Open Organizing – ConJunction

Join the Organidons: Organization and Management Scholars on Mastodon

This is what Open AI makes out of the instruction “organization scholarship in the style of digital retro art”

With its decentralized and non-profit nature, the Fediverse in general and Mastodon in particular provide a fitting and low-threshold opportunity to follow interesting researchers and practitioners, stay in touch with colleagues and share research output with the world. However, for a social network to thrive, it requires a critical mass of active users. To make it easier to find and (re-)connect with fellow organization and management scholars on Mastodon, we have launched the Organidons project: a curated opt-in only list of organization and management scholars on Mastodon.

The creation of this list was inspired by the collection of lists at Academics on Mastodon over at Github.

In addition, we have also extracted via fedifinder those people who are following the account of the journal Organization Studies on Twitter (@osofficer) and have put their Mastodon handle in their Twitter profile to be found there. Check out this list to get an overview of some people who are already on Mastodon (this list is static and won’t be updated in the future).

New Article in Long Range Planning: »Open about organizational failure«

After what had begun as the supervisor of Nils Köster‘s master thesis when I was still at Freie University of Berlin has finally resulted in a publication, together with co-authors Erik Schäfer (also FU Berlin) and Christoph Seckler (ESCP). The article “Open about organizational failure: A communication perspective on postmortem impression management” has been accepted for publication in Long Range Planning and shows how postmortem statements of failed startup founders may lead to what we call an “organizational afterlife”:

Being open about failure as an entrepreneur is an increasingly common practice in and beyond startup communities, for example by proactively and strategically crafting public statements to frame subsequent failure conversations. Combining an impression management perspective with an analysis of communicative genres of failure narratives, we empirically investigate postmortem statements of failed entrepreneurs. Shifting the discourse from the (content of the) failure narratives towards considering its broader communicative context, we show how genres emerge from patterns of failure narratives and impression management strategies. Our analysis suggests that subgenres of postmortem statements represent different forms of openness about failure, and some subgenres in particular contribute to establishing an ‘organizational afterlife’ as a potentially long-lasting impression management strategy.

The journal pre-proof version is already available at the journal’s website. In case you don’t have access please contact me and I will be happy to provide you with a copy.

EGOS 2019 Call for Short Papers: »Open Organizing for an Open Society?«

Logo of the 35th EGOS Colloquium in Edinburgh, UK

The 35th EGOS Colloquium will take place from July 4–6, 2019 in Edinburgh, UK, and for the third time after 2015 in Athens and 2017 in Copenhagen Georg von Krogh (ETH Zürich), Richard Whittington (Oxford University) and I will convene a sub-theme on organizational openness. Please find the Call for Short Papers (about 3.000 words) of sub-theme 55 on “Open Organizing for an Open Society? Connecting Research on Organizational Openness” below, submission deadline is January 14, 2019:

Discussions around open organizing date back to the 1950s, when organizations were conceptualized as open systems interdependent with their environments (e.g. Boulding, 1956). However, recent developments have seen openness recast as an organizing principle in a wide range of domains. Indeed, Tkacz (2012, p. 400) describes contemporary advanced societies as undergoing a “second coming of openness”. Thus we see the apparent rise of phenomena such as open innovation (Chesbrough, 2006), open strategy (Hautz et al., 2017), open software development (von Hippel & von Krogh, 2006), open government (Janssen et al., 2012), open science (Nosek et al., 2015), and open education (Seely et al., 2008).

While there is growing reference to notions of openness across domains, these are largely disconnected from each other, show few signs of convergence and lack theoretical reference between domains. This fragmentation is even more marked when considering related notions such as organizational fluidity (Dobusch & Schoenborn, 2015), liquidity (Kociatkiewicz & Kostera, 2014), boundlessness (Ashkenas et al., 2002) and partiality (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011). Alongside these notions, advanced societies appear also to be seeing the emergence of more open organizational forms such as crowds (Felin et al., 2014), communities (Faraj et al., 2016), ecosystems (Baldwin, 2012) or meta-organizations (Gulati et al., 2012). A central objective of the proposed sub-theme will be to bring together discussions of various forms of open organizing in order to explore possible commonalities and significant distinctions, and to develop means for more connected theorizing across domains and dimensions. Continue reading “EGOS 2019 Call for Short Papers: »Open Organizing for an Open Society?«” →

Fake Science and Predatory Journals: Antidote Open Peer Review?

Is Open Peer Review an Antidote against predatory publishers? (Credit: SarahRichterArt, CC0)

Digitalization reduces technological and financial barriers to scientific publishing. Science can thus become faster, more inclusive and more plural. At the same time, the growing acceptance of specific forms of Open Access has also led to the rise of author-pays business models based on Article Processing Charges (APCs). The increasing publication pressure in the scientific system in combination with APCs provides incentives for creating “predatory” journals that only supposedly or very superficially conduct peer review in order to maximize their profits from such APCs. These manuscripts are at best inadequate and at worst deliberately tendentious and misleading.

