Revealing the Purpose of a Stakeholder Organisation: The Case of a Public University Responding to the COVID-19 ‘Corona’ Crisis

By the beginning of March 2020, Austria went into a state of emergency due to the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 (‘Corona’) virus. Social life was on hold and public and private organisations were close to a complete shutdown; medium-term and long-term implications were unforeseeable at that time. As a consequence, universities also had to adapt their modus operandi. In this “ad-hoc” empirical paper we report on how a public university responded to this low-probability-high-consequence event. We analyse the email communications that occurred during the very first phase of responding to this crisis in respect to the organisation's purpose and its salience. As our findings indicate, a situation of emergency reveals the priority of some ends over others of the organisation's purpose. We contribute to the debate on multi-objective purposes of stakeholder-focused organisations (such as public universities) and provide singular empirical evidence.