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Report 2003: Department of Organisation and Industrial Sociology (IOA)

Department of Organisation and Industrial Sociology (IOA): Research Report 2003

Highlights 2003

Internationalisation:
  • CBS, through Department staff members professors Finn Borum and Peer Hull Kristensen and administrative officer Marianne Risberg, hosted the European Group for Organizational Studies’ annual research colloquium at the beginning of July. To judge by the number of participants – 800 from 32 countries – and all the positive feedback about the academic level and the organisation of the colloquium, it was a great success.

  • The Department contributed to the extension of CBS’ network of internationally recognised researchers: On the initiative of assistant research professor Mie Augier and professor Kristian Kreiner, CBS invited
    professor David Teece from The Haas School of Management, University of California, Berkley, in September. His lecture on ”Explicating Dynamic Capabilities” was very well attended. The Department also took the initiative to appoint Harvard sociologist Frank Dobbin adjunct professor.
Partnership with the business community:
  • In August, IOA and CBS, through professor Henrik Holt Larsen in cooperation with the Danish Centre for Management, hosted the annual Cranet conference on HRM-related issues with the participation of more than 200 Danish HR managers.

  • Joint research projects with private enterprises have been launched under the LOK programme and in connection with the Danish Ministry of Science innovation consortium scheme. LOK allocated funds for a 3-year period for the research project entitled ”Competence, Organisation and Management in Biotech Industries” (the COMBI programme), and IOA is part of the innovation consortium ”Center for Effektiv Miljøkommunikation i Produktkæder” (Center for efficient environmental communication in product chains, CEMIP) which is being co-financed by the Ministry of Science for a 3-year period.
The learning university:
  • The Department is facing a department evaluation and as the first CBS department it started preparations to draw up intellectual capital accounts in connection with the Department’s self-evaluation. Intellectual capital accounts allow reporting of both systematic analyses and experiments. We expect to exploit the results in connection with our efforts to develop a more innovative form of organisation which were started last autumn: IOA as a project organisation.


Academic profile

To organise means to create order and that is what the Department of Organisation and Industrial Sociology is concerned with. Through our research we study how various social activities are organised and structured; in other words how they ’arise’. The conditions of such organisational processes vary considerably. For the same reason, the Department's research focus is on identifying and understanding the conditions of successful creation, maintenance and change of the established order in connection with organisational strategy and development processes. It seeks to open a number of the ”black boxes” of business economics – agents, technologies and markets – by further developing the behaviour-theory positions of the Department.
Hence, the Department’s research target field is organisation(s) with the dualism implied by the fact that organisational structures and processes are considered mutually dependent and fundamental. In our efforts to identify and understand the constant changes to working life and to the business community – the organisational processes – we therefore focus on processes rather than on structural conditions; on relations and interaction between players rather than on individual players or groups of players; and on informal practices developed concurrently with formal divisions of work, tasks and social roles. These relations are studied in private and public organisations, service organisations, interest organisations and voluntary organisations.
The Department’s academic profile is characterised by an interdisciplinary approach reflecting the academic background of its staff on the one hand and a specific methodical research approach on the other. The Department staff make up a broadly composed group of academics in the fields of engineering, literary science, economics, sociology, psychology, political science and anthropology. At the same time the dynamics and complexity characteristic of the Department’s research target field call for the mobilisation of several types of explanations or theoretical disciplines. In this way the Department’s interdisciplinary approach is constantly at stake.
The Department has a long tradition of conducting in-depth, almost ethnographical analyses. Its strong empirical embeddedness is another characteristic contributing to the international positioning of Department research while challenging us to find new interrelationships and patterns and to gain further insight.
Department research aims to investigate and gain insight into issues relevant to business economics and to contribute to the solution of practical problems. Among the key issues currently subject to Department research are:
  • Organisational and managerial strategies in multinational corporations
  • Interaction between technologies and working processes, organisational processes and strategy processes
  • Establishment and development of the environmental activities of organisations
  • Knowledge and competence development
  • Management and organisation in the health sector
  • Institutionalisation of communication processes
  • Narrativity and identity
  • Management and organisation of creative industries
The Department exploits and develops the synergy between the above projects to gain new insight into the complex organisational dynamics involved when new organisational and managerial strategies are developed and implemented.


Research strategy

The Department has a very well-reputed research environment which is known for its practice-oriented, interdisciplinary approach producing research results of relevance to research and teaching and to a large number of non-university players.
IOA aims to sustain and extend this position by influencing the national and international research agenda to strengthen a sociological, psychological and anthropological approach to studies of organisational processes; by continually emphasising that all researchers should also teach; and by giving high priority to other ways of presenting our research. Even though all staff cannot be expected to be equally good at all the above activities, it is the Department’s ambition that all three methods of presentation – in the fields of research and teaching and in relation to other target groups in society – should constitute a work entity to which everybody should contribute.
To fulfil this objective, continuous development of the Department’s academic identity and profile and focus on publication concurrently with an orientation towards current theory debates and relevant, topical social issues must remain priorities. For the same reason, the Department research strategy is based on a number of measures for the purpose of:
  • extending academic – theoretical and empirical – debate with a view to concretising and developing the Department's research profile. The Department’s annual ’Winter Games’ dedicated to positioning the research of associate and full professors and the many varied activities of our Researcher Development Center (RDC) are good examples of contributory activities.

  • developing the skills of individual researchers with a view to presenting their research in international journals. This should be seen in the light of the fact that international journals determine individually what is considered worth presenting and that good researchers are not necessarily good at writing articles (and vice versa). A number of workshops (with emphasis on ’work’) were scheduled for the autumn of 2003 to provide feedback and to develop the manuscripts of participants. This activity is expected to continue in 2004.

