Tag: organization theory

Call for Papers: 4th OT Winter Workshop at the University of Innsbruck

We are happy to announce that we will host the 4th OT Winter Workshop from February 6-8, 2024, at the University of Innsbruck. The OT Winter Workshop aims to advance research on organizational theory and further develop potential submissions to the journal “Organization Theory” (OT). The workshop will offer detailed coaching and hands-on feedback sessions as well as plenary sessions on crucial topics with regard to developing and writing theory with the members of the OT Editorial board.

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New Article in Organization Theory: »Taking Individual Choices Seriously: A process perspective of self-selection in strategy work«

I am very glad to announce that the article “Taking Individual Choices Seriously: A process perspective of self-selection in strategy work”, co-authored by Martin Friesl, Martin Brielmaier and myself, has been accepted for publication at Organization Theory and is already available online. Particularly the growing interest in open approaches to strategy, which at least formally invite broad audiences to participate in organizational strategy-making, was one of the reasons for writing this paper. Not just because an invitation to participate cannot hardly intrinsic motivation to actually contribute but also because inviting everyone does not guarantee that you will actually arrive at a more diverse and inclusive bunch of people (see also Dobusch et al., 2019). The abstract reads as follows:

An increasing body of work investigates the participation of a diverse set of actors in strategy making. We argue that extant research tends to gloss over a fundamental condition underpinning such participation: while participation may reflect a hierarchical mandate, insofar as it relates to the actual involvement of employees, it is the result of a process of self-selection. From this perspective, forms of participative strategizing are neither fully the outcome of deliberate top-down choice, nor do they form a random pattern that is subject to the whims of individual employees. Such forms of strategizing are rather, as we argue in this paper, based on an endogenous logic of whether and how an individual self-selects, and in turn involves her/himself in the process, or not. To conceptualize the broader phenomenon of strategy participation, we draw on practice theory to conceptualize how individuals knowingly choose to involve themselves in strategizing events and we develop in turn a process model of self-selection as an ongoing social accomplishment. This model elaborates different patterns of participation in strategy making (stabilizing and shifting trajectories) with variable emergent outcomes. We end the paper by discussing the implications of our theorizing for ongoing research on open and participatory strategizing, and for the body of work on strategy as practice.

The paper is open access available at Organization Theory. Summary threads ft. #1paper1meme can be found over at Mastodon and Twitter.

New Article in Organization Theory: Transparency and Accountability: Causal, Critical and Constructive Perspectives

Earlier this year, the journal Organization Theory launched as the sister journal to Organization Studies, similar to the distinction between AMJ (empirical) and AMR (theoretical) at the Academy of Management. Part of Organization Theory is a “Conversations and Controversies section”, where Maximilian Heimstädt and I managed to publish an article entitled “Transparency and Accountability: Causal, Critical and Constructive Perspectives”. The abstract of reads as follows:

Given the excessive power of Google and other large technology firms, transparency and accountability have turned into matters of great concern for organization scholars. So far, most studies adopt either a causal or critical perspective on the relationship between the two concepts. These perspectives are pitted against each other but share some basic assumptions – a fact which limits organization theory’s ability to fully grasp the management of (digital) visibilities. To address these limitations, we therefore propose a third, constructive perspective on these concepts. A constructive perspective turns transparency and accountability from analytic resources into topics of inquiry, allowing organization scholars to study how people in and around organizations put them to work and with what consequences. We introduce sites of ethical contestation as a new methodological strategy to conduct surprising and unintuitive empirical research from a constructive perspective.

The other article of the controversy has been authored by Richard Whittington and Basak Yakis-Douglas, who wrote about “The Grand Challenge of Corporate Control: Opening strategy to the normative pressures of networked professionals”. Both articles are available open access.