Seungah Lee
Seungah Sarah Lee received her PhD in Organization Studies and International Comparative Education from Stanford University.
Her research broadly explores how global models, scripts, and norms become transmitted and adapted to influence organizational forms, practices, and change. She is particularly interested in how nation-states and organizations negotiate the changing demands of a globalized world and adapt models for sustainable development to foster (social) entrepreneurship and innovation in their local contexts. She also has a secondary interest in the organization of higher education. In this line of work, she studies organizational change and expanding actorhood of higher education institutions in response to globalization, social movements, and changing labor market demands from global, comparative perspectives.
Her work has been funded by the Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship, Sheikh Saud bin Saqr Al Qasimi Foundation for Policy Research, and the Stanford Abbasi Program on Islamic Studies and published in journals such as *World Development, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Scientific Reports*, in numerous book chapters, as well as policy research reports. She was nominated for the Academy of Management's William H. Newman Award and was a runner-up for the OB Division's Best Paper Award with Entrepreneurial Implications.
Prior to joining HEC Paris, Seungah was a Visiting Senior Lecturer at New York University Abu Dhabi. Prior to academia, she led organizational strategy and design for newly established education nonprofits and provided policy research and advisory services. She also worked as the interim director of a corporate philanthropic foundation, overseeing foundation strategy, board governance, and development of grant projects. She now serves the foundation as a Board Member.
Chasing Dreams, Managing Disappointment: How Narrative Buffering and Purpose Decoupling Sustain Aspirational Ideals in Structurally Unequal Contexts
Organizations frequently embrace ideals such as inclusion, empowerment, and innovation, even in settings where structural inequalities make these goals difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. This paper examines how such commitments are enacted and managed by an intermediary organization that seeks to support and facilitate access to opportunities on behalf of others, particularly in stratified institutional contexts where specific groups are systematically excluded or marginalized. Drawing on an ethnographic study of an accelerator in the United Arab Emirates, this paper examines how the widely valorized ideology of “entrepreneurship for all” is enacted in a structurally unequal context. The paper identifies two mechanisms that help the organization navigate this tension: narrative buffering, where culturally familiar and institutionally valorized scripts are employed to normalize structural barriers and recast exclusion as an individual growth opportunity, and purpose decoupling, which involves the internal reframing of organizational goals and success towards more abstracted aims such as mindset and culture development. This process is theorized as aspirational retainment, a dynamic in which commitments to social ideals such as inclusion are sustained through narrative and interpretive work, even as material access remains structurally constrained. While this process enables the organization to maintain coherence and sustain engagement among staff and participants even in the face of structural barriers, it comes at a cost. It can inadvertently suppress systemic reflexivity, thereby normalizing exclusion, reinforcing structural inequalities, and excluding the very people it aims to support and empower.