2020 PDW Chair Report
Eva Boxenbaum, Copenhagen Business School
2021 OMT Program Chair
The 2020 virtual Academy Meeting prompted us all to innovate and experiment, an opportunity that our PDW program embraced wholeheartedly. We hosted, as usually, a diverse and exciting set of PDWs for OMT members at all stages of their career. The virtual format did not prevent our PDWs from, once again, becoming a great place to meet and engage with each other and to develop our scholarly community. Among the “Top 10 sessions by attendance,” two were PDWs sponsored by OMT (#3 “New Ways of Seeing Theory;” #9 “Advancing Theory with Review Articles”), and four were PDWs that OMT co-sponsored. The remaining four sessions included two organized by the Academy journals, one by the central organizers of the Academy, and one by the OB Division.
Thanks so much to all our members who submitted, organized, re-designed for virtual purposes, facilitated, and participated in the PDW program for their ideas, enthusiasm, creativity, courage, time, and efforts in making OMT the (virtual) place to be!
Before the conversion to a virtual conference, we accepted 36 PDW proposals and opted to co-sponsor 39 PDWs submitted to other divisions. Once the virtual conference became a reality, we invited the organizers of our sponsored PDWs to express their individual preferences for the potential inclusion of their PDW in the virtual conference. After some contemplation, 75% of our PDW organizers expressed a preference for the synchronous program, 10% for the asynchronous program, and the remaining 15% for withdrawal of their PDW. The Academy honored all of these preferences, even if only 10% of accepted PDWs were originally supposed to appear in the synchronous program. In addition to our own PDWs, 60% of the co-sponsored PDWs appeared in the virtual conference program. To feature so many PDWs in the synchronous program, the Academy removed the structural barrier between the PDW program and the scholarly program, which meant that OMT featured PDWs throughout the conference period (Friday to Tuesday).
Again this year, our PDW sessions included a number of events designed to support our doctoral students and early-career scholars:
In addition, we introduced a new recurrent PDW, previously part of OMT’s off-program, which aims at welcoming OMT members and OMT research from regions of the world that are underrepresented in OMT:
Furthermore, OMT offered excellent workshops on conceptual theory development as well as a high-quality set of methods-oriented workshops, which addressed both novel and established, qualitative and quantitative research tools and methods – among them PDWs on qualitative analysis, ethnography, social network analysis, big data, and experiments.
Topics debated in our PDWs in 2020 included stigma, trust, paradox, social networks, (e-)sports, social media, circular economy, un-sung papers, B-corps, social responsibility of business school students, and many more.
We also hosted the following classic OMT events in our synchronous program:
The two latter events, our socials, featured creative and fun virtual activities that our new Digital Strategy Officer, Mélodie Cartel (UNSW), developed for the occasion in collaboration with elected Chairs Davide Ravasi, Renate Meyer and myself.
During the OMT Social Hour, we also co-constructed with participants the visual and verbal input for the 2020 OMT Digital Artifact: The OMT Slot Machine, which is a co-created tribute to the OMT Artifact tradition. Check it out on the OMT Website and at www.omtartifact.com!
In addition to the official PDW program, OMT coordinated a set of virtual Off-Program Events during and after the regular conference. Organized by the OMT Membership Group (OMG), led by Emily Block, these events appear on the OMT Off-Program Events Calendar.
We look forward to having a rich program again in 2021. Forrest Briscoe, our new PDW chair, will be inviting your PDW submissions. Please contact him with your ideas for innovative PDWs.
In my role as Program Chair, I would also like to encourage you to submit your papers, symposium, and preferred topics for review to the OMT program. The submission system will open in late November and Forrest and I both look forward to your submissions.
We all look forward to seeing you in 2021!
Best wishes,
Eva Boxenbaum
OMT Division 2021 Program Chair