Telfer Research Seminar Series - Kisha Lashley
Janus at Work: Organizational Cleaving and the Morally Bounded Identity
Deadline: April 16, 2026,
***M.Sc. Students, these seminars can count towards the six mandatory Telfer Research Seminars Series required for your program (MGT 6191/ MGT 6991 / MHS 6991) (4 seminars for MSc Project-based students).***
Kisha Lashley, PhD
Existing research on rhetorical history has highlighted the strategic advantages of selectively remembering or forgetting aspects of the past in constructing and maintaining their identities. Similarly, organizational identity research has examined how organizations contend with identity threats. Less understood are the options available to organizations when a core aspect of their identity is morally contentious, such as when stakeholders advance irreconcilable and competing moral interpretations of the past. Through a longitudinal inductive case study spanning two centuries at a prominent U.S. university, I introduce the concept of cleaving, a process where organizations segment their narrative and material representations of the past into distinct domains, one sustaining the dominant heritage narrative, and another acknowledging an adjacent narrative that makes explicit the moral taint, separating what is tainted from what is defensible, and producing a morally bounded identity. This study advances our understanding of rhetorical history and organizational identity, showing how organizations sustain a core identity amid permanent stakeholder contestations.
About the Speaker
Kisha Lashley is the Frank S. Kaulback Associate Professor of Commerce at the McIntire School of Commerce and a Shannon Fellow at the University of Virginia. Professor Lashley is a field researcher who studies contentious practices within organizations and industries. Her research focuses on the dynamics of organizational social evaluations,
Professor Lashley has taught courses in strategic management and entrepreneurship at the undergraduate and graduate levels at Penn State University, McIntire School of Commerce, and Harvard Business School. She is an International Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Corporate Reputation at the University of Oxford. Before embarking on her academic career, she worked for several years coordinating and facilitating buyer-supplier relationships between major corporations and their small suppliers. She also worked as a technology transfer specialist, bridging the gap between innovative technologies and practical applications.
