2022 CAPI Student Fellowship awards

Organizational-level patriotism—an organization's love or devotion to its country—is pervasive. Organization’s patriotism can take many forms, such as organizational goals or commitment associated with a country’s culture, goals, and interests. Tata Group—an Indian multinational conglomerate headquartered in Mumbai, for example, was infused with the vision of “[propelling] India into the ranks of industrialised nations” when it was founded in 1868 [1]. Similarly, when starting up Sony Corporation—a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan—in 1946, the founder Akio Morita also aligns his corporate commitment “to develop the technologies that would help rebuild Japan's economy” [2]. From the business and management perspective, organizational-level patriotism has also been used strategically to achieve organizational goals. The Canadian multinational coffeehouse Tim Hortons, for example, has promoted its business by associating itself with the Canadian culture and identity as a patriotic act since 1996 [3, 4]. Recently, Vingroup—the Vietnamese largest conglomerate—has also claimed its acts of patriotism regarding its efforts to boost Vietnam’s industrialization, localize the manufacturing base, and develop spearhead industries of the country [5]. Such claims seek to strategically maneuver the patriotism cause as a symbolic resource to legitimize Vingroup’s innovations (e.g., electric cars, university, and school systems). Surprisingly, in management and organizational studies, organizational-level patriotism has been understudied. Patriotism has been extensively studied in various social science disciplines, including political science, social psychology, economics, and public administration. Those studies have focused primarily on individual-level patriotism—an individual's love or extreme commitment to the nation. Generally, such studies explain how and why individual-level patriotism enables and constrains certain activities or outcomes. However, we know little about the strategic role of patriotism in different aspects of business and management. Given patriotism as a crucial, but understudied, avenue, my research aims to explore this topic. Getting inspired by the empirical observations of Vingroup’s strategy concerning patriotism and innovations, I ask: why and how do entrepreneurial firms mobilize patriotism as a social-symbolic resource to legitimize innovation?

This fellowship will fund my field trip to collect primary data in different cities in Vietnam (i.e., Hanoi, Da Nang, Hai Phong, and Ho Chi Minh) from May to September 2023. I have completed gathering secondary data (i.e., archival records) using UVic’s library databases and other online sources. My next step is to collect primary data, including i) interviews with Vingroup’s informants (i.e., founder, managers, and leaders), ii) focus-group interviews with Vingroup’s stakeholders (i.e., local governments, customers/ clients in Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh cities), and iii) on-site observations at Vingroup’s headquarters (in Hanoi) and its manufacturing factory (in Hai Phong city). These three main activities aim to capture the informants’ narratives, interpretations, and justification toward articulating the process behind Vingroup’s employing patriotism throughout its legitimation of innovation.