Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

For decades, globalization has been recognized as a key driver of organizational and social change (Drori et al., 2014; Höllerer et al., 2017). The seamless flow of information, practices, and norms across the global village, facilitated by a world polity of international governmental and civic organizations and by technological advances from email to generative AI, has created cultural scripts that influence the organization, organizations and organizing of communities worldwide. At the same time, recent global shocks have underscored that organizations and organizing remain deeply rooted in a sense of place and tightly intertwined with the communities in which they operate (e.g., Auyero, 2001; Dutta & Forbes, 2025). The COVID-19 pandemic, the intensification of climate risks, and growing crises around migration, inequality, and democratic backsliding all highlight the limits of placeless global templates. These pressures expose the frictions and creative tensions—and sometimes synergies—between global institutional expectations and the grounded, situated realities of neighborhoods, cities, and regions (Brandtner et al., 2017). Increasingly, organizations and organizing find themselves at the intersection of these two forces: navigating global norms while negotiating local histories, identities, needs, and material conditions (e.g., Baker & Ruming, 2015; Vith et al., 2019). In the third edition of the EGOS SWG 7 on Organizations and Place-Based Communities, we extend the standing working group’s ongoing conversation by examining the organizational, institutional, and community dynamics that emerge in the interplay of global diffusion and local adaptation. Our focus is on the symbolic and material spaces where ideas of ‘the global’ meet lived experiences of ‘the local’: where international scripts are translated, resisted, hybridized, or reinvented; where local communities mobilize in response to global pressures and bring change to global prescriptions; and where organizations mediate, enact, or transform these co-constitutive encounters.

We welcome contributions that deepen our understanding of how global and local institutional forces are intertwined, and as such shape and co-produce organizational and community outcomes. We are especially interested in research that explores how global organization and management ideas and practices travel across cultural borders and take on new meaning as they are interpreted within specific place-based contexts. We also welcome work that investigates how local actors, from grassroots organizations to municipal governments to community entrepreneurs, engage with or push back against global narratives, multinational corporations and transnational networks (Marquis & Battilana, 2009), and how such global, local and glonacal engagements shape new models of organization and organizing.

This Sub-theme will pursue three main topics of conversation:

• Communities as sites of maintenance, negotiation, resistance, and reinterpretation
  Place-based communities increasingly experience global pressures in domains such as climate adaptation, migration flows, economic restructuring and transformation, and technological change. These dynamics can trigger community mobilization, contestation, or participatory responses, reshaping local civic life and institutional arrangements. We welcome research that investigates how communities respond to global influences—whether by contesting externally imposed practices, engaging in collective action, forming new organizational coalitions, or reconfiguring local identities. We are especially interested in work that highlights varying capacities across communities to negotiate global forces and sustain resilience, possibly also leveraging global forces to shape local impact

• Organizational forms at the intersection of global governance and local embeddedness
  Organizations today often operate simultaneously at multiple scales: global, national, and local (e.g., Schotter et al., 2017). In this context, multinational corporations, global NGOs, transnational professional associations, and cross-border social movements interact with place-based communities in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. We invite work that explores how new organizational forms, governance arrangements, and collaborative platforms emerge from these interactions, reimagining community and place within the global context. This includes studies of how global institutions shape local development trajectories, how digital technologies mediate global-local relationships, and how organizations experiment with new architectures to balance global expectations with local accountability.

• Global institutional scripts, local translation, and organizational practice
  Across sectors and regions, global governance systems articulate norms around transparency, sustainability, innovation, inclusion, and accountability, to name only a few. Yet these global frames rarely enter local contexts unchanged. We invite work examining how organizations interpret, localize, or hybridize global templates—and how place-based histories, infrastructures, and identities shape the outcomes. This includes exploring the role of intermediaries, brokers, or community organizations in mediating the movement of global scripts, as well as the contradictions that arise when global expectations collide with local realities or resource constraints.

To this aim, we invite submissions from scholars with different theoretical backgrounds and methodological approaches, including organization theory, sociology, economic geography, urban studies, innovation studies, anthropology, institutional theory, and related fields. Possible research questions include, but are not limited to, the following:

• How do globally circulating organizational and management concepts transform as they are adapted into local community settings?

• Under what conditions do local actors reinterpret, resist, or subvert global institutional expectations?

• What notions of place-based community emerge and re-emerge during the era of globalization (Brandtner et al., 2024)?

• How do global-local tensions shape organizational legitimacy, identity, or strategy within specific place-based communities?

