Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

This sub-theme follows in the footsteps of a highly successful one held at EGOS in Milan (and standalone workshop and conference in Lyon). Our goal is to consolidate a community working on the hospitality industry broadly defined so as to include also lodging, food and beverage services, travel, and tourism. The goal of this sub-theme is to gather scholars contributing toward an organizational perspective on this industry: The common thread across submissions is in the empirical context rather than the perspectives or methods employed. We specifically welcome empirical papers at different stages, discussing different phenomena, and employing different methods, provided they ignite a dialogue going beyond analytical categories and focusing on challenges and opportunities faced by organizations in this industry. Importantly, although our sub-theme is not restricted to the Colloquium theme, its focus on hospitality is rife with opportunities to engage in playful organizing.

The hospitality industry is a microcosm of our socioeconomic landscape. Organizations populating it witness, host, go through, and bear consequences of most phenomena of interest to organizational scholars. No wonder it is an empirical setting that has inspired a wealth of research focusing on intraorganizational, organizational, and interorganizational phenomena, and leveraging qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods. The setting has attracted the attention of scholars studying culture (Fine, 1996; Van Maanen, 1991), knowledge transfer (Demetry & Doern, 2025; Di Stefano et al., 2014), innovation (Feuls, 2018), craft (Woolley & Pozner, 2025), institutional change (Rao et al., 2003), institutional entrepreneurship (Svejenova et al., 2007), status (Favaron et al., 2022), symbolic boundaries (Lockwood et al., 2023), social codes (Durand et al., 2007), authenticity (Pozner et al., 2023), categories (Slavich et al., 2020), localized competition (Baum & Haveman, 1997), market identity (Wang et al., 2016), community cohesion (Simons et al., 2016), practice emergence (Gomez & Bouty, 2011), organizational uses of the past (Cappelen & Strandgaard, 2021), and much more.

Like ships that pass in the night, those excellent and influential pieces of research have largely ignored one another. But we’re working on it! This sub-theme follows in the footsteps of a previous EGOS sub-theme (Milan, 2024) and standalone workshop (Lyon, 2025) and conference (Lyon, 2026), all met with great enthusiasm, and providing rich exchanges and fun experiences. It’s important for researchers of this setting to discuss because, from the focal organizations’ perspective, the issues they face, responses they attempt, and dynamics they go through seem to overlap and feed into one another. Organizations in the hospitality industry confront complex situations for which scholars are lacking a dialogue. We need to keep enriching our research beyond our own analytical categories, so as to contribute toward an organizational perspective on food (Moser et al., 2021). This dialogue is what our sub-theme aims at fostering. Our idea is to welcome scholars who share curiosity and passion for, as well as expertise on, the hospitality industry, yet differ in their perspectives and methods. Instead of repeated calls for interdisciplinary research, which are at best challenging, we want to offer a space for engaging in a dialogue and reflection that brings different perspectives (established and new, core and peripheral, insider and outsider) to the table.

We welcome empirical papers on the hospitality industry. We are open to contributions at various stages of advancement, and to any theory, topic, and method that could contribute to the joint development of an organizational perspective on food.

Some examples of potential directions include, but are not limited to, the following:

• How do people and organizations in the hospitality industry engage with grand challenges (e.g., sustainability, climate change, hunger), by developing new practices and forms (e.g., circular restaurants and hotels)?

• In the spirit of this year’s overall theme, how are hospitality organizations leveraging games and play to foster engagement, whether between employees or with customers? What makes a product or experience particularly fun and playful?

• What about new forms of collaboration across actors (entrepreneurs, policy makers, activists) and local (and global) communities (e.g., chef-led food relief and social kitchens)? How can the hospitality industry shift tastes and behaviors toward sustainable consumption?

• How is the hospitality industry addressing its own challenges (e.g., labor precarity, harassment culture), while sustaining its creativity and impish sense of fun?

• How are hospitality-related technologies (e.g., cultivated meat, AI, augmented reality, immersive worlds) influencing organizations? What new categories are emerging? How are the traditional forms of hospitality being challenged and changed?

• What new frontiers and meanings are being developed in relation to the hospitality industry in relation to technology, science, and art? (e.g., culinary genomics, space hotels; restaurants as essential infrastructures for food security)

• How are interactions with various third parties (critics, suppliers, customers, platforms) shaping behaviors for organizations in the hospitality industry?

