A gift that kept on giving
The day she entered kindergarten, Jean Bartunek, R.S.C.J., decided she wanted to be a teacher. A year later, entering first grade, she decided she wanted to become a Catholic sister.
“Isn’t it nice when all your life decisions are made by the time you are in first grade?” Sr. Bartunek, the Robert and Evelyn J. Ferris Chair and Professor of Management and Organization in the Carroll School of Management, told a Gasson 100 audience as she delivered a “last lecture” recently to mark her retirement from full-time academic work.
A pioneering academician, Sr. Bartunek was one of the first two tenure-track women hired onto the faculty of what was then BC’s School of Management in 1977, along with her Carroll School colleague Judith Gordon.
Sr. Bartunek’s career has embraced contrasting actions and ideas, such as scholarship and practice, and being both a committed academic and a vowed religious woman. Her primary scholarly interests center around organizational change and academic-practitioner relationships. She has investigated topics like large-scale organizational change, how knowledge is shared across theory and practice boundaries, and relationships and interactions among change agents and recipients, often from the perspective of dialectical processes.
These dialectical features, she told an audience that included friends, colleagues from the Carroll School and across the University, doctoral students, and fellow members of the Society of the Sacred Heart, first arrived as “a Christmas gift” on December 25, 1976.
Having earned her doctorate in social and organizational psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago earlier that year, Sr. Bartunek was teaching in the University of Illinois Urbana-Champlain management department and considering whether to make her final vows as a religious. On Christmas morning she was praying with the prologue to the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…”
“I was thinking, ‘How boring. A super powerful God telling us what to do from some distance away, like some theorists do. Why in the world would I care about it?’ But then, later on, the prologue says, ‘And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.’ I thought: ‘This is theory and practice together. It’s a relationship with God. Wow. I can make my final vows now and I know what I want to do with my career.’
“That’s not bad for a Christmas gift.”
She joined BC the next fall and made her final vows as a religious the following year.
Sr. Bartunek with retired Carroll School Professor David Twomey and Connell School of Nursing Professor Ann Burgess at the event.
Sr. Bartunek said the Christmas “gift” has led her to pay attention to dialectical properties over the course of her BC career, especially those related to organizational change and relationships between scholarship and practice. They have been salient as well when she has served in leadership positions in her professional association, the Academy of Management.
;She has recently been exploring how researchers may sometimes serve in supporting roles to practitioners. She used as a prime example the work of Professor Ann Burgess in the Connell School of Nursing, who taught members of the Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI a great deal about how to conduct social science research in the service of profiling very serious offenders.
While her lecture explored some of the topics that have defined her work, Sr. Bartunek also devoted time to people who helped to shape her life and career. For example, she noted that over time her aspirations of whom she wanted to teach moved from young children to doctoral students, and she showed photos that included all graduates of the Organization Studies doctoral program since its beginning in 1992.
She also thanked Robert and Evelyn Ferris, who have funded her endowed chair: “They made a huge difference in my life and in the lives of many of my students.”
Sr. Bartunek noted that the underlying meanings of the Christmas gift continue to unfold in generative ways. She concluded by saying she felt very lucky to have shared the last 49 years with Judith Gordon—who retired last year—and the other members of the Management and Organization department.
“I loved being part of our department and I’ve loved the chance to have been at BC all of these years. Thank you.”