• What is the role of “mid-level” analysis in understanding global-local dynamics? What roles do intermediaries, such as consultants, INGOs, municipal agencies, and national governments, play in facilitating or reframing the travel of global ideas to specific locales and communities?

• What role do place-based nodes of globalization (such as global cities and immigrant neighborhoods) play in driving or impeding organizational processes and dynamics?

• How do recent dynamics (e.g., speed, illiberality) and phenomena (e.g., generative AI, migration) of globalization accelerate certain aspects of community-based organizing while impeding others?

• How do digital infrastructures and AI-driven tools reshape global-local organizational dynamics, especially in resource-constrained or marginalized communities (Saxenian, 2005)?

• How do global environmental and social crises alter the relationships between organizations and their place-based communities?

• How do various forms of global crises shape, mitigate, and redefine place-based forms of organizing?

• In what ways do hybrid organizational forms emerge at the intersection of global scripts and local practices, and how do they contribute to community resilience or vulnerability?

• How do places and other geographic units, such as cities and regions, achieve and reproduce distinctiveness amid global templates (e.g., world, smart, or green cities) (Leixnering & Höllerer, 2022; Molotch et al., 2000)?

• How do ideas and practices coined in specific place-based communities “scale up,” become models or benchmarks for other community organizations, and diffuse worldwide?

• How does place-based organizing redefine possibilities for global organization? What are the effects of such bottom-up dynamics (Höllerer et al., 2017)?

We look forward to receiving submissions that advance theoretical, empirical, and methodological insights into the evolving relationship between organizations and place-based communities, and that illuminate how global and local institutional forces together, often in an intertwined form, shape the contemporary organizational landscape.
 

• Auyero, J. (2001). Glocal riots. International Sociology, 16(1), 33–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580901016001004
• Baker, T., & Ruming, K. (2015). Making ‘Global Sydney’: Spatial imaginaries, worlding and strategic plans. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39(1), 62–78. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12183
• Brandtner, C., Höllerer, M. A., Meyer, R. E., & Kornberger, M. (2017). Enacting governance through strategy: A comparative study of governance configurations in Sydney and Vienna. Urban Studies, 54(5), 1075–1091. https://doi.org/10.1177/004209801562487
• Brandtner, C., Laryea, K., Park, G., Luo, W., Meyer, M., Suárez, D., Hwang, H., & Powell, W. W. (2024). Neighborhood effects on integrative organizational practices in five global cities. Nature Cities, 1(12), 853–860. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-024-00154-1
• Drori, G. S., Höllerer, M. A., & Walgenbach, P. (2014). Unpacking the glocalization of organization: From term, to theory, to analysis. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 1(1), 85–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2014.904205
• Dutta, S., & Forbes, D. P. (2025). Fostering entrepreneurship in nonmetro areas: Ecosystem architects as conduits of knowledge spillovers. Academy of Management Journal, 68(4), 735–759. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2022.1249
• Höllerer, M. A., Walgenbach, P., & Drori, G. S. (2017). The consequences of globalization for organizations and institutions. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, T. Lawrence, & R. E. Meyer (Eds.), Sage handbook of organizational institutionalism (2nd ed., pp. 214–242). SAGE.
• Leixnering, S., & Höllerer, M. (2022). ‘Remaining the same or becoming another?’ Adaptive resilience versus transformative urban change. Urban Studies, 59(6), 1300–1310. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098021998923
• Marquis, C., & Battilana, J. (2009). Acting globally but thinking locally? The enduring influence of local communities on organizations. Research in Organizational Behavior, 29, 283–302. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.riob.2009.06.001
• Molotch, H., Freudenburg, W., & Paulsen, K. E. (2000). History repeats itself, but how? City character, urban tradition, and the accomplishment of place. American Sociological Review, 65, 791–823. https://doi.org/10.1177/000312240006500601
• Saxenian, A. (2005). From brain drain to brain circulation: Transnational communities and regional upgrading in India and China. Studies in Comparative International Development, 40(2), 35–61. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02686293
• Schotter, A. P. J., Mudambi, R., Doz, Y. L., & Gaur, A. (2017). Boundary spanning in global organizations. Journal of Management Studies, 54(4), 403–421. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12256
• Vith, S., Oberg, A., Höllerer, M. A., & Meyer, R. E. (2019). Envisioning the ‘Sharing City’: Governance strategies for the sharing economy. Journal of Business Ethics, 159, 1023–1046. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04242-4