Drinking Together or Bowling Alone: How Founders Co-Create Community Vehicle Organisational Identities
6 Mar 2025
13:00 -14:30
Times are shown in local time.
Open to: All
Castle Teaching Room (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our Organisational Behaviour seminar
Speaker: Professor Kevin Rockmann, George Mason University
About the seminar
Through an abductive study of the craft brewery industry and building upon multi-method analyses – including interviews with founders and employees, social media and Google reviews, and customer surveys – we examine how founders and communities co-imprint communitarian values onto firms, creating an organisational identity centred on the firm operating as a community vehicle.
We find that through a process of community-based imprinting and seeding, with catalysing and reinforcing community effects, these breweries emerged as community vehicles wherein the firm was used to catalyse broader impacts on the community, and in turn the firm.
We integrate our study’s findings with extant work on imprinting, organisational identity and communities, and build theory on the unique role that such organisations can play in their communities.
Speaker bio
Kevin Rockmann is a professor of management at George Mason University’s Costello College of Business. He is the Organisational Behaviour coordinator for the PhD in business programme, and the past director of the PhD in business and the MBA programmes. He also served as associate dean overseeing both graduate and undergraduate research.
His research and teaching focuses on how managers and organisations facilitate not only the management of individuals but the management of the connections between individuals. It is in these dyadic ties that much of work is completed, including task work, creative work and citizenship work. His work has been published in premier academic journals and edited volumes in the fields of management and organisational psychology as well as in leading practice-oriented publications and editorials.
His research has been featured in many popular media outlets and recognised with scholarly awards from a variety of national and international organisations. He teaches courses on leadership, negotiation and organisational behaviour in a range of formats and settings. He is also the lead author on the textbook Negotiation: Moving from Conflict to Agreement, published by Sage in 2021. He also speaks and consults regularly for organisations on topics regarding leadership, negotiation, relationship management and management teaching pedagogy.
Register
No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Luke Slater.