Author: leonidobusch

Professor of Organization at University of Innsbruck | Co-founder Momentum Conference and Momentum Institut | ZDF Verwaltungsrat | Blogging at netzpolitik.org

Book Review of »Organizational Wrongdoing« edited by Palmer, Smith-Crowe, and Greenwood

Earlier this year I was asked to serve as an Organization Studies book reviewer for ‘Organizational Wrongdoing’ edited by Donald Palmer, Kristin Smith-Crowe, and Royston Greenwood. My review has now been published in the most recent issue of Organization Studies. The final paragraph summarizes my reading of the volume as follows:

The final chapter of the volume (Chapter 16 by Chugh and Kern) then returns to the individual level in presenting suggestions on how to conceptualize and practice “ethical learning”. The chapter is a truly worthy conclusion, providing concrete suggestions for management practice. At the same time, it is also prototypical for the volume as a whole, focusing on reflection at an individual level instead of more collective and political processes of dealing with organizational wrongdoing. The latter perspective would not only put more emphasis on processes of subjectivation in the course of attributing “wrongdoing” to individuals, but might also arrive at different suggestions for practice such as ideas related to criminal law for corporations. This would reflect the, at least partially, emergent character of organizational wrongdoing. Given the importance of political processes and institutional contexts for organizational wrongdoing highlighted by several of the contributions in this volume, political organizing based on solidarity is probably as important as ethical learning by individuals.

The full text of the book review is available at the journal’s website. As usual, please send me an e-mail in case you are interested but your institution does not provide access to the journal.

 

Research Blog Recommendation (1): Orgtheory.net

This series points to other research blogs of potential interest for the Organization Studies Innsbruck Community.

Orgtheory.net is a multi-author blog run mostly by US scholars. All bloggers at orgtheory.net share a strong research orientation and they take organization theory seriously. The basic load of the blog is provided by hard blogging researcher Fabio Rojas, professor of sociology at Indiana University.  He has also authored over 40 posts on “grad school rulez”, explaining everything there is to know about US graduate education and PhD programs (see also the e-book version).

Above all, orgtheory.net is one of the oldest and continuously filled blogs in the realm of organization studies and therefore a worthy first entry in this series. Check back soon for more recommendations.

At a glance:

  • Orgtheory.net provides timely assessment of current debates in organization theory from a US perspective.
  • URL: orgtheory.net
  • Twitter/Facebook: –

 

Launch of the Blog »Organizing Openness: Concepts and Cases«

As Maximilian Heimstadt has announced earlier this week, we are currently working on a textbook on “Organizing Openness”. Given the topic of the book, we plan to also openly document the process of writing the textbook itself.

In the course of a kick-off meeting to launch the project in Vienna, we therefore started a blog on “Organizing Openness: Concepts and Cases” under O2C2.org (you can also follow the blog via Twitter at @O2C2project). In addition to continuous updates on the blog, we will also link to working documents for each of the chapters on the page “Textbook-in-Progress“, which will be open for anyone to comment.

New Publication: »Memes as Games: The Evolution of a Digital Discourse Online«

Stylized depiction of the “Hope” meme (Seiffert-Brockmann et al., 2017)

Probably the most pervasive example of how the internet turned popular culture from read-only into read-write (Lessig, 2008) is internet memes. In a new paper published in New Media & Society, Jens Seiffert-Brockmann, Trevor Diehl and myself have tried theoretically capture the communication logic of how memes spread and evolve. This is the abstract:  Continue reading “New Publication: »Memes as Games: The Evolution of a Digital Discourse Online«” →

Study Questions for Article on »Financialization as Strategy« Courtesy of Dirk Bezemer

Today I received a surprising and pleasant e-mail by Dirk Bezemer from University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He had come across the recently published article of Sebastian Botzem and myself on “Financialization as strategy: Accounting for inter-organizational value creation in the European real estate industry” (see also a summary of key points). And he not only read the paper but also chose to use it as a teaching case.

And I am very grateful that Dirk agreed to sharing his teaching questions on this blog (DOC/PDF), thereby effectively turning a research paper into a teaching case.

