Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Organizations—and management researchers—are increasingly dealing with situations that resemble complex games rather than stable systems: innovation tournaments, digital platforms and ecosystems, AI races, competition in turbulent markets, hackathons, A/B tests, regulatory sandboxes, simulations, and games used for learning and strategy. In these arenas, actors try out moves under uncertainty, rules evolve, and outcomes emerge from intersecting configurations of conditions rather than isolated drivers. The broader theme of play, creativity, and complexity spotlights such dynamics and calls for scholarship that takes experimentation seriously and attempts to understand play without sacrificing rigor.

This hybrid sub-theme aims to foreground play and experimentation as core lenses on organizational complexity. We view tensions, transitions, and disruptions not only as problems to be managed, but also as game-like situations in which actors test different configurations of identities, strategies, technologies, and institutional logics. Doing rigorous and impactful research on such phenomena requires theories and methods that can embrace, rather than suppress, causal complexity.

Configurational thinking and set-analytic methods (especially QCA) have become powerful tools for studying such causal complexity and intersectionality (Campbell & Fiss, 2025; Fiss, 2007, 2011; Fiss et al., 2013; Furnari et al., 2021; Meuer & Fiss, 2020; Ragin, 1987, 2008; Ragin & Fiss, 2017). They allow us to conceptualize and analyze social and organizational phenomena as configurations of conditions—enabling us to identify multiple paths to similar outcomes, asymmetric causal patterns, and context-dependent effects (Campbell et al., 2016; Misangyi et al., 2017; Rupietta & Meuer, 2024). In this sub-theme, we extend this perspective by framing configurational analysis as a form of analytic play: systematically exploring the space of possible combinations, experimenting with different conditions, and making visible the rules and “move sets” of organizational games.

We encourage empirical, conceptual, and methodological contributions from all areas of organization and management studies, including strategy, innovation, entrepreneurship, sustainability, HRM, international business, public and nonprofit management, and digital transformation. Contributions may focus on microlevel dynamics (individuals and teams), organizational forms and strategies, or broader organizational fields including ecosystems and institutions. Submissions may use QCA as a core method, combine it with other qualitative or quantitative approaches, or engage with configurational thinking more broadly. We are interested in work that treats organizations as complex adaptive games in which actors experiment with different configurations of structures, processes, and identities. We also welcome contributions that use QCA and other set-analytic tools to study strategic experimentation, learning processes, and adaptive organizational designs, and that reflect critically and creatively on methodological play—how we design, test, and refine configurational models in dialogue with theory and data.

Our sub-theme especially welcomes contributions that focus on one or more of the following issues:

• Theorizing organizational configurations as analytical play: Exploring configurational theorizing itself as “analytic play.” How can scholars experiment with condition sets, solution terms, and calibration choices to better understand complex phenomena? How does one experiment with conceptual approaches to describing, theorizing, and explaining phenomena such as digital eco-dynamics, complex adaptive systems, and other systems and structures that require nonlinear approaches?

• Complex organizational forms: Using QCA to understand which configurations of rules, incentives, participants, technologies, and governance structures enable creativity, learning, inclusion, resilience, or other desired outcomes. How can a configurational perspective clarify the processes and the complex conditions that make these forms (in-)effective? How may organizational design intentionally allow for multiple, successful configurations (equifinality) rather than enforcing a single best practice? How can researchers contribute to the scholarly debate around multistakeholder alliances and alternative forms of global governance?

• Individuals, identities, and roles as players: Advancing views of individuals as complex amalgams of a range of cognitions, traits, and experiences. How do individual characteristics combine and intersect to influence outcomes relevant to organizations and people working within them? How can researchers move beyond variable-based approaches to treat individuals as complex configurations of traits, identities, experiences, and roles? How do different “player types” (e.g., explorers vs. exploiters, boundary spanners, institutional entrepreneurs) emerge and interact in organizational games? How do identities, power relations, and intersectional categories shape who gets to play, which moves are legitimate, and whose strategies succeed?

