Organisational Learning and Adaptation to Address Complex Societal Challenges

The question surrounding the relationship between business and society has become fundamental to business and management studies in the past three decades. However, the Sustainable Development Agenda and its 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) have provided a new comprehensive paradigm to understand and pursue development, by highlighting the social, economic and environmental challenges of our time, their interdependence and inter-temporal nature. The SDG framework underlines a necessary paradigm shift towards multidisciplinary and cross-level (social science) research, able to provide support to more effective evidence-based policy and practice.  Many of the most pressing societal needs such as extreme poverty, gender/health/income inequalities, conflicts, climate change, migration, and pandemic outbreaks such as COVID-19 can be considered as wicked problems, which require integrated, multidisciplinary solutions and complex approaches to design, implementation and evaluation.

Drawing on Professor Angeli’s research, the lecture will provide an overview on how business firms and hybrid organisational arrangements adapt and learn to address these complex, interdependent societal issues. Taking inclusive healthcare delivery, poverty alleviation and humanitarian relief as empirical illustrations, the lecture will consider new approaches to sustainable business modelling and the importance of co-creation in resource-constrained settings; the relevance of new organisational forms, such as social enterprises, project networks and cross-sector collaborations, along with their adaptation challenges in view of complex organisational goals; the tensions inherent to evaluating the societal impact of organisational and policy interventions. From a theoretical point of view, the talk will highlight the relevance of behavioural theories, organisational learning and complexity in gauging the challenges facing organisations nowadays. 

Federica Angeli

Chair in Management at the York Management School, University of York.

She obtained her PhD in Business Administration from the University of Bologna, and has held positions at Tilburg University, Maastricht University and at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. By using a multidisciplinary, multi-level approach, her research investigates how business firms, hybrid organizational forms and inter-organizational networks adapt and learn to address complex societal issues, with a particular focus on inclusive healthcare delivery and poverty alleviation. Her work has received several research awards and has been published in international journals such as World Development, Organization & Environment, Sociology of Health and Illness, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Social Science and Medicine, PLOS One, Regional Studies, Long Range Planning and Health Services Research. She serves as Academic Editor for PLOS One.

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