Berit Virtanen-Thewlis

Research interests

In my doctoral research, I study how corporate boards read time. I look at how they recognise when gradual developments become strategically meaningful disturbances, how they align multiple time horizons, and how they build strategic continuity under uncertainty. I see governance not only as formal decisions and structures but as collective sensemaking. I develop the concept of temporal literacy to describe a board’s shared capacity to do this work.

I’m particularly interested in how this capacity is built in everyday board practice, how digital governance tools reshape it, and how boards rebuild it when their membership changes. I focus especially on owner-governed and family firms.

My research draws on sensemaking, time and organization studies, and sociomateriality. Empirically, my work is grounded in narrative interviews with board professionals and digital ethnography of board work.

Before research, I spent more than 30 years in international business, in executive roles and on boards. I aim to contribute both to academic debates on corporate governance and to how boards actually work. One example is Hallitusrotaatio – uudistuva hallitus yrityksen strategisena työkaluna (Board Rotation: The Renewing Board as a Strategic Tool, Tietosanoma 2026), a book for board practitioners.