And as the end of the year nears, so do the January deadlines for AOM and EGOS. EGOS 2021 offers bountiful opportunities for submitting history-based and history-inspired pieces of organizational scholarship this year. Below a quick summary of the main tracks that are likely interested in historical perspectives:
Sub-theme 01: [SWG] Organization & Time: The Situated Activity of Time Enactment
Convenors:
Tor Hernes Copenhagen Business School, Denmarkth.ioa@cbs.dk
Joanna Karmowska Oxford Brookes University, United Kingdomjkarmowska@brookes.ac.uk
Claus Rerup Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, Germanyc.rerup@fs.de
Call for Papers
The third sub-theme of Standing Working Group (SWG) 01 will concern the more situated, on-going activity of time enactment in organizations. The on-going time enactment is crucial for understanding a host of issues, including the very agency of the moment, the roles of temporal structures, and the on-going interplay between evoked pasts and projected futures. It will lend focus to temporal structure, including routines, practices and materiality, through which time is enacted in organizations. It will connect the situated time enactment to different variations and combinations of near and distant pasts and futures, while considering factors such as agency, emotions and aesthetics. The empirical focus invites, but not exclusively, papers on topics such as digitalisation, creative organizations and start-ups.
Sub-theme 24: Craft in Modern Society
Convenors:
Jochem Kroezen University of Cambridge, United Kingdomj.kroezen@jbs.cam.ac.uk
Innan Sasaki University of Warwick, United Kingdominnan.sasaki@wbs.ac.uk
Pursey P.M.A.R. Heugens Erasmus University, The Netherlandspheugens@rsm.nl
Call for Papers
The last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary resurgence of interest in craft and craftsmanship. Once thought to be an obsolete mode of organizing and producing for modern society, now craft movements appear to be reconfiguring entire sectors, with examples ranging from beer brewing (Kroezen & Heugens, 2019), to watchmaking (Raffaelli, 2019), to barbering (Ocejo, 2017) and to maker spaces (Browder et al., 2019). In addition to the transformative powers of craft production, there is also a surprisingly broad range of instances where heritage crafts have managed to survive despite pressures of modernization and globalization, such as the case in musical instrument making (Cattani et al., 2017) or Japanese family firms (Sasaki et al., 2019). Increasingly, management and organization scholars are paying attention to these phenomena across various strands of research and are contributing to a growing understanding of (1) what defines craft as opposed to established theories of organizing and (2) how empirically craft may be valued and organized differently across time and space. This sub-theme intends to offer a setting for scholars interested in craft and craftsmanship to advance our collective understanding of the concept and related phenomena and firmly establish craft as an object of investigation and theorization in its own right.
Sub-theme 33: Historical Organization Studies in Action: Strategy, Entrepreneurship, and Social Innovation
Convenors:
Mairi Maclean University of Bath, United Kingdomkmm57@bath.ac.uk
Roy Suddaby University of Victoria, Canadarsuddaby@uvic.ca
Stewart Clegg University of Technology, Sydney, Australiastewart.clegg@uts.edu.au
Call for Papers
Historical organization studies is ‘organizational research that draws on historical sources, methods and knowledge to explore, refine and develop theoretical ideas and conceptual insights’ (Maclean et al., 2016). Put simply, it seeks to blend history and organization studies. Its status is that of emergent academic movement rather than established community of practice. For over two decades, organization theorists have emphasized the need for more and better research recognizing the importance of the past in shaping the present and future (Clegg, 2006; Kieser, 1994). Some have identified a distinct historic turn in organization studies led by scholars who perceive the field to have been constrained by its orientation towards contemporary cross-sectional studies covering limited periods of time (Clark & Rowlinson, 2004; Mills et al., 2016). By historicising organizational research, it is argued, the contexts and forces bearing upon organizations might be more fully recognized and analyses of organizational dynamics might be improved. But how, precisely, might a traditionally empirically-oriented discipline, such as history, be incorporated into a theoretically-oriented discipline such as organization studies? In recent years this has been the topic of extensive debate, giving rise to a number of ground-breaking publications (Bucheli & Wadhwani, 2014; Kipping & Üsdiken, 2014; Rowlinson et al., 2014; Suddaby et al., 2010) and a flurry of Special Issues in journals including, inter alia. Academy of Management Review, Organization Studies, Management Learning, and Organization.
Sub-theme 49: Organizational Memory Studies: Toward an Inclusive Research Agenda
Convenors:
Hamid Foroughi University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom foroughi.hamid@gmail.com
Sébastien Mena City, University of London, United Kingdom sebastien.mena.1@city.ac.uk
William M. Foster University of Alberta, Canada wfoster@ualberta.ca
Call for Papers
Collective memories are powerful factors in shaping both individual perceptions and social behaviour, and as such, are important for organizing processes. Organizations are also arenas for the engagement of various social actors in collective processes of remembering and forgetting. While organizational research has tended to adopt a psychological metaphor of storage and retrieval of knowledge to understand organizational memory (e.g., Walsh & Ungson, 1991; Ren & Argote, 2011), recent advances have also engaged with sociological perspectives on memory (e.g., Hatch & Schultz, 2017; Foroughi, 2019; Mena et al., 2016; Ravasi et al., 2019). For instance, the interest in the social construction of organizational mnemonics (Coraiola et al., 2015) has fuelled the development of theoretical approaches on the practices of remembering and the uses of the past in achieving organizational strategies (e.g., Foster, et al., 2017; Wadhwani et al., 2018). Others have also looked at the importance of organizations for broader processes of social remembering and forgetting, such as the perpetuation of inequalities or the collective forgetting of corporate irresponsibility (e.g., Cutcher et al., 2019; Mena, et al., 2016). Yet, others have highlighted the role of diverse stakeholders, such as employees, customers and investors/donors, in shaping an organizational memory (Bell & Taylor, 2016; Foroughi & Al-Amoudi, 2019). Altogether, these examinations of memory in and around organizations from various perspectives have been called ‘Organizational Memory Studies’ (OMS) (Rowlinson et al., 2010).
Sub-theme 59: Organizing in the Age of Nationalism
Convenors:
Alexei Koveshnikov Aalto University, Finland alexei.koveshnikov@aalto.fi
Sally Riad Victoria Universiy of Wellington, New Zealand sally.riad@vuw.ac.nz
Eero Vaara University of Oxford, United Kingdom eero.vaara@sbs.ox.ac.uk
Call for Papers
Nationalism is a fundamentally important dynamic force in contemporary society (Billig, 1995; Gellner & Breuilly, 1983; Wodak, 2017). There are different interpretations of what nationalism is and a multitude of approaches to study it (Delanty & Kumar, 2006). Among these, Benedict Anderson’s (1983) idea of nations as “imagined communities” is based on the assumption that people in societies can imagine their unity and develop a sense of belonging by way of myths, symbols, and stories that help them to identify with and as a community that is (seen as) the nation. It applies well to studying contemporary nationalism in its multiple forms, and it has proved to be useful for moving discussions from objectivist to subjectivist conceptions of national unity (Segal & Handler, 2006). It is especially relevant today as we enter an era of “post-truth” politics and “alternative facts” (Knight & Tsoukas, 2019) where nationalism and constructions of nationalism become increasingly prominent parts of language games played by powerful societal actors such as politicians and corporate executives for the purposes of political mobilization and legitimation.
Organizational History Network 