The Inaugural Jan Schapper Scholarship was awarded to Dr Dhammika Jayawardena (University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Nugegoda, Sri Lanka) during the Annual ABEN Conference, Sydney, 8 December 2015.
2015 Jan Schapper Scholarship Award – Dr Dhammika Jayawardena
Dr Dhammika Jayawardena (University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Nugegoda, Sri Lanka) won the inaurgural Jan Schapper Scholarship Award. Dhammika’s paper was entitled “Water, Blood, CSR: A case study from the Global South”. As their ‘corporate language’ embodies, MNCs are often inspired by and promote (the rhetoric of) business ethics, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and good governance which are probably the ‘by-products’ of market managerialism in the contemporary political economy. This ‘duality’ of MNCs leads to an obvious ethico-political question: Why MNCs fail to ‘practice what they preach,’ mostly in the name of business ethics, or CSR. In this context, this paper seeks to explore and re-narrate a fearless struggle of the inhabitants of Rathupaswala —small village in Western Province, Sri Lanka — with a local MNC for their ‘right to free and clean water’.
2016 Jan Schapper Scholarship Award – Dr Sanjukta Choudhury-Kaul
During the ABEN Conference in Brisbane on December 6, 2016, the Award Committee, comprised of Assoc Prof Edward Wray-Bliss (Macquarie University) and Dr Tracy Wilcox (University of New South Wales), conferred the Jan Schapper Scholarship 2016 to Dr Sanjukta Choudhury-Kaul (Monash University) for her paper “Researching marginalized issues in management history: An interpretive framework”. In her study, Dr Choudhury-Kaul proposes a multi-method interpretive framework, integrating a historiographical approach, a hermeneutic circle, and an archival investigation for examining historical business responses to marginalized societal issues, deep prejudice and social exclusion.
2017 Jan Schapper Scholarship Award – Dr Jason Sing
At the ABEN conference in December 2017 in Melbourne, Jason Sing (Monash University) was awarded the Jan Schapper scholarship for his paper titled “Hybridising deliberative democracy in company-to-community relations in the Australian mining industry”. In his paper Jason explored some of the limitations of deliberative democracy in the context of the Australian mining industry and its relationship with Indigenous communities. He proposes a ‘hybridised deliberative democracy’ that more accurately captures the complexities of such relationships, with greater transformative potential.
2021 Jan Schapper Scholarship Award – Dr Alice Gibson
At ABEN’s 2021 Virtual Conference, hosted by the University of Notre Dame Australia, Alice Gibson (Monash University) was awarded the Jan Schapper Scholarship. Alice’s paper titled ‘Ethical leadership as a Mode-of-Being: A Heideggerian Perspective’ uncovered the rich context of meaning embedded in people’s experiences of ethical leadership. This was underpinned by the research question ‘how is ethical leadership understood through the lived experience?’. Interviews were undertaken with people from the energy, government and built environment sectors. The philosopher Martin Heidegger, in his seminal work Being and Time, identifies various ‘ontological structures’ of Being (or existence). He uses these structures to explain how we experience the world in different modes-of-Being. Alice paper mapped the everyday lived experience of ethical leadership with these ontological structures, to shed light on an ethical-leadership-mode-of-Being.