Seeing Anew: Studying Organization During Social Transformation
Saturday, August 10, 3:00-4:30pm, Swissotel, Veyvey 4
PDW Description
Current transformations in capitalism, such as digitization and climate change, pose challenges to the basic ontological categories of observation that have been used in studying management and business: firm, employee, industry, performance. How might management scholars study business in a moment when such basic building blocks of managerial research are contested? What can management scholars learn from how other fields – such as history, anthropology, semiotics, phenomenology – study transformations?
Format & Workgroups
In the first half, panelists (Jerry Davis, Lena Olaison, Christina Lubinski, Dan Wadhwani, Andy Hargadon, Steve Cummings) will discuss the challenges posed by digitization and climate change to taken-for-granted categories of management research and the opportunities this presents for researchers. The second half will consist of breakout groups, each devoted to discussing the study of a particular taken-for-granted category of organization given current challenges to their validity.
A.) The Firm. New forms of flexible and temporary organizing are driving vertical disintegration and destabilizing the corporate form. How are these changes recasting classical management questions (e.g. the boundaries of the firm) and how do we make sense of "the firm" under these emerging conditions?
B.) Employee/Occupation. The rise of gig work, novel contracting mechanisms, and new information technologies are destabilizing "employment" and "occupation" as conceptual anchors of work. What is lost and what is gained with the potential decline of employment and occupation as fundamental categories of management? Are there new fundamental categories by which work is organized?
C.) Industry. Industries, once considered relatively stable contexts in which firms compete and are regulated, are increasingly treated as fluid arenas of strategic choice and flexible identity. What are the implications of such changes for the nature of competition and regulation? Are there emerging practices by which firms, managers and regulators identify the contexts or fields of interaction?
D.) Performance. Changes in managerial behavior and the challenges of climate cast doubt on conventional measures of organizational performance, such as financial profitability and firm survival. These circumstances raise questions of how we evaluate management, and the temporal horizons of evaluation. How do we study changes in the practices of evaluation and what role, if any, is there for normative questions of what ought to be evaluated?
Pre-Registration
If you are interested in the PDW, please pre-register using this simple google form by August 1. If your university requires proof of involvement to fund your participation at the AOM please indicate this on the form and we can generate a letter of invitation/participation.
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Daniel Wadhwani
Professor
University of Southern California
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