Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Organizations today operate under conditions of near-continuous change, shaped by technological turbulence—including the rapid diffusion of AI-enabled systems—shifting societal expectations, sustainability pressures, and evolving institutional demands. In such environments, formal structures alone rarely determine how organizing unfolds. Rather, coordination and adaptation increasingly depend on the interplay between formal architectures and the informal relations, microinteractions, and emergent practices that constitute everyday work.

Organization theory has long recognized that new forms of organizing emerge through the recombination of routines, coordination mechanisms, and structural elements (Puranam et al., 2014). More recent perspectives suggest that design is not merely a matter of formal blueprinting but a relational and sociocognitive process, distributed across actors and embedded in patterns of interaction (Joseph & Sengul, 2025). Classical approaches, such as organizational ecology and institutional theory, further emphasize how these patterns are shaped by historical trajectories, environmental conditions, and social dynamics (Romanelli, 1991). Taken together, these streams converge on a view of organizational (re)design as a multilevel, evolving, and socially embedded phenomenon.

Research on microlevel processes offers additional insights into how structures take shape. Soderstrom and Weber (2020) show that fleeting interactions accumulate into shared attention and collective identities that gradually solidify into emergent structures. Bailey et al. (2022) similarly demonstrate that technologies become consequential not as standalone tools but through the relationships among people, artifacts, and practices. These studies underscore that the building blocks of organizational design often originate in situated interactions rather than top-down plans (e.g., Duvald et al., 2025).

Yet organizations facing similar pressures often diverge markedly in the speed and trajectory of their structural adaptations. Some exhibit pronounced inertia, while others pivot rapidly—for instance, during shifts in collaboration modes, workflow integration, or distributed decision-making. Explaining these divergent temporal dynamics requires integrating macrolevel design principles with mesolevel routines and microlevel relational dynamics (Puranam, 2018). It also calls for a deeper understanding of how actors interpret rules, negotiate constraints, and coordinate through evolving networks—creating a dynamic, “game-like” environment in which moves and countermoves shape organizational trajectories.

From this perspective, organizational design becomes an ongoing capability rather than a discrete intervention. Building such capability entails aligning formal architectures with relational infrastructures—norms, trust, shared meanings, and coordination practices—that sustain collective action under fluid conditions. Technological developments such as AI and advanced analytics matter precisely because they reshape these relational patterns. Rather than constituting a separate domain of design, sociotechnical changes interact with existing structures and social dynamics, simultaneously enabling and constraining adaptation. A relational perspective thus helps illuminate the inherently sociotechnical nature of organizational (re)design in contemporary settings.

This sub-theme invites research that theorizes and empirically examines organizational (re)design as an emergent, contested, and continuously negotiated process. We welcome contributions that bridge formal structural analysis with relational, interactionist, and sociotechnical approaches, drawing on qualitative, quantitative, mixed-method, or simulation-based designs.
Illustrative questions include:

• What triggers processes of design or redesign in organizations facing technological, institutional, or social pressures?

• How do formal structures and informal relations jointly shape coordination, adaptability, and performance?

• What mechanisms account for structural inertia versus rapid adaptation, and how do these dynamics unfold over time?

• How do microlevel interactions, networks, and practices generate or transform macrolevel organizational structures?

• How do technologies interact with relational patterns to reshape organizing processes?

• What intended or unintended outcomes arise from emerging forms of organizing?

• How do organizations build the capability for ongoing redesign and adaptive alignment, and what practices sustain it over time?

• How do interdependencies across multiple contingency factors generate misfit, trigger redesign, or produce structural tension?

• How do AI‑enabled technologies reshape relational structures, coordination practices, and the balance between formal authority and informal influence?

By bringing together scholars of formal structure, informal networks, sociotechnical systems, and interaction-based perspectives, this sub-theme advances a relational theory of organizational (re)design. It aims to foster a more integrated and practice-relevant understanding of how organizations are shaped—and reshaped—through the coevolution of structures and relations in an era of continuous change.

• Bailey, D. E., Faraj, S., Hinds, P. J., Leonardi, P. M., & von Krogh, G. (2022). We are all theorists of technology now: A relational perspective on emerging technology and organizing. Organization Science, 33(1), 1–18.
• Burton, R. M., Obel, B., & Håkonsson, D. D. (2020). Organizational design: A step-by-step approach (4th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
• Duvald, I., Obel, B., Lohse, C., Kirkegaard, H., & Burton, R. M. (2025). Organizational resilience in emergency healthcare: Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic in five Danish hospitals. Social Science & Medicine, 366, Article 117728.
• Joseph, J., & Sengul, M. (2025). Organization design: Current insights and future research directions. Journal of Management, 51(1), 249–308.
• Livijn, M. (2019). Navigating in a hierarchy: How middle managers adapt macro design. Journal of Organization Design, 8(1), Article 7.
• Lu, L., & Yan, B. (2026). Syncing minds and machines: Hybrid cognitive alignment as an emergent coordination mechanism in human–AI collaboration. Academy of Management Review. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2024.0546
• Puranam, P., Alexy, O., & Reitzig, M. (2014). What’s “new” about new forms of organizing? Academy of Management Review, 39(2), 162–180.
• Puranam, P. (2018). The microstructure of organizations. Oxford University Press.
• Romanelli, E. (1991). The evolution of new organizational forms. Annual Review of Sociology, 17(1), 79–103.
• Soderstrom, S. B., & Weber, K. (2020). Organizational structure from interaction: Evidence from corporate sustainability efforts. Administrative Science Quarterly, 65(1), 226–271.