"Cross-roads": Green Transition & Organization Theory (2021)
Organizers: Majken Schultz, Miriam Feuls

Presenters: Majken Schultz, Tor Hernes, Miriam Feuls (Novo Nordisk project) & Susana Borras, Trine Pallesen, Stine Haakonsson (DFF project)

Timing: Friday October 8, 2021, 13.00 - 16.00

Organizational Ethnography on the Streets (2021)
Organizers: Pedro Monteiro and OT@IOA
 
Presenters: Samantha Ortiz (Ph.D. Candidate, EM Lyon, France) and Rafael Alcadipani (Professor at EAESP-FGV, Brazil)

Provocatrice: Tammar Zilber

Time: Thursday September 16, 2021, 13.00 - 15.00
Place: Virtual seminar (Zoom)

"Cross-roads": Time, Food, and Organization (2021)
Organizers: Tor Hernes, Jesper Strandgaard, Silviya Svejenova

Presenters: Iben Stjerne, Mie Plotnikof, Miriam Feuls, Tor Hernes, Silviya Svejenova (Velux project on the temporality of food innovations) & Sophie Cappelen, Jesper Strandgaard (projects on culinary heritage and school gardens)

Timing: June 7, 2021, 14.00 - 16.00, followed by socializing on campus (if feasible)

"Cross-roads": The dark sides of organization theory (2021)
Organizers: Christian De Cock, Eva Boxenbaum, Renate Meyer

Presenters: Eva Boxenbaum & Renate Meyer's Velux project on undesirable consequences of implementing OT & Christian De Cock's projects on violence and conditions of disregard

Contributor: José Ossandón (provocateur)

Timing: April 14, 2021,14.00 - 16.00

Institutions in Time and Place (2020)

Organizers: Eva Boxenbaum, Renate Meyer and Silviya Svejenova

Time: September 7, from 1 pm to 3 pm
Place: Copenhagen Business School, Kilevej 14A, 2000 Frederiksberg, room KL.2.53.
 

Institutions and Creativity (2019)
This seminar will explore the interface between institutional theory and creativity. More specifically, we will discuss research on organizational creativity from an institutional perspective and through the notion of field of ideas. The conversation will revolve around two research projects to be presented and discussed at this event (attached please find abstracts and brief bios of the speakers).

The first research “Organizing creativity in music and pharma: An institutional perspective” will be presented by Elke Schussler (Professor of Business Administration and Head of the Institute of Organization Science at Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria). It will give us insights into the practices by which actors engaged in creative projects enact field-level temporal, regulatory and evaluative structures in creative collaborations, and discuss the extent to which these practices can be seen as institutionalized on team, organizational or field levels.

The second research “What’s an idea? Creativity, idea work and intertextual fields” will be presented by Arne Carlsen (Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Department of Leadership and Organizational Behavior, BI Norwegian Business School, Norway). It will problematize core assumptions of mainstream research on organizational creativity and expand on the notion of fields of ideas.
IOA Professor Christian de Cock who has also extensively researched creativity will take on the role of provocateur, connecting the presentations and further fueling the conversation.

Organizers: Eva Boxenbaum, Renate Meyer and Silviya Svejenova

Time: December 16, from 1.30 pm to 3.30 pm
Place: Copenhagen Business School, Kilevej 14A, 2000 Frederiksberg, room K4.74
 

Institutions and Innovation (2019)
This seminar will explore how innovation arises in highly institutionalized settings. We will discuss research on how innovations can acquire prestige despite them not conforming to the status standards of an organizational field, and what type of individuals can promote such low status innovations regardless of potential harmful consequences on their own status in the field.

The discussion will revolve around two research projects to be presented and discussed at this event (attached please find abstracts and brief bios of the speakers).

The first research “Destiny or fate? How values guide actors throughout their lives in becoming institutional entrepreneurs: The case of Swiss spatial planners’ career paths” will be presented by Emamdeen Fohim (PhD student at the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland) and gives insights into the puzzling emergence of institutional entrepreneurs.
The second research “Acquiring prestige: An archival study of reinforced concrete in the French construction industry” will be presented by Mélodie Cartel (Lecturer at UNSW Business School, Sydney, Australia) and discuss how low status innovations can eventually acquire extreme forms of status such as prestige.

Organizers: Eva Boxenbaum, Renate Meyer and Silviya Svejenova

Time: October 3, 2019, from 2.30 pm to 4.30 pm
Place: Copenhagen Business School, Kilevej 14A, 2000 Frederiksberg, room K1.24
 

Institution and War (2018)

This seminar will explore the interface between institutional theory and war. More specifically, we will discuss research on the recent refugee crises from an institutional theory perspective.

The discussion will revolve around two studies (one ethnography and one social media analysis) to be presented and discussed at this event (attached please find abstracts and brief bios of the speakers).

The first study “The Long Walk to Aleppo: Institutional Myths, Inhabited Institutions, and Ideals in the Real World” will be presented by Mark de Rond (Professor of Organizational Ethnography at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge) and give insights into an ethnographic study on the civil march from Berlin to Aleppo.

The second study “New forms of organizing in a logistical crisis– implications for institutional theory” will be presented by Noomi Weinryb (Associate Senior Lecturer at Södertörn University, Sweden) and show how new norms of organizing and accountability emerge in initiatives trying to help refugees.

Organizers: Eva Boxenbaum, