Inspiring input, exhausting heat, and dolce vita! A short summary of the 39th EGOS Colloquium 2023 in Cagliari

Last week, Monica Nadegger, Katharina Zangerle, and Milena Leybold (University of Innsbruck, Department for Organization and Learning) traveled to the beautiful island Sardegna to meet for four days with around 2000 people at the Colloquium of the European Group of Organization Studies.

From the left: Monica Nadegger, Milena Leybold, Katharina Zangerle

While Milena kicked-off her EGOS experience with a paper development workshop (incl. panel) on Grand Challenges, Communication, and Performativity, which she had co-organized herself, Monica participated in the CCO Data Collective Workshop. In the evening, Monica and Milena went to the opening ceremony as they were shortlisted to potentially win the “EGOS Best Student Paper Award 2022” for a paper that is co-authored by their colleague Sean Kenney (CU Boulder, Colorado). And they got it! A true highlight of this year’s EGOS and a great honor for the authors.

After celebrating this achievement on Wednesday, July 5th, the main part of the conference started July 6^th: the sub-themes. Katharina presented her paper titled “Then my baby is a baby no longer: Organizing emotions through romanticizing metaphors in the life sciences” – which is about metaphors as epistemic practice in laboratories (and possible problematic implications) – in sub-theme #36 “Framing Innovation with Words: A Linguistic Approach”. Milena and Monica attended sub-theme #06 on “Performing the Future Communicatively: How What Does Not Yet Exist Already Makes a Difference“. On Thursday, Milena presented a paper on the negotiation of organizational vocabulary in strategic change processes and showed how practices of using organizational vocabulary shape strategic change as well as participation in strategy-making. Monica took her audience to the alps and talked about the rhythms of snow and their consequences for organizing radically different times within the business-as-usual rhythms in the Anthropocene.

We all attended the must-go party on Friday evening, which included some dance in the rain, a nice refreshment after days walking and presenting in the heat of South Italy.