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CFP JOD Special Issue – Organization Design of Resilience in the Face of Unanticipated Global Crises

  • 1.  CFP JOD Special Issue – Organization Design of Resilience in the Face of Unanticipated Global Crises

    Posted 09-26-2020 07:39
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    Journal of Organization Design Call for Papers | Special Issue

    'Organization Design of Resilience in the Face of Unanticipated Global Crises'
     

    Guest Editors

    Arie Y. Lewin, Duke University, USA

    Liisa Välikangas, Technical University of Denmark and Hanken School of Economics, Finland

    Deadline for submissions

    17 April 2021 (full call for papers available here)

    Background

    How to design for resilience, and how do organizations manifest resilience in organizational designs during global crises? The COVID-19 pandemic

    has revealed resilience as a neglected organizational capability despite decades of research in different but related disciplinary fields ranging from psychology to ecology, from safety engineering to organization studies and management.

    What is resilience? Holling (1996) drew a distinction between resilience that is about the functional efficiency of a system or an organization (called engineering resilience) and resilience that is about its survival (called ecological resilience). He further noted that resilience is found only in dynamic responses to extraordinary challenges, not in the everyday adaptation of organizations (March, 1981), which may mask latent or potential resilience or lack thereof (Fenema & Romme, 2020, Linnenluecke and Griffith, 2010).

    How is resilience manifest? Some authors focus on a bounce back to event- preceding conditions as a sign of operational resilience (Wildawski, 1988). Others emphasize the improvisation of timely strategic responses amidst external chaos (Lengnick-Hall et al. 2011) and without undergoing trauma (Hamel & Välikangas, 2003). Resilience is then observable in the capacity of an organization to transform itself to remain competitive or legitimate in the abruptly changing external environment. Such resilience may be enabled by fungible slack resources or flexible cognitive routines to fashion solutions out of collective, transactive memory. It may derive from particular qualities in organizational relationships, or it may be a matter of serendipity and luck – making it to the right place the right time. Resilience may also have an internal quality, such as mindfulness (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2001) which may mean preventing disruptions including accidents. The dynamic nature of resilience is evidenced in the organization transforming itself or it may be – in Karl Weick's words – a dynamic non-event: the status quo prevails.

    A number of case studies (e.g. Perrow, 2011, Vaughn, 1986, Majchrzak et al, 2007, Stevenson, 2014) have discussed adaptation to potentially catastrophic external disruptions. What is the record of organizations and their designs in a global pandemic beyond the luck of benefitting from a business that is in particular demand, or being able to ramp up to the needs of the suddenly skyrocketing market? Where do we find resilience in the current landscape of organizations and why (Van der Vegt et al 2015)? What organizational designs show resilience under crisis (for an integrative view, see Williams et al, 2007)? An interesting example of studying resilience of complex organizations from different theoretical perspectives is the debate between Charles Perrow and Nancy Leveson who scrutinized each other's work from a sociological and engineering perspective, respectively relating to the nature and designs of resilience and safety (see for example Marais et al, 2004, Leveson et al, 2009, Leveson, 2011, Perrow, 1981).

    It is not clear whether resilience pinpoints to a single or multiple phenomena.

    What is potentially adding to the confusion are terms that are sometimes used interchangeably, such as agility, robustness, or anti-fragility. What unites the resilience scholars and practitioners is the focus on the challenge of responding to unpredictable Black Swan type events that can precipitously obsolete existing competitive strategy or organizational functionality and distort the organization's capacity to recognize that returning to old normal is not an option (Grandori, 2020; Välikangas & Lewin, 2020). 

    Special Issue aims and scope

    The intent of this Special Issue is not to limit resilience to any singular format or framework or to seek an ultimate or unassailable dominant design definition. We acknowledge that resilience can stem from many wellsprings and it may be manifest in multiple ways. This should not be surprising, given the scientific roots of the term being located in a multitude of disciplines, with cross-overs and interpretations. We thus call for papers that consider and accept equifinality of capabilities underlying resilience anchored in various theoretical lenses in the context of studying organizations. For example, we welcome multi-method studies on the expressions of organizational resilience in collective learning, organizational ambidexterity, open innovation, garbage can processes and outcomes, capabilities for recognizing emergence, leadership, or deploying and repurposing advanced technologies. How do particular theoretical perspectives enable or negate organizational resilience and how is such theorization empirically manifest? We invite diverse submissions that take specific or a fusion of theoretical perspectives and consider how the particular perspective(s) might anchor resilience, coupled with an empirical qualitative or quantitative study. Where is resilience manifest in organizations and their designs and to what performative effect? How do organizations learn from failing to be resilient?

    The Special Issue is proposed as a forum for exploring resilience from multitude of theoretical perspectives under extraordinary circumstances such as the current global pandemic. We encourage exchange across theoretical, or even disciplinary boundaries in the best tradition of resilience studies, as long as the discussion is related to organizations and their designs for resilience. To aid such exchanges, we will assemble reviewers from multiple disciplinary backgrounds to provide commentaries on the published articles.


