Speakers
Dr Gloria Kutscher
Corporate Governance and Ethical Leadership in Maritime Trade
Commercial cargo ships are spaces where seafarers depend on each for their wellbeing. Therefore, the ethics of care poses a pivotal issue to modern day shipping and seafarer welfare. In this presentation, we report on how seafarers in the international maritime industry understand, talk about, and respond to each other’s wellbeing at sea. Drawing on a multi-year project involving fieldwork, interviews with seafarers, and collaboration with maritime charities, we highlight a fundamental issue: the caring-intrusiveness tension. The tension arises from spatial arrangements and emerging technologies that blur the line between caring and intrusiveness in a confined work setting (e.g., noticing and responding to personal wellbeing issues). We explain how seafarers navigate the caring-intrusiveness tension, and how it shapes crews’ ability to care for members’ personal and professional wellbeing. Our study challenges conventional ethics of care, showing how the spatial arrangements of seafaring require crews to care for each other in unobtrusive ways. Our study provides practical insights about how seafarers and leaders can promote each other’s wellbeing unobtrusively, caring for each other while preserving privacy, autonomy, and camaraderie in confined spaces.
Gloria Kutscher is a Lecturer in Organisation Studies at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. Gloria conducts research on how organisations and individual actors make sense of and respond to different forms of hardship in ways that lead to personal growth and positive social change. She has been working with seafarers and seafaring charities, over the years exploring topics including seafarer wellbeing, technological change, and work-life boundaries. Her research has been published in both academic and practitioner-oriented outlets such as Organization Studies, Harvard Business Review, and the Routledge Companion to Organizational Diversity Research Methods. Gloria’s teaching ranges across undergraduate, postgraduate, MBA, focusing on organisation and management, careers, international business and positive change. She received a PhD from WU Vienna, Austria and has been a postdoc at Aalto University, Finland before joining Southampton.
Derin Kent is Associate Professor of Organisation Studies at Warwick Business School, United Kingdom and Co-Director of the WBS Extreme Contexts Unit. He specialises in ethnographic research with people who work in extreme contexts, i.e., those that are physically or psychologically dangerous, investigating themes such as engaging work, personal growth, and theorising from unconventional settings. In previous and ongoing research he has embedded with commercial seafarers, disaster relief workers, and storm chasing teams. Derin’s research appears in Academy of Management Journal, Organization Studies, Harvard Business Review, and The Conversation UK, among other outlets. At Warwick Business School, he teaches across postgraduate and MBA programmes, focusing on change management, career management, and organisational behaviour. He earned his PhD at Queen’s University, Canada and was previously a postdoc at Aalto University, Finland.