Continue reading “Study Questions for Article on »Financialization as Strategy« Courtesy of Dirk Bezemer” →

Program of the 2nd OS ConJunction Students and Alumni Day: »Organizing and Entrepreneurship«

(Picture: Martin Grandjean, CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Alumni-Team of the Master Program Organization Studies and the Transferstelle Wissenschaft – Wirtschaft – Gesellschaft invite to the 2nd Organization Studies ConJunction Students and Alumni Day on November 24, 2017, 3:00 p.m., Kaiser-Leopold-Saal, Faculty of Theology, University of Innsbruck. And this is the program under the headline of “Organizing and Entrepreneurship”: Continue reading “Program of the 2nd OS ConJunction Students and Alumni Day: »Organizing and Entrepreneurship«” →

New Publication: »Open strategy-making with crowds and communities«

Academic publication processes often take some time. For example, the article “Open strategy-making with crowds and communities: Comparing Wikimedia and Creative Commons” by Jakob Kapeller and myself, which has now been published in Long Range Planning, is not entirely new. Back in 2013 at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida, we had already received the prestigious Carolyn Dexter Best International Paper Award for a previous version of the article. Several rounds of revision later, we can proudly present the abstract of the now published final version of the paper:

In the wake of new digital technologies, organizations rely increasingly on contributions by external actors to innovate or even to fulfill their core tasks, including strategy-making processes. These external actors may take the form of crowds, where actors are isolated and dispersed, or of communities, where these actors are related and self-identify as members of their communities. While we know that including new actors in strategy-making may lead to tensions, we know little about how these tensions differ when either crowds or communities are concerned. Investigating this question by analyzing open strategy-making initiatives conducted by two non-profit organizations (Creative Commons and Wikimedia), we find that tensions with communities may be resolved with increasing openness in strategy-making, while crowds are better compatible with more exclusive strategy-making practices.

The full text of the article is available at the journal’s website. As usual, please send me an e-mail in case you are interested but your institution does not provide access to the journal.

New Publication: »Open to Feedback? Formal and Informal Recursivity in Creative Commons’ Transnational Standard-Setting«

SOTC-gif-main
Animation by Creative Commons (Source)

Together with Sigrid Quack (University of Duisburg-Essen) and Markus Lang (University of Heidelberg), I have investigated the case of Creative Commons to learn more about formal and informal feedback cycles in transnatioal standard-setting. The article “Open to Feedback? Formal and Informal Recursivity in Creative Commons’ Transnational Standard-Setting” has been published in Global Policy and the abstract reads as follows:

In this article, we examine how non-membership organizations that claim stewardship over a transnational public or common good, such as the environmental or digital commons, develop combinations of formal and informal recursivity to develop and maintain regulatory conversations with their dispersed user communities. Based on a case study of Creative Commons, an organization that developed what have become the most widely used open licenses for digital content, we show how rhetorical openness to informal feedback from legitimacy communities in different sectors and countries can improve the feasibility and diffusion of standards. However, as long as the standard-setter’s methods of making decisions on the basis of such feedback remains opaque, its communities are likely to raise accountability demands for more extensive ex post justifications.

Global Policy also asks its authors to provide at least three policy implications, which we were happy to deliver: Continue reading “New Publication: »Open to Feedback? Formal and Informal Recursivity in Creative Commons’ Transnational Standard-Setting«” →

New Publication: »A Communication Perspective on Open Strategy and Open Innovation«

In a recent article (PDF) published in the leading German management research journal Managementforschung, Waldemar Kremser (Radboud University Nijmegen), David Seidl, Felix Werle (both University of Zurich) and I have tried to systematically compare the more recent stream of literature on open strategy-making with previous studies on open innovation. For doing so, we operationalized organizational openness in communication terms, guided by a Luhmannian understanding of organizations as communication. The abstract of the paper reads as follows: Continue reading “New Publication: »A Communication Perspective on Open Strategy and Open Innovation«” →

Drei Fragen in drei Minuten: Video zur Entstehung von Blasen im Immobilienbereich

Zu dem im Juni in der Zeitschrift “Accounting, Organizations and Society” erschienen Beitrag über finanzialisierte Geschäftsmodelle in der Immobilienbranche ist jetzt auch auf der Webseite der Universität Innsbruck ein Beitrag erschienen: “Immobilien: Vom Entstehen der Blase“.

In diesem Kontext durfte ich auch in einem kurzen Interview die Kernerkenntnisse und Ableitungen des Beitrags in Videoform zusammenfassen. Entscheidend für Regulierung ist der Fokus auf Gebühren, kurz: Follow the fees!

Quelle und Link zum Beitrag, um den es geht: Botzem, S., & Dobusch, L. (2017). Financialization as strategy: Accounting for inter-organizational value creation in the European real estate industry. Accounting, Organizations and Society, im Druck.