Recently, an investigative report by the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung and public broadcasters WDR and NDR has revealed that even researchers from reputable academic institutions publish in or represent publishers of dubious quality. In their attempt to reveal “Fake Science” (using the English term in their German reportings), journalists easily accomplished the publication of a non-sensical article in an allegedly peer reviewed journal charging APCs. What they also show is how these unscientific practices not just harm the reputation of legitimate open access journals but are also a potential source – and allegedly scientific proof – for fake news more generally.

This blogpost discusses how reputable (Open Access) journals can defend their credibility against somewhat or even completely dubious Open Access journals. In our opinion, the most sustainable response, which however would only be possible in the mid to long-term, would be to abandon author-pays business models altogether and switch to publication infrastructures financed by universities and institutions (for an example of such an approach, check out the Open Library of Humanities). In the short-term, however, certain open-peer review practices might also be helpful to address the problem of predatory open access journals.

>> Read the remainder of the full post at governance across borders

New Publication: »Closing for the Benefit of Openness« in Organization Studies

My sister, Laura (Radboud University in Nijmegen, NL), our colleague Gordon Müller-Seitz (TU Kaiserlautern), and I have looked at an open strategy-making process of Wikimedia, the non-profit foundation behind the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. In the paper “Closing for the Benefit of Openness?“, which is now open access available at the journal Organization Studies, we find that “simply” opening up preexisting organizational processes tends to reproduce or even reinforce social inequalities already in place. To enable broad participation and to reach out to particularly marginalized groups, openness is depending on certain forms of (procedural) closure. Pleas find the abstract of the paper below:

A growing number of organizations subscribe to ideals of openness in areas such as innovation or strategy-making, supported by digital technologies and fuelled by promises of better outcomes and increased legitimacy. However, by applying a relational lens of inclusion and exclusion, we argue that, paradoxically, certain forms of closure may be necessary to achieve desired open qualities in strategy-making. Analysing the case of Wikimedia, which called for participation in a globally open strategy-making process, we show that openness regarding participation in crafting strategy content depends on certain forms of closure regarding procedures of the strategy-making process. Against this background, we propose a two-dimensional framework of openness, in which content-related and procedural openness are characterized by a combination of open and closed elements.

Thanks to an open access agreement between Dutch universities and the publisher Sage, the fulltext is open availble.

New Publication: »Politics of Disclosure: Organizational Transparency as Multiactor Negotiation«

Creating transparency is oftentimes imagined as something that can easily be turned on or off. Zooming in, transparency is hard work. In a new paper published in Public Administration Review, Leonhard Dobusch and I have traced the multiactor negotiations that led to the creation of an overarching Open Data program in the city administration of Berlin. The abstract reads: Continue reading “New Publication: »Politics of Disclosure: Organizational Transparency as Multiactor Negotiation«” →

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 Project: Textbook on »Open Organizing«

Every year, Wikimedia Germany together with two partners (VolkswagenStiftung and Stifterverband) supports a small number of young scholars who are interested in the idea of open science. For eight months, these “Open Science Fellows” receive support to realize their own open science project outside the constraints of their research institution and culture. I was more than happy when in late September I got the message that my application for the class of 2017/18 was successful.

From October 2017 until 2018 I will receive financial support and mentoring (by the amazing Ina Blümel) to develop my personal open science project: Together with Leonhard Dobusch I will work on a management textbook on “Open Organizing” in which we intend to cover phenomena (e.g. open innovation, open strategy, open government) as well as theoretical concepts of openness (e.g. transparency, participation, boundaries). To make this project as open as possible, we will not only report on our progress on a dedicated blog (to be launched), but will make the textbook available as Open Educational Resource (OER). Using an open license (CC-BY or CC-BY-SA) anyone will be allowed to use, share, and remix the learning material for any purpose and at no cost.

This is a crosspost from Maximilian’s personal blog.

New Publication: »Openwashing: A Decoupling Perspective on Organizational Transparency«

Bildschirmfoto 2017-04-02 um 22.47.22

In my PhD project (supervised by Leonhard Dobusch) I studied the institutionalization of Open Data in and around the city administrations of Berlin, London and New York City. One of the questions I tried to answer was how organizations balance a public demand for information sharing with their inherent preference for informational control. My answers have now been published in an article entitled “Openwashing: A decoupling perspective on organizational transparency” in Technological Forecasting and Social Change as part of a Special Issue on the Sharing Economy (edited by Aurélien Acquier, Thibault Daudigeos and Jonatan Pinkse). The abstract reads as follows: Continue reading “New Publication: »Openwashing: A Decoupling Perspective on Organizational Transparency«” →

Special Issue in Long Range Planning on »Open Strategy«

Last year I blogged about a study on open strategy blogging of new ventures by Thomas Gegenhuber and myself, which had been accepted for publication at Long Range Planning. Now the whole special issue on “Open Strategy” is available online and these are the contributions: Continue reading “Special Issue in Long Range Planning on »Open Strategy«” →