Dear colleagues,
We look forward to welcoming you all to our AOM 2026 symposium, All Talk, No Walk? Reimagining "Community" in Contemporary Organizations, where we will discuss how organizations increasingly invoke "community" in words and initiatives, examine when and how that rhetoric shapes identity, stakeholder relations, and real-world impact.
"Community" is increasingly everywhere in organizational and social life - from purpose statements and annual reports to ESG initiatives and workplace culture decks. Yet this surge in community rhetoric also invites conceptual opaqueness. Community might better be understood as a contested concept which invites us to dig deeper. This proposed symposium focuses on the growing centrality of community in how organizations construct identity, structure stakeholder relationships and respond to societal expectations. It brings together three streams that utilize different lenses to explore the key tenets as well as the paradoxical tensions that the community concept evokes:
1. Community as TALK - invoking community
How organizations invoke community as identity, legitimacy, purpose, or myth.
2. Community as WALK - engaging community
How organizations engage communities as stakeholders, partners, audiences, employees, users. or publics.
3. Community as IMPACT - governing community
How organizations materially shape the lives, risks, protections, and futures of communities.
Across the three streams, panelists will discuss: What kind of community do organizations invoke in this day and age? For whom, and with what consequences? The session aims to offer an integrative synthesis and an avenue for the continued dialogue on the future research directions for management scholars across OMT, STR, and SIM.
Organizers: Andrea Geissinger, San José State University, Shilpi Banerjee, Hult International Business School, Prem S. Menghwar, University of Virginia Darden School of Business & Janice Klaiber, University of St. Gallen.
Panel Participants: Robert Phillips , Paula Jarzabkowski, Seungah Sarah Lee, Tyler Wry, Wren Montgomery
We hope you will join us for what promises to be a lively and timely conversation.
Location: Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown: First Floor: Seminar B, 201 N 17th St, Philadelphia
Time: TUE, 4 Aug, 2026, 11:30 - 13:00
Best,
Shilpi, Andrea, Prem and Janice (organizers)