• Institutional complexity: Opportunities for a configurational perspective to analyze how intersecting institutional logics, regulations, and societal expectations create complex rule systems for organizational games. How can researchers investigate sustainability transitions, digitalization, or grand challenges (e.g., climate change, inequality) as multilevel games with multiple arenas and players? How could we explore how policy experiments, pilot projects, and public-private partnerships function as institutional games that open (or close) pathways for change?

• Methodological innovations: Using set-analytic approaches to analyze experimental interventions in organizations (e.g., new incentive schemes, digital tools, governance mechanisms) as configurations rather than single treatments. These may include innovative measures to systematically analyze intersections and intersectional phenomena such as windows of opportunity, processes, and sequences. These may also involve methodological reflections on combining QCA with experiments, simulations, agent-based models, or game-based methods to study emergent patterns and learning over time.

• Methodological reflections: Developing novel ways to calibrate and model data that reflect experimentation, play, and process (e.g., sequences of moves, windows of opportunity, tipping points). Advancing robustness checks, transparency practices, and visualizations that highlight the playful exploration of configurational spaces while maintaining analytic rigor. Reflecting on the researcher’s role as both the rule-maker and player in the analytic game: choices about conditions, thresholds, and interpretations as moves that shape the resulting “game board” of solutions.

We intend to organize the sub-theme in a hybrid format. To make it inclusive for both on-site and online participants, we will ask presenters to attend in person and assign each presentation an online discussant. The online chat will be monitored and moderated by one of the convenors, who will encourage all participants to use it to ask questions, share materials, and post relevant papers. In this way, we aim to establish a running commentary throughout the sub-theme that will help identify emerging themes from the contributions of both online and on-site participants. We hope that this approach will also foster connections between participants, making the sub-theme inclusive in both substantive and relational terms.
 

• Campbell, J. T., & Fiss, P. (2025). Tackling the complexity challenge: When and how to engage in configurational and hybrid theorizing. Academy of Management Review. Advance online publication.
• Campbell, J. T., Sirmon, D. G., & Schijven, M. (2016). Fuzzy logic and the market: A configurational approach to investor perceptions of acquisition announcements. Academy of Management Journal, 59(1), 163–187.
• Fiss, P. (2007). A set-theoretic approach to organizational configurations. Academy of Management Review, 32(4), 1180–1198.
• Fiss, P. (2011). Building better causal theories: A fuzzy set approach to typologies in organizational research. Academy of Management Journal, 54(2), 393–420.
• Fiss, P., Cambre, B., & Marx, A. (Eds.). (2013). Configurational theory and methods in organizational research (Vol. 38). Emerald.
• Furnari, S., Crilly, D., Misangyi, V. F., Greckhamer, T., Fiss, P. C., & Aguilera, R. V. (2021). Capturing causal complexity: Heuristics for configurational theorizing. Academy of Management Review, 46(4), 778–799.
• Meuer, J., & Fiss, P. (2020). Qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) in business and management research. In R. Aldag (Ed.), Oxford research encyclopedia of business and management. Oxford University Press.
• Misangyi, V., Greckhamer, T., Furnari, S., Fiss, P. C., Crilly, D., & Aguilera, R. (2017). Embracing causal complexity: The emergence of a neo-configurational perspective. Journal of Management, 43(1), 255–282.
• Ragin, C. (1987). The comparative method: Moving beyond qualitative and quantitative strategies. University of California Press.
• Ragin, C. (2008). Redesigning social inquiry. University of Chicago Press.
• Ragin, C., & Fiss, P. (2017). Intersectional inequality: Race, class, test scores, and poverty. University of Chicago Press.
• Rupietta, C., & Meuer, J. (2024). Comparative configurational process analysis: A new set-theoretic technique for longitudinal case analysis. Organizational Research Methods. Advance online publication.