Call for Papers
35th EGOS Colloquium
Sub-theme "Organization and Decision: The Theoretical Challenge of a Changing World"
Edinburgh, July 4–6, 2019
Convenors:
Cristina Besio, Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg, Germany
Niels Akerstrøm Andersen, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Michael Grothe-Hammer, Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg, Germany
Major changes have taken place in the organizational landscape in recent years because of the processes of growing complexity, globalization, and digitalization. Complexity in organizational environments leads to more organizational fluidity, and organizing seems to become more temporary, latent, modular, project-based, boundary-less, fluid, and partial (Ahrne et al., 2016; Brès et al., 2018; Schreyögg & Sydow, 2010). Large corporations are in decline, whereas the overall number of organizations worldwide is growing rapidly (King, 2017). Organizations coordinate among each other more and more globally as well as in network, latent, or Meta-forms of organization (Ahrne et al., 2016) – creating even more organizations. Moreover, digitalization is significantly affecting organizations in various forms. How organizations strategize, structure, and decide is increasingly driven by Big Data and algorithms (McAfee & Brynjolfsson, 2012). In the context of these rapid developments, established concepts of bureaucracy, formality, goal orientation, membership, and hierarchies lose their capability to grasp empirical reality, confronting scholars of organizational studies with severe theoretical challenges (Barley, 2016; Davis, 2015).
Against this backdrop, some scholars have started to update the notion of organization. One outcome of this movement is a resurgence of interest in a decision-based understanding of organization. Newer works connect to the classic theory of decision-making developed by James March and Herbert Simon (1993) and put to the core a communication-based understanding of the notion of decision. Our sub-theme aims to foster a discussion on how a decision-based view of organizations can provide new understandings to capture the abovementioned empirical developments to understand how organizations differ from other phenomena, such as networks or groups, to explain how new organizational forms operate, and to grasp how they affect society in general. Contributions can be conceptual, empirical, or methodological in nature and must address issues of organization theory.
The full CfP is available on the EGOS website: http://bit.ly/2Q4mgLa
Submission guidelines are available here: http://bit.ly/2TfEBUm
Deadline for submission of short papers is Monday, January 14, 2019, 23:59 CET.
-- Dr. Michael Grothe-Hammer Helmut-Schmidt-Universität / Helmut Schmidt University Institut für Gesellschaftswissenschaften / Institute of Social Sciences Holstenhofweg 85 22043 Hamburg Germany