Rebuilding a society: Binghamton researchers look to help Ukrainians affected by war

For Andre Havrylyshyn, the news updates on the Russian invasion of Ukraine are daily reminders. They remind him that, amid the turmoil, his nephew, his cousins and his godfather who still live in Ukraine are all finding ways to keep going about their daily lives.

Those family members are also working, to help displaced people find housing in a war-torn country.

They’ve carried on, and with each reminder of that resilience, Havrylyshyn, a Ukrainian-American and assistant professor in the School of Management, has grown eager to help in a meaningful way.

He hadn’t considered how his own expertise in strategic management might be of use.

That is, until a colleague posed an intriguing hypothetical scenario: What if the phone rang and it was Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, seeking his advice as an expert in strategic management? What if he asked Havrylyshyn, “What should we do as we rebuild our country?”

What if research that began at SOM could help inspire other scholars to draw upon their own areas of expertise to help Ukraine in similar ways? For Havrylyshyn and Rory Eckardt, an associate professor in SOM, a series of research projects that began earlier this year are designed to draw out answers to those complex questions.

We’re experts in the running of organizations and we’re hoping to leverage our management expertise in a way that could help the people of Ukraine,” Havrylyshyn says. “Rebuilding Ukraine means rebuilding a society — people returning to their coffee shop or their restaurant, the private sector companies that have thousands of employees — the kinds of things we management scholars are good at exploring.”

The research has been divided into several areas — studying what rebuilding Ukraine could involve from management perspectives, speaking with people affected by geopolitical events and exploring how companies around the world respond to governmental action. It demonstrates just one of the ways SOM researchers are making a global impact.

“To implement this research, it involves collaborations in Ukraine with institutions, other universities, government organizations and nonprofits,” Eckardt says. “We want to get more people involved, because I think the future is going to be full of even more complex issues to work around.”

Laying the groundwork

Not long after the Russian invasion in February 2022, Havrylyshyn reached out to contacts at organizations based in Ukraine to offer any assistance from an academic standpoint. He gave a few virtual lectures to private sector organizations based there, mostly about administrative obstacles connected to living in the midst of a war.

Later, a Ukrainian university invited Havrylyshyn and Eckardt to guest speak virtually at a conference focused on the role of nonprofit organizations in Ukraine’s recovery.

The conference centered on how management scholars could address challenges for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Ukraine and what insights drawn from the private sector could make those NGOs more effective.

“That sort of thinking, even if done in the abstract, is relevant because it helps the people of Ukraine in their rebuilding process to be as effective as they can be with the resources they will have available to them,” Eckardt says.

More motivated than ever and with greater knowledge of what Ukrainians were facing, these experiences paved the way for Havrylyshyn and Eckardt to explore new research to help Ukrainians deal with such long-term challenges.

Researching ways to help in Ukraine

A starting point for the pair of researchers involved teaming up with fellow academics to study what value using their research skills to help Ukraine could bring, beyond immediate assistance to those affected by the war.

They wanted research to not only be impactful, but broad enough to avoid becoming quickly outdated and potentially help add context in the discussion of similar events in the future.

“It can mean just looking at a case study of what’s going on over there that builds more broadly on what makes for good management,” Havrylyshyn says, “but it can also mean doing new research outside of Ukraine by looking at problems and considerations that are key to what people there are living through.”

Havrylyshyn is also interviewing people who are closely tied to Ukraine for various reasons but live in other countries. He wants to understand how they’re affected by such significant geopolitical events while still going about their daily routines.

“We’re interested in learning not only how people in those situations balance that,” Havrylyshyn says, “but also what their colleagues could and should do in terms of supporting them.”

Another research project in the works explores how the situation in Ukraine plays into a larger context. In this case, Havrylyshyn is working with other colleagues to understand why some companies take a stand and essentially boycott a government’s action, particularly one that’s divisive or largely viewed as negative.

They started by investigating how and why some companies such as McDonald’s exited the Russian market after the invasion of Ukraine, while others did not. While there are many other high-profile examples of firms boycotting governments to make a moral statement, that has been largely unexplored by management researchers. Havrylyshyn says this study is trying to address that research gap in a meaningful way.

Answering complex questions

One of the more unique aspects of Havrylyshyn’s and Eckardt’s research is how it centers on a complex situation that many people might struggle to understand. There are few places in the world where people are living through a scenario like what has been playing out in Ukraine in the past year.

But ultimately, their research is driven by the desire to understand what lies ahead for a country in turmoil. Of their many related research projects, perhaps their most critical is a study Havrylyshyn and Eckardt have undertaken that deals with the issue of rebuilding Ukraine.

To help ensure this research could be truly impactful, they determined it also had to draw upon the wealth of existing academic literature available from political science and international relations experts.

“Just doing a paper about what you need to know if you’re a manager of a private-sector company in Ukraine wouldn’t be enough,” Havrylyshyn says. “It’s got to be about how NGOs work with private- sector institutions and with the government, and should also address what role religious institutions, like the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, are going to have in that process.”

Havrylyshyn and Eckardt aren’t expecting a call from Ukraine’s president anytime soon asking for their input. Their goal, instead, is to lay out a broader research agenda with policy and practical implications to help the people in Ukraine.

Eckardt says it’s for the people of Ukraine to decide what their rebuilding process looks like in the future, but he hopes this research can demonstrate SOM’s ability to make a social impact.

“We’re demonstrating how we can do research that contributes not only to scholarly literature and scientific domains but can also be impactful and important to society.”