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Sub-theme 08: [SWG] Expertise and Organizational Design

Convenors:
Jillian Chown
Northwestern University, US
Lisa E. Cohen
McGill University, Canada
Pedro Monteiro
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Organizations are experimenting with how they structure expertise—adopting flatter hierarchies, cross-functional teams, agile methods, and new specialized roles—with varied consequences for organizations and their members. But we lack frameworks for understanding how these design choices shape the development, deployment, and integration of expertise and why similar arrangements produce such different outcomes across settings. The underlying problem is old: the division of labor has always been, at its core, a question about how specialized knowledge is distributed across organizational structures, shaping which specializations emerge, how knowledge circulates, and who counts as an expert in a given domain. What has changed is the range and variety of design choices organizations now face, from holacracy to algorithmic management, raising questions that cut across established literatures on expertise, knowledge work, organizational design and structure, and the governance of professional work.

This sub-theme invites papers that investigate the relationship between expertise and organizational design. We are interested in how organizations structure expert work—through roles, tasks, jobs, spatial arrangements, governance mechanisms, and technological tools—as well as how these design choices shape the development, deployment, recognition, and integration of specialized knowledge.

These dynamics raise a set of interconnected questions that we hope to explore through this sub-theme:

  • How do different organizational structures (e.g., hierarchical, matrix, or network-based, or less hierarchical forms) shape the specialization or integration of expert knowledge, and with what consequences for how expertise is developed and exercised? 

  • How do task and job designs, role configurations, and the bundling of work shape which problems receive expert attention, how effort is allocated, and what patterns of coordination emerge?

  • How do expertise networks emerge, evolve, and intersect with formal and informal organizational structures?

  • How do experts, tasks, and expertise co-evolve in organizations? What are the potential misalignments between experts and tasks, and how are these managed?

  • How are new technologies, including AI and algorithmic tools, reshaping who counts as expert, how expertise is bundled into roles, and how organizations recognize and evaluate specialized knowledge?

  • How do organizational designs intended to govern expertise produce unintended consequences, such as reinforcing inequality, constraining adaptation, or sustaining arrangements that have outlived their usefulness?


Jillian Chown 's research examines how organizations deploy and govern specialized expertise, focusing on the infrastructures (e.g., roles, task designs, spatial arrangements, and indirect controls) through which expert work is structured. Much of her empirical work is situated in healthcare, where professional discretion is high and governance challenges are particularly acute. She is interested in how organizational design shapes which problems experts take up, how knowledge circulates, and why similar structures produce divergent outcomes across settings.
Lisa E. Cohen ’s research focuses on the bundling of tasks into jobs and jobs into organizations: how and why do jobs and organizations look the way they do, how do they change, and how they influence organizational outcomes? Currently she is examining these issues through the lens of startup hiring and job design with papers looking at how jobs change between deciding to hire and actual hiring, how external stakeholders collaborate in job design processes, how tasks and expertise co-evolve, and how misfit leads to system level changes in jobs.
Pedro Monteiro ’s academic work explores organizations’ challenges in developing, recognizing, and integrating expertise, and he is particularly interested in the role of organizational structures in these processes. Pedro is also interested in how expertise in organizational theory is structured and how it relates to lay understandings and theories about organizing. He is also passionate about research dissemination and co-founded the Talking about Organizations Podcast.