After UZH Chair of Organization and Management in 2024 and Saïd Business School at University of Oxford in 2025, this year was our turn to host the 3rd Open Strategy Research Workshop at Universität Innsbruck. Even at the risk of sounding like one of those all-too-familiar and unconvincing LinkedIn cheerleading posts, I want to celebrate this event here and share some photos and slides.
Continue reading “3rd Open Strategy Workshop 2026 at University of Innsbruck”
Together with three (former) doctoral students of mine, I had the honor to contribute three quite foundational entries to the brand new Edward Elgar Encyclopedia of Strategy as Practice, edited by Benjamin Grossmann-Hensel, Paula Jarzabkowski, Renate Kratochvil, David Seidl, Paul Spee, and Richard Whittington.
»Organization« (with Alwin Baumhöver):
The ontological question of what defines an organization has not been a central theme in strategy-as-practice (SAP) research (Kuhn, 2021), similar to more traditional strategy research that mostly takes organization for granted, as well. Yet, given the flat ontology of practice-theoretical approaches in general, the (re-)constitution of organizational phenomena from an SAP perspective can be conceptualized in the same manner as any social formation, based upon ongoing, patterned, and socially situated human activities (Schatzki, 2006). Building upon these foundations, one could even go so far to posit that what makes a social formation organizational in particular, is that its constituting bundle of interrelated sociomaterial practices is, at least to some degree, coordinated or driven by practices labelled as ‘strategic’ or ‘strategy-making’.
Continue reading “Three Entries in the EE Encyclopedia of Strategy-as-Practice: »Organization«, »Practices« & »Participation«”
Together with Maximilian Heimstädt, I had the honor to contribute the closing chapter of the volume “The Politics of Open Infrastructures: Power, Governance, and Justice in Digital Knowledge Practices”, edited by Katja Mayer, Astrid Mager and Renée Ridgway (editor)
Our concluding chapter is somewhere between manifesto and essay, entitled “Open Digital Infrastructures for Democratic Resilience and Economic Sovereignty”. Check out the abstract below:
This chapter advances six theses on why digital resilience and economic sovereignty in platformised societies depend on the systematic strengthening of open digital infrastructures. It argues that proprietary, centralised platforms generate structural dependencies, democratic vulnerabilities and economic lock-in effects, while open standards, open protocols and free software enable decentralisation, interoperability and collective self-empowerment. Conceptualising open digital infrastructures as digital commons shifts attention from problems of overuse to challenges of provision, maintenance and sustainable financing. Treating open infrastructures as essential public services, comparable to transport or energy networks emphasises responsibilities of the state in funding and regulating such infrastructures. Yet, to avoid undermining their decentralised character, pluralistic governance arrangements and new legal forms of public social ownership such as public infrastructure funds, mandatory commons contributions and multi-stakeholder oversight are needed.
The whole book has been published by Open Book Publishers and is thus available open access in various formats.
Looking back, I can hardly remember a research project where the research gap was so glaringly obvious to me: while open strategy research investigates transparent and participatory approaches to strategy-making, over more than a decade of Open Strategy research not a single article addressed its relationship to traditional forms of workplace democracy. This is particularly stunning since increasing transparency and participation in strategy are key tasks of works councils and codetermination regulations in many continental European countries.
Yet, there are several reasons for this omission:
Give this situation, it was by no means certain that the research essay by Felix Schmid and myself on “Open Strategy and Traditional Workplace Democracy: Bridging Breadth and Depth of Inclusion” was to be easily published. Consequently, I am all the more pleased to report that it has just been accepted for publication at Strategic Organization. The abstract reads as follows:
Continue reading “New Article in Strategic Organization: »Open Strategy and Traditional Workplace Democracy: Bridging Breadth and Depth of Inclusion«”
Zum ersten Mal durfte ich dieses Jahr bei der Berliner re:publica, Europas größter Konferenz zur digitalen Gesellschaft, auf Stage 1 vortragen. Gemeinsam mit der Kommunikationswissenschaftlerin Nadia Zaboura habe ich zum Thema “Ganz normale Medien und ihr Beitrag zum Comeback des Faschismus” gesprochen. Aus der Ankündigung des Vortrags:
Das ist keine Übung. Der Vormarsch neofaschistischer Ideen und Parteien ist real. Ermöglicht und mitbefeuert hat diesen Vormarsch ganz normaler Journalismus in ganz normalen Medien – mit vermeintlich neutralem Blick und falscher Objektivität.
Autoritäre und neofaschistische Kräfte profitieren weltweit von einer Doppelstrategie: Einerseits setzen sie seit Jahren auf neue Digitalplattformen, um Menschen direkt zu erreichen – und profitieren dort von deren Algorithmen. Andererseits profitieren sie aber auch von ganz normalem Journalismus in ganz normalen Medien und deren “Algorithmen”: falsche Ausgewogenheit, falsche Gleichsetzung, falsche Dilemmata, Doppelstandards, Mikrofonständerjournalismus und viele weitere Standardsituationen des Medienversagens mehr.
