Revealing the Purpose of a Stakeholder Organisation: The case of a public university responding to the COVID-19 ‘Corona’ Crisis

Abstract

By the beginning of March 2020, Austria went into a state of emergency due to the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 (‘Corona') virus. Social life was put on hold, and public and private organisations were close to a complete shutdown; medium-term and long-term implications were unforeseeable at that time. As a consequence, universities also had to adapt their modus operandi. In this empirical paper, we report how a public university responded to this low-probability-high-consequence event. We analyse the email communications that occurred during the first phase of responding to this crisis concerning the organisation's purpose and the salience of its components. As our findings indicate, a situation of emergency reveals the priority of some ends over others of the organisation's mission. We contribute to the debate on multi-objective purposes of stakeholder-focused organisations (such as public universities) and provide singular empirical evidence.

Keywords: Coronavirus, Covid-19, Corona, Stakeholder Organisation, Public University, Crisis Response