Business PhD Spotlight: Maggie Cascadden
For PhD candidate Maggie Cascadden, devoting her career to building a better future was always a given. She spent her childhood roaming the forests and beaches of British Columbia supported by her family’s connections to ¾ÅÐãÖ±²¥’s oil and gas industry. As such, she has always seen the environment and industry as a “both/and.” She is inspired to use her career to carve out a future with a resilient and reconciled economy that foregrounds environmental sustainability.
Cascadden did not start out in business but through studying sustainability at McGill University, working with a nonprofit conservation, and completing a master’s in resource and environmental management at Simon Fraser University, she became confident about her path forward. She realized two things. First, she was passionate about research and wanted a career in academia. Second, the role of organizations and businesses in the context of sustainability was a critical area that she wanted to make an impact in. With this in mind, she decided to pursue a PhD at the ¾ÅÐãÖ±²¥ School of Business supervised by two leading experts who are also focused on making the world a better place: and
“I was excited to read papers for class, to write and to learn more about how organizations worked, and share this knowledge before I even started my doctoral program. I realized I could build a career doing what I loved, so a PhD in strategy, entrepreneurship and management was just the answer!”
Enrolled in the ¾ÅÐãÖ±²¥’s business doctoral program, Cascadden studies organizations and their roles in — and relationships to — addressing the most pressing problems of our time, such as how organizations both address and contribute to climate change and how we can substantially address climate change while also keeping our economy strong. As she investigates how organizations and communities engage with each other, her thesis asks an important question ‘How do communities respond when an industry disappears?’ Her work centers on a community near Edmonton and how they are coping with the closure of nearby coal mines and plants.
“Today’s pressing problems will require nuanced responses. With this, it becomes more important than ever to involve the people who will be affected by decisions into the decision making process.”
Cascadden’s thesis topic looks to better understand how organizations decline or even die out. “At business schools, research excels at exploring how organizations start and grow, but there is a gap in understanding how organizations or industries die. If I’m going to address some of the major issues of our time, I want to shed light on why some of the organizations that existed for some time, did not survive the changing times.”
Her recent publications further explore how organizations can better work with, listen to and involve the communities they are a part of and neighbour to. Cascadden and her coauthors explore topics like best practices for closing down a mine (with Emily Block and Viva Bartkus in a forthcoming issue of Research in the Sociology of Organizations journal) and, in a recently accepted Organization Studies piece (with Kylie Heales, Pia Heidak, Matthew Kingston and Dev Jennings), she develops a method for how organizations can make decisions that better consider both community stakeholder concerns and the results of an internationally standardized tool for evaluating the environmental impact of products or processes: life cycle assessment.
An important tenet of Cascadden’s work, beyond asking questions that matter, is to ensure that the answers to these questions get to the people who need them. To this effect, she co-founded the Organizations and the Natural Environment and Social Issues in Management (ONE SIM) Outreach award with Emilio Marti. This award recognizes scholars who effectively communicate insights from a peer-reviewed paper. Through this award, the co-coordinating team, which Cascadden is part of, has produced videos to spread their ideas and best practices within the academic community.
Maggie Cascadden joined the ¾ÅÐãÖ±²¥ School of Business in 2018 as a PhD student specializing in strategy entrepreneurship, and management, under the supervision of and .