  • providing research support in order to increase publication rates. Publication is considered extremely important to ensure research quality and to the Department’s research exposure and development. With a view to further improving the publication activities of its staff, the Department allocates resources to edit working papers (which often lead to one or more journal articles), to research tours, to participation in conferences, to language review of articles and to other forms of research support (e.g. the purchase of books). Furthermore, publication is a recurring theme in connection with staff development, with approval of the work programmes of assistant professors and with various Department seminars.

The Department previously described its research activities within the framework of four core areas: Organisation Theory, Strategy and Management, Human Resources and Business and Industrial Sociology. Realising that these headlines are constantly being redefined and given new meaning, and that they are no longer considered satisfactory with regard to describing its activities, the Department has taken the consequences and started the process of institutionalising a project organisation. In this connection, one of the challenges in terms of research strategy will be to develop existing initiatives to support the project organisation while improving the basis for strategic commitments, for example in the form of applications for external funds. It is also a special challenge to develop a profile which is sufficiently open to interpretation to be thought-provoking and inspiring while being clear enough to set out the Department’s research identity.


Research results

The most frequently applied target for the Department’s research results is the number of publications, especially international ones. As appears from Figure 1 below, IOA only improved its publication rate in the category of ”Other publications” primarily covering articles published in other contexts, e.g. in the daily press and the trade press. This reflects the Department staff’s high level of activity with regard to presenting their research results to a wide audience and getting involved in public debate on managerial and organisational issues, and there has been a steady increase in these activities throughout the reporting period.
Unfortunately this positive trend does not apply to the development of the Department’s rate of publication in other respects. The number of published articles and working papers remains much too low, although they are published in good journals such as Research Policy and Management Learning.

Publikationer 1999-2003

Figure 1
The number of Nordic-language articles, proceedings and working papers has been sustained at more or less the same level over the years, whereas the number of foreign-language articles was reduced by more than half from 2000 when the Department’s international publication peaked. This may be attributed to fluctuating publication processes resulting in an uneven distribution of publications over the years. However, that explanation is completely inadequate. The explanation is also to be found in several other conditions: for one thing, the Department’s generational change is accompanied by a publication ”time-lag” due to the relative lack of publication experience of its younger staff; for another, many of the Department’s most experienced staff members have been concerned with other activities, including organising conferences, launching research projects, developing and implementing new graduate courses. Initiatives to change the Department's publication approach have therefore been intensified.
However, there are other goals for research results than those appearing from Figure 1 – for example the number of theses and dissertations submitted, hosting and participating in international researcher networks, review activities and the Department’s ability to attract international guest professors. When assessed in relation to those criteria, the Department performance is a good deal more satisfactory:
  • In general, our PhDs complete their studies on time, and 9 PhD students submitted and defended their theses in 2003.

  • The Department contributed substantially to the organisation and holding of this year’s EGOS colloquium. 10 members of the Department staff acted as conference convenors and in that capacity they reviewed papers and established comprehensive networks. In a few instances they were also involved in publication activities to follow up on the conference, i.a. for the journal entitled International Studies in Management and Organization.

  • Several members of the Department staff act as reviewers at good publishing houses and conferences in our field (e.g. Oxford University Press, Organization Studies, Management International Review, Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, and the Academy of Management conference in Seattle) and one staff member holds a central position as editor of the Scandinavian Journal of Management.

  • Several internationally recognised guest professors (James March, Paul Duguid, Paul du Gay, Raghu Garud, David Teece and Daniel Bertaux) visited the Department in the course of 2003.
Although these research results are clearly more satisfactory than the limited number of publications, the Department must evidently do much more to increase its international publication in future.

Research relations to practice

The Department cooperates with the business community and public organisations within the framework of a number of research projects and in an educational context. With regard to the former, several staff members have been involved in (fully or partially financed) partnership projects with external partners, and a good many of the Department’s PhD students have also been financed through external funding allocations. As appears from Figure 2 below showing the basic funds and new external funding of Department research from 1999-2003, the size of new external funding allocations was considerably reduced over the last two years.

Forskningsmidler 1999-2003

Figure 2
The Figure does not show that the Department received a number of major internal and external funding allocations throughout the period. Hence, It does not give an overall impression of the Department's research funding. In 2003, the Department received almost DKK 4.5 mill. from externally funded research projects (EU, research councils, etc.) and DKK 3.5 mill. from partnerships, etc. In the past year we obtained funding for ”Competence, Organization and Management in Biotech Industries” (COMBI). This project is financed by LOK funds and implemented in cooperation with IVS. It is part of the recently established Center for Business Economics in the Biotech Sector (CEBI). The Department participates in an innovation consortium co-financed by the Danish Ministry of Science concerning efficient environmental communication in product chains (CEMIP) and a Finance Knowledge Centre funded by the Ministry. In addition, the Department has entered into a partnership contract with the National Agency for Enterprise and Housing on piecework in the building sector, and the Danish Centre for Development of Human Resources and Quality Management (SCKK) funds a project on educational self-training in new educational theory and practice. SSF allocated funds for studies of the institutionalisation and influence of the business press (BIZPRESS).
Research relations to practice are also implemented in connection with the Department’s educational activities, especially in relation to continuing education (the HD programme in Organisation and CBS’s Summer school) and the executive programmes (the MPA, MMD, MBA-BYG, MBA-TMO, MHM, MBA-full time Master’s programmes) but also in connection with the new undergraduate business economics programme in psychology. In all the above cases, the Department has cooperated with business community representatives and other relevant organisations on curriculum planning and development.



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