Entscheidend ist dabei, dass diese nicht Ausnahme- sondern Regelfall von normalem, sich als möglichst ‘neutral’ oder ‘objektiv’ verstehendem Journalismus sind. Es ist nicht nur der ‘Boulevard’, es sind nicht nur Axel-Springer- und Newscorp-Medien. Sondern es sind dominante Medienlogiken bis tief hinein in den Qualitätsjournalismus, die sie zu hilflosen Helfern und damit aktiven Ermöglichern neofaschistischer Kommunikationsstrategien und Raumnahme machen.
Die zentrale Ableitung unseres Vortrags: Journalism-as-usual muss enden. Medien ohne klare, antifaschistische Ausrichtung sind Teil des Problems und nicht der Lösung.
Overshadowed by the tragic passing of my co-author, Paul Zimmermann, I want to share the news that our joint article on “Questioning the ‘transparency-fix’ in the fight against corruption: The example of Transparency International” has been published in Critical Policy Studies. Please check out the abstract below:
Increasingly, transparency is seen as a panacea in the fight against the ‘cancer of corruption’ and as a solution that fixes problems associated with all sorts of organizational misbehavior. In this paper, we turn the given into a question and study transparency not as a solution to the problem of corruption, but rather as a historically contingent form of problematization that links specific problem constructions with specific technologies for governing behavior. Drawing on the Foucauldian concepts of ‘problematization’ and ‘moral technologies,’ we analyze the NGO Transparency International as a critical case with strategic importance for the more general problem of disentangling the ‘transparency-power nexus’ and of understanding the politics of regulation in the name of transparency.
The article is available open access at the journal’s website.
It is with great sadness that we share the news that Paul Zimmermann, a valued member of the Organization Studies Innsbruck community, lost his life in an avalanche.
After finishing the Organization Studies Master’s program, Paul successfully completed his PhD (Management) in December 2025. In his dissertation, he critically studied the phenomenon of whistleblowing and how it is regulated and enacted in organizations.
One reason why it is so hard to reign into Big Tech social media platforms is their own contradictions. In a brand new article by Elke Schüßler, Sara Maric and myself, we try to unpack how Big Tech both expand and subvert democratic publics by looking at the case of YouTube – and explore the potentials and challenges of Fediverse alternatives based on decentralized architectures and distributed governance.
The issue is that both is true at the same time: YouTube has expanded our democratic public by lowering barriers for content creation and distribution; and it also has subverted our democratic public by amplifying extremist, emotionalising or propagandistic content.
To give another example, it is YouTube’s monopolistic market dominance is that makes it so strong and valuable as a market place for creators and users alike; at the same time, the proprietary governance by profit-driven algorithms leads to discriminatory practices such as shadow bans without accountability, frustrating both creators and users.
Continue reading “New Article in Information & Organization: »Digital platforms and democratic publics: How social media platforms selectively appropriate and strategically subvert institutional logics«”
While Aging in Place – the possibility to grow old in one’s own home – is a wide-spread ideal for many people, it comes with an increased risk of loneliness in later life. In a study spearheaded by my PhD student Andrea Kastl and co-authored together with Ulrike Fettke, we empirically explored the perspectives and practices of dealing with loneliness as voiced by older people who want to age in place. The study entitled “Experiences and social constructions of loneliness in later life: Collaborative focus group discussions in Germany” has now been published in the journal Health Policy. Our main conclusions based upon collaborative focus group discussions:
Assessing loneliness requires taking individual perspectives into account, as mere quantification of social contacts is insufficient for evaluation or intervention design. To help cope with loneliness, health professionals are an important social interface and can become a substitute for close relationships. This should be reflected in professional roles and in developing complementary technologies and policies.
The article is available open access over at Health Policy.
In the wake of a workshop on “Digital Responsibility” at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Professors of Business Administration (VHB) at Leuphana University Lüneburg that brought together scholars and perspectives from organization studies (OS) and information systems (IS), the workshop organizers Hannah Trittin-Ulbrich, Markus Zimmer and Stefanie Habersang edited a curated essay collection to be published in Schmalenbach Journal of Business Research (SBUR).
Together with Elke Schüßler and Maren Gierlich-Joas, I contributed one such essay offering “Interdisciplinary Theoretical Reflections On Digital Responsibility”. It is summarized in the introducation as follows:
Essay 1 situates the first and second fault line in OS and IS scholars ongoing discourses on theory. The authors distinguish three views of theorizing that we can find in both disciplines. They highlight that OT and IS scholars often draw on the same theories, which provides a basis for interdisciplinary research into digital responsibility. Offering a vantage point, they present avenues for such research by their three views of theorizing.
The whole essay collection is available open access over at SBUR.
ConJunction 