The 83rd annual meeting of the Academy of Management took place in Boston this year. Under the theme “Putting the Worker Front and Center”, more than 10.000 scholars and practitioners joined the conference’s professional development workshops (PDW), paper sessions, symposia, keynotes, and very importantly, its socials. Leonhard Dobusch and Milena Leybold were two of these attendees, who, among other scholars representing the University of Innsbruck, had the pleasure of enjoying a great program and Boston as a fantastic conference site. In this blog entry, they share some of their highlights. As Leonhard is this year’s chair of the Strategy-as-Practice (SAP) Interest Group (IG) and Milena part of the Social Media Committee of the Interest Group, they were both actively engaged in events organized by and for the IG.
On Friday, August 4th, Leonhard and Milena were responsible for hosting the SAP Morning Coffee Table at 7:30 am (no problem for jetlagged Europeans, of course 😉). Besides familiar faces, we were very happy to welcome first time attendees like Luz Rivas from Colombia, who does research on inclusion practices in open strategy. It was a very nice and heart-warming kick-off, since we have met some colleagues for the first time in-person ever, others for the first time since the pandemic hit.
Afterwards, Milena co-organized a PDW titled “The Public as Co-Strategizers: Communicative Perspectives on Strategizing in the Public Sphere”. The room was packed, when four great panelists, Gail Fairhurst, Linda Putnam, Rebecca Bednarek, and Eero Vaara shared their (communicative) perspectives on strategizing in and by the public. Rebecca, for example, presented an intriguing case of indigenous strategizing in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
We ended this first day with an amazing and rich joint SAP Dinner.
We headed home to get some sleep – in anticipation to what was planned for Saturday morning: The first ‘Unconferencing’ session in the history of the AOM, co-organized by Leonhard, Madalina Pop, and Seray Ergene. Leonhard has already blogged about this energetic experience here.
Monday was packed. We started with a paper presentation by Milena together with Konstatin Hondros (University of Duisburg-Essen). The paper, co-authored by Leonhard and Sigrid Quack and titled “Recycling, mimicking, and shortcutting: how organizations strategically handle knowledge input in open science” unpacks how organizations recycle existing and available knowledge input, mimic existing vaccine technologies to develop and design their vaccines, and shortcut parts of the approval processes. We discuss how these practices of strategically handling knowledge on the input side shape knowledge sharing on the output side of open science. The presentation kicked-off an intriguing debate on potential policy implications from this research in response to (or better preparedness for) pandemics.
Later that day, we had the honor to listen to SAP’s distinguished keynote speaker, Wanda Orlikowski (MIT Sloan), who talked about “Materializations in Practice: Studying Work in the Digital Era”. What an inspiring talk! One of my favorite quotes from her talk: “Today, all work is digital work.” She introduced the audience to the “digital undertow”, a concept she has recently explored together with Susan Scott and published in Organization Theory.
We ended the Monday with the SAP business meeting (one of Leonhard’s last official tasks before passing the hat on to the next SAP IG Chair), where we acknowledged this year’s award winners (Milena was awarded for her engagement for the community) and a fantastic SAP social feast!
In sum, this AoM Annual Meeting was a rich mix of fruit for thought, not least provided by all informal gatherings with inspiring people on the hallways or socials and receptions organized by AoM Divisions/IGs and other universities. Despite an air-condition that was set-up for people wearing skiing outfits, the overall atmosphere was warm, welcoming, and engaging.
ConJunction 