Looking back on the 35th EGOS Colloquium »Enlightening the Future« in Edinburgh

The annual Colloquium of the European Group of Organization Studies (EGOS) is a great opportunity to engage with a great variety of research communities. In 2019 University of Innsbruck’s department of organization and learning was represented with a record number of participants. Please find an overview of our contributions to this year’s EGOS Colloquium below.

• Sub-theme 55 on “Open Organizing for an Open Society? Connecting Research on Organizational Openness” was not only co-convened by Leonhard Dobusch. In addition, Andreas Streiter spoke about “The community, that’s us: Achieving organizationality by abandoning elements of formal organization” based upon a study of the community of mountain bikers in Innsbruck “#MTB Innsbruck”.

• Birthe Soppe got two papers accepted. First, in the Sub-theme on “Organizational Fields of the Future and the Future of Fields”, Birthe presented a paper co-authored with Nadine Arnold (University of Lucerne) on “Field stability and change: The co-evolution of fields and organizations in the case of fair trade”. The second paper entitled “How contestation buttresses legitimacy: A historical analysis of the 1855 Bordeaux wine classification”, co-authored with Grégoire Croidieu (Grenoble Ecole de Management) and Walter W. Powell (Stanford University), was presented in the Sub-Theme “Realizing the Potential of Historical Organization Studies”.
• Katharina Zangerle presented data from her research in the context of the research group “Organized Creativity” in the paper “Barracudas, Piranhas and Crowds: The Genesis of Value of Pharmaceutical Ideas”, contributing to sub-theme 44 “Valuation, Strategy and Organization”.
• Marilyn Poon spoke on “Organizing Practices of Journalistic Collaborations” in the Standing Working Group on “Routine Dynamics: New Ways of Organizing”.
• In the Standing Working Group on “Organization as Communication”, three papers with co-authors from Innsbruck were delivered. Milena Leybold presented a paper co-authored with Laura and Leonhard Dobusch on “The Google Memo gate: Negotiating organizational exclusion under the banner of inclusion”. Monica Nadegger, PhD fellow at the MCI and member of the doctoral program “Organizing the Digital”, gave a talk on “The role of non-human actors in the constitution of the collective identity of the #wirsindmehr protests in Germany” (PDF of the paper). In addition, Christoph Seckler (ESCP Europe) presented the paper “‘The story of how I failed…’ – A communication perspective on entrepreneurial failure”, which was also co-authored by Leonhard Dobusch and two other colleagues.
• Richard Weiskopf presented the paper “From universalizing transparency to the interplay of transparency matrices: Critical reflections on the Chinese Social Credit System and other unsettling phenomena” in the Standing Working Group “Organizing in the Age of Digitalization and Datafication: Surveillance, Transparency and Power” (PDF of the presentation). The paper was co-authored with Hans Krause Hansen (Copenhagen Business School).

In case you are interested in any of the papers, which are all work-in-progress, please do not hesitate to contact the authors for a copy. Some further impressions of this year’s EGOS conference can be found below.