Organization and Management Theory OMT

We invite you to submit a short paper to EGOS sub-theme 28 on 'Unsettling Boundaries: Practices of Inter-Organizational Collaboration'. The EGOS conference will be held from July 3-5, 2014, in Rotterdam (The Netherlands). The deadline for short paper submissions is January 13, 2014. More information below. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Kristina Lauche (Radboud University Nijmegen; k.lauche@fm.ru.nl)

Hans Berends (VU University Amsterdam; j.j.berends@vu.nl)

Paul Carlile (School of Management, Boston University; carlile@bu.edu)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Changes in the global landscape require a reshaping of organizational practices to tackle problems that no single organization can address. Accomplishing innovation across domains and geographical distance, providing healthcare for an aging population or finding sustainable forms of development and value creation requires significant inter-organizational collaboration. Such collaborative activities involve the integration of practices across a variety of boundaries (Carlile, 2002), without recourse to traditional means of organizing such as hierarchy, routines, common knowledge, or organizational culture. Thus, inter-organizational collaboration demands rethinking our concepts of organizing and re-imagining it across boundaries of organizations. In this sub-theme, we aim to open the black box of inter-organizational collaboration and investigate the cross-boundary practices of how collaboration is initiated, maintained, negotiated, and transformed.

While alliance research has so far largely focused on structural features, antecedents and consequences of inter-organizational collaboration, we suggest building upon the 'turn to practice' in organization studies (Miettinen et al., 2009). Practice studies have become an established stream of research in the EGOS community. While mostly grounded within single organizations, recently more studies have emerged that focus on practices and processes of inter-organizational collaboration (e.g., Berends et al., 2011; Levina & Vaast, 2005; Sydow et al., 2012).

We aim to further open the black box of inter-organizational collaboration and investigate the cross-boundary practices of how collaboration is initiated, maintained, negotiated, and transformed. These settings are socially and technically complex and the boundaries generate novel sources of difference and dependences that must be understood before the challenge of cross-boundary integration can be addressed (Carlile, 2002). Actors face competing challenges in negotiating between institutional demands of their parent organisation and the joint project (Agterberg et al., 2010). There is no clear division of labour or shared means of addressing these boundaries, requiring actors to negotiate what it is that they are doing within and across practices. This proves more challenging in the case of temporary and highly dynamic collaborations.

We invite both theoretical and empirical papers from different disciplinary backgrounds as long as they address actual processes and practices. We encourage process research approaches, as these are particularly appropriate for investigating the dynamics of practices and practicing within and between organizations.

Questions and themes that may be addressed in this sub-theme include, but are not limited to:

• How are inter-organizational practices initiated, maintained, negotiated and transformed over time?
• What role do artefacts play in inter-organizational practices?
• How do temporal orientations and temporal structures affect collaboration across boundaries?
• How do we conceptualize boundaries under such complex and multi-layered conditions?
• How does the relational context (e.g., power, dependency and trust between partners) affect practices of inter-organizational collaboration?
• How do intra-organizational practices and inter-organizational practices interact?
• How do organizations learn to collaborate across inter-organizational boundaries and evolve that capability over time?

Conference website:

http://www.egosnet.org/2014_rotterdam/general_theme

More information on submission of short papers: http://www.egosnet.org/jart/prj3/egos/data/uploads/_2014/EGOS-Colloquia_Submission-of-SHORT-PAPERS_2014.pdf