KALPANA Vignehsa

Dr Kalpana Vignehsa is Senior Research Fellow in the Governance and Economy department at the Institute of Policy Studies. She works on topics related to immigration and social integration in families and workplaces. Kalpana also has interests in the lived experience of parenthood and behavioural interventions in healthcare and environmentalism. 

Before joining IPS in 2020, Kalpana worked across public advocacy, academia, non-government work, and consulting. Most recently, she was Design Ethnographer at the Australian Consumer Association, where she led the social research programme within R&D. The team developed new digital solutions to promote good business behaviour and empower consumers to better protect themselves from problems created by imperfect markets and policy. Kalpana worked on projects related to housing, the circular-economy, ageing, and energy affordability. Her team did in-market experiments and launched some scale, built award-winning products, and seeded new ventures.

Prior to this, Kalpana was Assistant Professor at UTS Business School. Her research focused on organisational “stuckedness”—the how and why of our persistence with practices that are non-generative, or even counterproductive. She also taught in the Executive MBA, the MBA, and Undergraduate programmes on subjects ranging from the role of cities in moulding business innovation, to organisational cultures, to business leadership and stewardship.

Kalpana received her PhD in Organisational Sociology from the University of Technology Sydney (Australia). She also holds a Bachelors of International Business and a BA with Honours in Political Science and International Relations from Macquarie University (Australia). 

Research Interests
Binational families; lived experience of parenthood; immigration and integration; social integration and the workplace; behavioural science-based interventions in healthcare and environmentalism

• Vignehsa, K. (2015). Genealogical Ethnography: Process Thinking to Study the ‘Inside’ of Projects. Project Management Journal, Vol. 46, No. 2, pp. 60 - 72. 
  
• Vignehsa, K. (2015). Intra-organizational Project Governance from the Bottom-up. In Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference of European Academy of Management (EURAM), Kozminski University, Warsaw, Poland, 17-20 June 2015.
• Vignehsa, K. (2014). Genealogical Ethnography: Applying Loose and Strict Thinking to Fieldwork, Headwork, and Textwork in Project Scholarship. In Proceedings of the 14th Annual Conference of European Academy of Management (EURAM), Universitat de València, Valencia, Spain, 4-7 June 2014. 
• Vignehsa, K. (2013). The Art of Stuckedness: When Crisis meets Practice. In Proceedings of the 15th Meeting of Asia-Pacific Researchers in Organisation Studies (APROS), Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, Japan, 14-7 February 2013.
• Vignehsa, K. (2012). Double Moral Hazard in Projects: A Governance Perspective? In Proceedings of the 28th European Group for Organisational Studies (EGOS) Colloquium, Aalto University & Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland, 5-7 July 2012. 
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Vignehsa, K. (2012). Tools of change: an investigation of dynamic capabilities in project-based organizations. In Proceedings of the 28th European Group for Organisational Studies (EGOS) Colloquium, Aalto University & Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland, 5-7 July 2012. 
Vignehsa, K. (2011). Project Organising: The Antidote to Organisational Stuckedness? In Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of European Academy of Management (EURAM), Estonian Business School, Tallinn, Estonia, 31 May-4 June 2011.