• What about other trends and dynamics that affect the behavior of organizations in the restaurant, and more broadly hospitality, industry?

We are looking forward to your cool papers and are cooking up secret recipes to make this sub-theme a productive and fun experience of encounters, discussions, and not least meals. At table!

• Baum, J. A. C., & Haveman, H. A. (1997). Love thy neighbor? Differentiation and agglomeration in the Manhattan hotel industry, 1898–1990. Administrative Science Quarterly, 42(2), 304–338.
• Cappelen, S., & Strandgaard Pedersen, J. (2021). Inventing culinary heritage through strategic historical ambiguity. Organization Studies, 42(2), 223–243.
• Demetry, D. A., & Doern, R. (2025). Cutting the apron strings: Establishing optimal distinctiveness from mentors in creative industries. Strategic Management Journal, 46(12), 3048–3091.
• Di Stefano, G., King, A. A., & Verona, G. (2014). Kitchen confidential? Norms for the use of transferred knowledge in gourmet cuisine. Strategic Management Journal, 35(11), 1645–1670.
• Durand, R., Rao, H., & Monin, P. (2007). Code and conduct in French cuisine: Impact of code changes on external evaluations. Strategic Management Journal, 28(5), 455–472.
• Favaron, S. D., Di Stefano, G., & Durand, R. (2022). Michelin is coming to town: Organizational responses to status shocks. Management Science, 68(9), 6925–6949.
• Feuls, M. (2018). Understanding culinary innovation as relational – insights from Tarde’s relational sociology. Creativity and Innovation Management, 27(2), 161–168.
• Fine, G. A. (1996). Kitchens: The culture of restaurant work. University of California Press.
• Gomez, M.-L., & Bouty, I. (2011). The emergence of an influential practice: Food for thought. Organization Studies, 32(7), 921–940.
• Lockwood, C., Glynn, M. A., & Giorgi, S. (2023). Polishing the gilt edge: Elite category endurance and symbolic boundaries in U.S. luxury hotels, 1790–2015. Academy of Management Journal, 66(1), 9–42.
• Moser, C., Reinecke, J., den Hond, F., Svejenova, S., & Croidieu, G. (2021). Biomateriality and organizing: Towards an organizational perspective on food. Organization Studies, 42(2), 175–193.
• Pozner, J.-E., DeSoucey, M., Verhaal, J. C., & Sikavica, K. (2022). Watered down: Market growth, authenticity, and evaluation in craft beer. Organization Studies, 43(3), 321–345.
• Rao, H., Monin, P., & Durand, R. (2003). Institutional change in Toque Ville: Nouvelle cuisine as an identity movement in French gastronomy. American Journal of Sociology, 108(4), 795–843.
• Schifeling, T., & Demetry, D. (2021). The new food truck in town: Geographic communities and authenticity-based entrepreneurship. Organization Science, 30(1), 133–155.
• Simons, T., Vermeulen, P. A. M., & Knoben, J. (2016). There’s no beer without a smoke: Community cohesion and neighboring communities’ effects on organizational resistance to antismoking regulations in the Dutch hospitality industry. Academy of Management Journal, 59(2), 545–578.
• Slavich, B., Svejenova, S., Opazo, M. P., & Patriotta, G. (2020). Politics of meaning in categorizing innovation: How chefs advanced molecular gastronomy by resisting the label. Organization Studies, 41(2), 267–290.
• Svejenova, S., Mazza, C., & Planellas, M. (2007). Cooking up change in haute cuisine: Ferran Adrià as an institutional entrepreneur. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 28(5), 539–561.
• Van Maanen, J. (1991). The smile factory: Work at Disneyland. In P. J. Frost, L. F. Moore, M. R. Louis, C. C. Lundberg, & J. Martin (Eds.), Reframing organizational culture (pp. 58–76). Sage.
• Wang, T., Wezel, F. C., & Forgues, B. (2016). Protecting market identity: When and how do organizations respond to consumers’ devaluations? Academy of Management Journal, 59(1), 135–162.
• Woolley, J. L., & Pozner, J.-E. (2025). Co(coa)preneurship: The persistence of craft ventures and the power of coupling. Academy of Management Discoveries, 11(1), 96–122.