Sub-theme 41: Organizing Innovation and Entrepreneurship in and for a Sustainable Society
Call for Papers
We may be living through a golden age of organizational innovation. While DiMaggio and Powell famously asked in 1983 “why
there is such startling homogeneity of organizational forms and practices” (p. 148), the world has clearly changed. Social
enterprises and for-profit companies alike are experimenting with new forms and practices of organizing. “Hashtag movements”
such as #metoo and #blacklivesmatter exist without formal leadership or structures (Heimans & Timms, 2018). General Motors
and IBM have relocated some of their creative teams from corporate campuses to WeWork co-working spaces to facilitate informal
interaction. Some organizations, such as Zappos, have tried to remove formal hierarchy altogether in revived attempts to remove
traditional hierarchies (Lee & Edmondson, 2017). These new forms of organizing result in part from a ‘push’ provided by
new digital technologies that facilitate collaboration across organizational boundaries (Yoo et al., 2012) and in part from
a ‘pull’ for greater agility, innovativeness, entrepreneurialism, connectedness and the ability to address complex and systemic
challenges. New forms and practices of organizing may thus be necessary for us to be able to address the ‘grand challenges’
of our time that require the development of coordinating architectures and enable multilevel action (George et al., 2016).
New forms of organizing provide solutions to link previously disconnected actors and bridge social boundaries.
International boundary organizations, such as Fairtrade International (Reinecke & Ansari, 2015), can offer brokering between
distinct normative logics. Likewise, a study of the Structural Genomics Consortium (Perkmann & Schildt, 2015) shows how
a boundary organization enabled innovation by facilitating collaboration among actors with misaligned incentives and interests.
Many new digital ventures, such as Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (Majchrzak et al., 2018) and sharing economy platforms
(Reischauer & Mair, 2018a) are organized around digital infrastructures that facilitate effortless interactions without
a need for physically” being there” (Grabher et al., 2018). These platform organizations – organizations that provide generic
resources and connections for third parties to provide and deliver products and services – act as a disruptive force in established
markets (Kirchner & Schüßler, 2019; Mair & Reischauer, 2017; Reischauer & Mair, 2018b) as they enable innovation
and entrepreneurial activity (Muñoz & Cohen, 2018). While building and managing the resulting digital workforces has been
identified as grand challenge (George et al., 2016), platform organizations can also provide a home for societal groups that
are excluded from traditional labor markets. In a similar vein, many social enterprises are hybrid organizations that can
bridge multiple institutional logics (Mair et al., 2015; Schildt & Perkmann, 2017), thereby combining the pursuit of social
value with market-based approaches and ultimately tackle important challenges such as inequality (Mair et al., 2016).
These new forms are complemented with new organizing practices. One prominent set of practices relates to the orchestration
of actors with limited formal authority or traditional incentives (Giudici et al., 2017; Paquin & Howard-Grenville, 2013).
Post-bureaucratic organizations require new coordination mechanisms, such as ‘trading zones’ where professionals from different
disciplinary backgrounds can interact (Kellogg et al., 2006). With increasing precariousness, individuals and organizations
must develop practices to cope with emotional strain and lack of stable organizational identification (Petriglieri et al.,
2019). Non-bureaucratic forms may also require specific practices that facilitate incomplete behavior (Garud et al., 2008)
and foster collaboration (Gulati et al., 2012) to support innovation. Interstitial and playful spaces are established as sites
for experimentations with new practices on organizational and field levels (Furnari, 2014; Hjorth et al., 2018).
However, new forms and practices of organizing can create unintended and often undesirable consequences in the absence of
regulation. Online knowledge-exchanging communities, for example, tend to replicate existing geographic and social boundaries
and inequalities (Hwang et al., 2015). Platform organizations are criticized for promoting insecure work (Fleming, 2017) with
a strong control regime (Petriglieri et al., 2019; Wood et al., 2019). The entrepreneurial ideal, in platform contexts and
beyond, is often misused to justify deregulated and exploitative labor practices (Ahsan, 2018). Moreover, algorithms and digitalization
of platforms and traditional organizations has a tendency to create transparency and surveillance, with potential negative
consequences (Hansen & Flyverbom, 2015; Schildt, 2017). These dynamics provide a valuable and important area for more
academic research.
The experimentation with new forms and practices of organizing and their promise in bridging
communities and helping address some of the societal grand challenges as well as their potentially problematic consequences
motivates this sub-theme. We invite qualitative, quantitative, mixed methods, and conceptual papers to increase our knowledge
of new forms and practices of organizing and their consequences for facilitating innovation and entrepreneurship and ultimately
in building a more sustainable society. The following research questions are intended for inspiration:
New forms of organizing
What are the key commonalities in new forms of organizing, and what are their consequences in relation to the more traditional organizations?
How should we theorize and study governance and strategy in organizations that lack traditional organizational boundaries and hierarchical authority?
How do new forms of organizing differ from traditional ones with respect to their resource and knowledge base, and in the way they emerge and develop over time?
Which new organizational forms are especially suitable to tackle grand challenges and why?
What theories and concepts are especially suitable to examine new forms of organizing?
New organizing practices
What kind of organizing practices are emerging in response to increasing data processing capabilities and mobile devices?
How and why do established organizations adopt or experiment with new organizing practices?
What are the relationships of new social innovations and new organizing practices?
What are new organizing practices that either create or alleviate negative individual outcomes in the gig economy?
How can new practices facilitate coordination and orchestration across organizational boundaries?
Consequences of new forms and practices of organizing
What are the intended and unintended consequences of new forms and practices of organizing?
How do new forms and practices of organizing affect inequality and/or power regimes?
How do new forms and practices of organizing affect the relationship between the public and private domain, including non-market strategies?
How do civil society and social movements leverage and respond to new forms and practices of organizing?
What are the implications of new forms and practices of organizing for the wellbeing of members?
Which are adequate regulatory frameworks for new forms and practices of organizing?
References
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