Organization and Management Theory OMT

We kindly invite you to submit papers to our EGOS subtheme 50 on 'The Challenge of Configuration: Bridging Perspectives and Methodologies'. The EGOS conference will be held at Rotterdam (The Netherlands), July 3-5, 2014. The deadline for short paper submissions is January 13, 2014.

Description of the subtheme:

The notion of configuration – that the whole is best understood from a systemic perspective and should be viewed as a constellation of interconnected elements – is one of the central ideas of organization studies. That this notion has at the same time remained one of the field's least understood aspects is one of the greater paradoxes of organization studies. With the emergence of set-theoretic methods such as Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) (Ragin, 1987; 2008), we are currently witnessing a new and invigorated approach to configurational thinking along with methods that are better geared towards tackling the complexity of interconnected elements. In this panel, we want to further this development by calling for a rethinking of the way we look at organizations and a reshaping of the methods we use to study them.

We invite papers that enhance our understanding of both configurational theory and methodology in organization studies. As such, we welcome contributions from multiple theoretical perspectives and seek cross-pollination between the various approaches to understanding organizations as complex systems. We particularly welcome studies that incorporate insights from related disciplines. Likewise, we encourage both theoretical contributions that aim to clarify the theory and (causal) mechanisms of configurations, and empirical and methodological contributions that strive to enhance our ability to capture the dynamic nature of configurations. We especially welcome papers deploying set-theoretic methods such as crisp and fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA).

Organizers: 

Bart Cambré, Antwerp Management School; Peer C. Fiss, University of Southern California; Axel Marx, Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies