Please submit your organizational field related research by Jan. 14, 2019 (3000 word short paper) to join us at EGOS in Edinburgh from July 4-6, 2019.
EGOS Sub-theme: Organizational Fields of the Future and the Future of Fields: Interactions, Intersections and Interfaces across Organizational Fields
Convenors:
Santi Furnari, Cass Business School, City, University of London, Santi.Furnari.1@city.ac.uk
Danielle Logue, University of Technology Sydney, Danielle.Logue@uts.edu.au
Charlene Zietsma, Pennsylvania State University, czietsma@psu.edu
This sub-theme focuses on new research developments on organizational fields and how field-level approaches can help address new societal challenges and opportunities. Although the field concept has long been at the core of organization theory (e.g. DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Zietsma, Groenewegen, Logue & Hinings, 2017), it is even more useful now as boundaries between sectors and social spheres have blurred. We believe that field approaches hold promise to capture three developments that are key for contemporary organizations and societies today: 1) Cross-field interactions, which are the informal interactions increasingly happening in virtual and physical interstitial spaces between fields (Furnari, 2014), such as social media, inter-industry maker-spaces, fab labs and co-working spaces, field-configuring events spanning fields and any other between-fields interaction setting; 2) Cross-field intersections, which are the more formalized and structural arrangements that govern resources and shared issues between fields (Zietsma et al., 2017), such as boundary organizations (e.g. O'Mahony & Bechky, 2008), hybrid organizations (e.g. Battilana, Besharov & Mitzinneck, 2017), digital platforms and other types of structural overlaps between fields (e.g. Furnari, 2016; Evans & Kay, 2008); 3) Cross-field interfaces, which are the communication protocols that affect interactions among actors between fields, such as micro-level framing and meaning-making processes (e.g., Gray, Purdy & Ansari, 2015; Leibel, Hallett & Bechky, 2018), interaction rituals (Collins, 2004), shared vocabularies of practice (e.g., Loewenstein, Ocasio & Jones, 2015), and boundary-shaping processes (e.g. Grodal, forthcoming).
Cross-fields phenomena have serious consequences for organizing today, as is demonstrated by the power of monopolistic digital platforms (e.g., Srnicek, 2017), the diffusion of new forms of cross-sector hybrid collaboration (e.g., Battilana, et al., 2017), and the emergence of new fields from initially inconsequential social interactions between fields. To explain the "fields of the future", we must better understand cross-field phenomena and processes.
We invite papers that expand the frontiers of organizational field research and address (but are not limited to) the following research questions:
- What are the different ways in which multiple organizational fields interact and what are the consequences? How can we conceptualize various field-to-field interactions?
- How can field boundaries be defined? Changed? What are the consequences?
- What new forms of cross-field interaction are emerging due to industry convergence, cultural and institutional shifts, or the recognition of interdependencies in addressing societal problems? What are the consequences of these cross-field interactions for the emergence, evolution, fracturing, or crystallization of organizational fields?
- What is the (so far under-theorized) role of digital technologies and platforms to explain within-field and inter-field phenomena? How is power and responsibility redistributed?
- How can the intersections between fields be managed by different organizational forms (digital platforms, hybrid organizations, boundary organizations, etc.)? What are the consequences of these forms for emergence and change in the fields that they bridge?
We welcome papers that use any qualitative, quantitative, or mixed method, and encourage novel methods. Theoretically, we also welcome papers from different theoretical perspectives in addition to institutional theory and field theory at large.
References
Battilana, J., Besharov, M. & Mitzinneck, B. (2017): "On hybrids and hybrid organizing: A review and roadmap for future research." The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism, 2nd Edition, 2, 133-169.
Collins, R. (2004): Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
DiMaggio, P.J. & Powell, W.W. (1983): "The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields." American Sociological Review, 48: 147–160.
Evans, R. & Kay, T. (2008): "How Environmentalists 'Greened' Trade Policy: Strategic Action and the Architecture of Field Overlap." American Sociological Review, 73(6): 970-991.
Furnari, S. (2014): "Interstitial spaces: Microinteraction settings and the genesis of new practices between institutional fields." Academy of Management Review, 39(4): 439-462.
Furnari, S. (2016): "Institutional fields as linked arenas: Inter-field resource dependence, institutional work and institutional change." Human Relations, 69(3): 551-580
Gray, B., Purdy, J. M., & Ansari, S. S. (2015): "From interactions to institutions: Microprocesses of framing and mechanisms for the structuring of institutional fields." Academy of Management Review, 40(1), 115-143.
Grodal, S. (forthcoming): "How Core and Peripheral Communities Shape the Boundaries of an Emerging Field." Administrative Science Quarterly.
Leibel, E., Hallett, T. & Bechky, B. (2018): "Meaning at the source: The dynamics of field formation in institutional research." Academy of Management Annals, 12(1), 154-177.
Loewenstein, J., Ocasio, W. & Jones, C. (2012): "Vocabularies and vocabulary structure: A new approach linking categories, practices, and institutions." Academy of Management Annals, 6(1), 41-86.
O'Mahony, S. & Bechky, B.A. (2008): "Boundary organizations: Enabling collaboration among unexpected allies." Administrative Science Quarterly 53 (3): 422-459.
Srnicek, N. (2017): Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Zietsma C., Groenewegen P., Logue, D.M. & Hinings C.R. (2017): "Field or fields? Building the scaffolding for cumulation of research on institutional fields". Academy of Management Annals, 11(1), 391-450.