    About the Guest Editors

    Arie Y. Lewin (Coordinating Guest Editor) is Professor Emeritus of Strategy and International Business at Duke University, Fuqua School of Business. He is elected Fellow of the Academy of International Business and The Organization Management and Theory division of the Academy of Management, which awarded Professor Lewin the first Joanne Martin Trailblazer Award at the 2008 Annual Meeting. He is the Editor-In-Chief of Management and Organization Review (MOR). He was Editor-in-Chief (2002- 2007) of Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS); founding Editor-in-Chief of Organization Science (1989-1998) and the convener of the acclaimed Organization Science Winter Conference (1994 - 2008). Email: ayl3@duke.edu

    Liisa Välikangas teaches strategic leadership at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and Hanken  School of Economics in Finland. Previously she has been affiliated with Aalto University, Stanford  University, London Business School and Keio University. She has worked for Strategos, a strategic management consulting firm, and SRI International in California's Silicon Valley. Her prior works include The Resilient Organization, McGraw-Hill, 2010 and Strategic Innovation, Pearson/ Financial Times Press, 2015. She is Deputy Editor of Management and Organization Review's Dialogue, Debate and Discussion section. Professor Välikangas has consulted with many small and large companies around the world and served in the board of the Finnish National Innovation Agency, Tekes. Email: liiva@dtu.dk

    Instructions

    The deadline for submission is 17 April 2021.

    Submit via the journal's forthcoming new platform: editorialmanager.com/jorg.

    Mention the special issue in your covering letter, and affirm during the submission process that you are submitting to this Special Issue.

    The Journal of Organization Design publishes various article types, including research papers, research primers, translationals, commentaries, and "point of view" papers, all of which can be submitted to this Special Issue. Refer to the journal's online submission guidelines for details pertaining to each article type, as well as examples of published work.

    Beginning in 2021, the Journal of Organization Design will begin publishing in hybrid format:  by  default,  accepted articles will run in the subscription version of the journal. Following acceptance, authors will have the option to publish their work  in Open Access format through Springer Nature's Open Choice program. For more information, please contact the Development Editor Erica Gordon-Mallin via Erica.Gordon-Mallin@springer.com.

    About the journal

    The Journal of Organization Design is published by Springer Nature in partnership with the Organizational Design Community. It was established in 2012.

    Editors-in-Chief

    Oliver Baumann Brian Wu

    References

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    Fenema, P. & Romme, A. G. 2020. Latent organizing for responding to emergencies: foundations for research, Journal of Organization Design volume 9, Article number: 11 (2020).

    Gradori, A., 2020. Black Swans and Generative Resilience, Management and Organization Review,16:3, 495-501. Hamel, G. and Valikangas, L. (2003). The quest for resilience. Harvard Business Review, 81, pp. 52–65.

    Holling (1996). Engineering Resilience versus Ecological Resilience, In Shulze, P. Engineering within Ecological Constraints, National Academy of Engineering.

    Lengnick-Hall, C. A., Beck, T. E., & Lengnick-Hall, M. L. 2011. Developing a capacity for organizational resilience through strategic human resource management. Human Resource Management Review, 21(3): 243–255.

    Leveson, N. 2011. Applying systems thinking to analyze and learn from events, Safety Science 49, 55–64.

    Leveson, N., Nicolas Dulac, Karen Marais, and John Carroll, 2009., Moving Beyond Normal Accidents and High Reliability Organizations: A Systems Approach to Safety in Complex Systems, Organization Studies, 30(02&03): 227–249.

    Linnenluecke, M. 2017, Resilience in Business and Management Research: A Review of Influential Publications and a Research Agenda, International Journal of Management Reviews, Vol. 19.

    Majchrzak, A., Jarvenpaa, S. L., & Hollingshead, A. B. 2007. Coordinating expertise among emergent groups responding to disasters. Organization Science, 18(1): 147–161.

    Marais, N. Dulac, N. Leveson 2004, Beyond normal accidents and high reliability organizations: The need for an alternative approach to safety in complex systems, MIT, available at: http://klabs.org/DEI/lessons_learned/papers/marais-b.pdf


    March, J.G. 1981, Footnotes to Organizational Change, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 4, pp. 563-57Masten, A. & Obradovic, J. 2006. Competence and Resilience in Development, Annals of New York Academy of Sciences, 1094: 13–27.

    Meyer, A.D. (1982). Adapting to environmental jolts. Administrative Science Quarterly, 27, pp. 515–537. Perrow, C. 1981. Normal Accident at Three Mile Island, Perrow, C. Society 18, 17–26.

    Perrow, C. 2011. Fukushima and the inevitability of accidents, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Volume: 67 issue: 6, page(s): 44-52.

    Stevenson, J. R. 2014. Organisational resilience after the Canterbury earthquakes: A contextual approach. PhD thesis, University of Canterbury.

    Vaughn, D. , 1986. Structural secrecy and organizational misconduct: NASA and the space shuttle Challenger. Pa- per presented at the Symposium on Secrecy and Disclosure in Organizations, Academy of Management Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL.

    VanDerVegt, G.S., Essens, P., Wahlström, M., & George, G. 2015. Managing risk and resilience. Academy of Management Journal, 58(4): 971–980.

    Välikangas, L. & Lewin, A.Y. 2020: The Lingering New Normal, Management and Organization Review, 2020. Weick, K.E. and Sutcliffe, K.M. (2001). Managing the Unexpected. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

    Wildavsky, A.B. (1988). Searching for Safety. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Academy of Management Annals 2017, Vol. 11, No. 2, 733–769. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2015.0134

    Williams, T., Gruber, D. Sutcliffe. K. Shepherd D., Zhao, E. 2017. Organizational Response To Adversity: Fusing Crisis Management And Resilience Research Streams, Academy of Management Annals, Vol. 11, No. 2, 733–769.



    ------------------------------
    Arie Lewin
    Duke University
    Durham NC
    (919) 660-7832
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