Open Organizing – ConJunction

EGOS 2021 Call »Openness as an Organizing Principle: Revisiting Diversity and Inclusion in Strategy, Innovation, and Beyond«

Logo of the 37th EGOS Colloquium 2021 in Amsterdam

The 37th EGOS Colloquium will take place from July 8–10, 2021 in Amsterdam, NL, and for the forth time after 2015 in Athens, 2017 in Copenhagen and 2019 in Edinburgh, I will co-convene a sub-theme on organizational openness. This year I am happy to team up with Violetta Splitter (University of Zurich) and Marieke van den Brink (Radboud University Nijmegen). Please find the Call for Short Papers (about 3.000 words) of Sub-theme 48: “Openness as an Organizing Principle: Revisiting Diversity and Inclusion in Strategy, Innovation, and Beyond” below, submission deadline is Tuesday, January 12, 2021, 23:59:59 CET:

Over the course of the past decade, we can observe a growing trend towards (calls for) greater openness in various organizational contexts such as open innovation, open government, open strategy or open science. To some degree openness has been recast as a programmatic organizing principle, promising not just gains in efficiency (e.g., Chesbrough & Appleyard, 2007) but also in terms of transparency (Ohlson & Yakis-Douglas, 2019), accountability (Whittington, 2019) and inclusiveness (Mack & Szulanski, 2017). At the same time, we can observe a growing body of literature on diversity and inclusion that addresses openness in terms of inclusive organizing (Ferdman & Deane, 2014; Mor Barak, 2016; Nkomo et al., 2019; Shore et al., 2018; Zanoni et al., 2010).

Particularly regarding inclusiveness, however, we see a detachment of research on openness in various organizational contexts (e.g. strategy or innovation) from other scholarly debates on diversity and inclusion that address inclusive organizing as such (for an exception see Dobusch et al., 2019). With this sub-theme we seek to make a connection between these two separate research streams because we see three particular avenues for crosspollination that will advance our knowledge about inclusion, diversity and open organizing:

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Call for Papers for a Special Issue in Organization Studies: »Open Organizing in an Open Society?«

Please find below the Call for Papers for a Special Issue in Organization Studies on “Open Organizing in an Open Society? Conditions, Consequences and Contradictions of Openness as an Organizing Principle” (PDF), co-edited by Georg von Krogh, Violetta Splitter, Peter Walgenbach, Richard Whittington and myself. In case you are interested to submit a paper to the Special Issue, please also consider to submit a short paper version of it to the upcoming EGOS sub-theme 55 on “Open Organizing for an Open Society? Connecting Research on Organizational Openness” . Submitting authors are not in any way obliged to participate at this sub-theme, and papers presented at the sub-theme are not guaranteed publication in the Special Issue. We just see this sub-theme as an opportunity to develop papers for submission. Deadline for submitting short papers to the EGOS sub-theme is January 14, 2019, deadline for submitting manuscripts to the Special Issue in Organization Studies is November 30, 2019. Continue reading “Call for Papers for a Special Issue in Organization Studies: »Open Organizing in an Open Society?«” →

The Simulacrum of Massive Open Online Courses representing Open Educational Resources

This research essay is authored by Isabella Winkler, student in the master program Business Education at Universität Innsbruck and participant in the 2017 edition of the course “Open Organizations and Organizing Openness“.

Globalization and digitalization are keywords which characterize today’s society. The process of digitalization and dissemination of data has already found its way into education. It is one of the biggest concerns when talking about modernizations in educational systems (Dobusch & Heimstädt, 2016). One primary goal of recent education is to make knowledge accessible anywhere, anytime and for anyone. As a result education becomes egalitarian and contributes to the public’s welfare. In his educational ideal Humboldt already registered that it is the state’s duty to make knowledge available for everyone even for the poorest (Gaisbauer, Kaperer, Koch & Sedmak, 2013). Going one step further beyond open access for everybody the UNESCO has come up with the conception of Open Educational Resources (OER). “OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others.” (Atkins, Brown & Hammond, 2007, p. 4).

What also came along with this Open Education Movement were Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in the segment of higher education. Since 2008 these educational opportunities offered by universities and commercial organizations have shaped the educational infrastructure. The number of MOOCs has rapidly grown in the last ten years because educational institutions have to fulfill the needs of potential students and to meet the requirements of the fast changing educational market towards learner-centered and individualized learning methods. MOOCs are online courses which provide each person free access to university level education without paying a fee and without the need to fulfill certain admission requirements (Yuan & Powell, 2013). Though, at this point it raises the question: To what extent does the ‘Open’ in Massive Open Online Courses correspond to the ‘Open’ in Open Educational Resources or do MOOCs not overcome the hurdle of providing only Open Access instead of Open Education? Continue reading “The Simulacrum of Massive Open Online Courses representing Open Educational Resources” →

4 Open: Wiki-based Course on “Open Organizations and Organizing Openness”

On February 1st I joined the Department of Organization and Learning at University of Innsbruck as a professor of business administration with a focus on organization. One of the most challenging and, at the same time, tempting tasks as a newly appointed professor is the opportunity to design at least some new courses from scratch. In particular, I was so lucky to being offered to teach the module on “Current Issues in Organization Studies”, which allowed me to design a course I have been wanting to give for a long time: “Open Organizations and Organizing Openness“.

The overall rationale for the structure of the course follows the imperative formulated by Tkacz (2012: 404, PDF) in his “critique of open politics”:

To describe the political organisation of all things open requires leaving the rhetoric of open behind.

As a consequence, the lecture part of the course is organized around different aspects or dimensions of organizational openness such as boundaries, transparency, participation or emergence. The respective readings only peripherally address the issue of openness but rather shall provide the building blocks for arriving at a more precise and theoretically grounded understanding of openness.

Read the rest of this entry at governance across borders >>