Bridging Moral Aspirations and the Mundane Reality: A Grounded Study of the Process of Radical Purpose Adaptation in a Business School

In previous research, scholars have often highlighted the important role of leaders in defending and protecting a historical organizational purpose. However, adopting such a ‘backward-looking’ perspective, researchers have devoted much less attention to understanding how an organizational purpose can be deliberately changed and leveraged to justify novel moral commitments, thereby bridging the moral and the mundane. We theorize these activities as a process of radical purpose adaptation, whereby an established organization deliberately and radically changes its purpose to align with its commitment to society. We draw on a single, longitudinal case study of a business school as it engaged in the process of changing its organizational purpose. Adopting a social-symbolic work lens, we conceptualize purpose as a social-symbolic object and theorize purpose work, which captures leaders’ efforts to establish new organizational aspirations. We find that proactive purpose work leads to the unintended emergence of self-reinforcing, competing demands that threaten the new purpose, which are tackled through reactive purpose work. Thus, a recursive process emerges in which proactive and reactive purpose work operate in tandem: proactive work generates novel aspirations and tensions, while reactive work contains and redirects them, enabling organizations to stabilize new commitments without abandoning their transformative intent.