strategies in business management, this book is a piv...
Article
The company stakeholder responsibility views business and society as intertwined, and managing the relations with all the stakeholders of an organization is understood to be a key to success. This article asks how top managers’ stakeholder responsibility attitudes change and how top managers balance stakeholder issues and economic interests. The au...
Article
This paper sheds light in the field of responsible brands and branding and explores what are the core elements of building a responsible brand in a company. The existing literature on responsible brands and branding is reviewed based on 66 scholarly articles in the leading academic journals. As a result of this review, six key components of respons...
Article
This chapter addresses the field of responsible brands and branding and explores core elements of building a responsible brand in a company. Existing literature on responsible brands and branding is reviewed, and as a result of this review, six key components of responsible branding are depicted: (1) integrating CSR into the core of the brand, (2)...
Article
Full-text available
Tämä artikkeli tarkastelee liiketoiminnan vastuullisuutta sidosryhmänäkökulmasta. Sidosryhmäteoria tarjoaa laajan, eri osapuolten odotusten ja tarpeiden huomioimista korostavan näkemyksen vaihtoehdoksi perinteiselle, omistajien voiton maksimoimista painottavalle liiketoimintamallille. Sidosryhmäteorian normatiivinen ydin liittää sen liiketoiminnan...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Purpose ‐ The purpose of this paper is to understand differences between the strategic level and the operational level of corporate responsibility within an organization. Design/methodology/approach ‐ The research was conducted as a single case study of one of the more noteworthy Finnish firms with respect to corporate responsibility reporting. Fin...
Book
Full-text available
Kädessäsi oleva kirja on suunnattu kaikille palveluliiketoiminnan kehittämisestä ja uudistamisesta kiinnostuneille. Lukija löytää kirjasta tiiviin tietopaketin sellaisista ajankohtaisista teemoista ja nykyaikaisen palveluliiketoiminnan kehittämisen kulmakivistä kuten yhdessä tekeminen, verkostot, arvonluonti ja osaamisen kehittäminen. Kirjassa on p...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Article
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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the ethical culture of organisations and organisational innovativeness. Design/methodology/approach A quantitative empirical analysis was conducted on the basis of a survey of 147 respondents within the public sector in Finland. A multivariate linear regression analysis was d...
Article
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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...
Article
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Taking multidimensional ethics scale approach, this article describes an empirical survey of top managers’ moral decision-making patterns and their change from 1994 to 2004 during morally problematic situations in the Finnish context. The survey questionnaire consisted of four moral dilemmas and a multidimensional scale with six ethical dimensions:...
Article
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Despite the importance of brands in mediating corporate social responsibility, there has been relatively little research on how responsible brands are developed from the internal perspective of the company. Some research has been conducted from the external perspective, such as the link between ethical issues and consumer purchase behaviour, but th...