Please take 1-2 minutes to let us know your interests so that we can effectively plan the workshop.
The PDW will begin with a panel discussion on how current social transformations (digitization, climate change) pose fundamental challenges to the basic categories of observation that have been used in management research. We will then break out into subgroups based on the four research domains below.
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 these as fundamental categories? Are there new fundamental categories by which work is organized?
C.) Industry. Once considered relatively stable contexts in which firms compete and are regulated, "industries" have become increasingly fluid arenas of strategic choice and flexible identities. 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 of fields of interaction?
D.) Performance. Both the changes in managerial behavior and the impending challenges of climate change have cast doubt on convventional measures of organizational performance, such as financial profitability and firm survival. These circumstances have raised questions of what we measure when we evaluate management, and the temporal horizons over which performance is evaluated. How do we study changes in the practices of evaluation and how might researchers effectively address normative questions of what ought to be evaluated?
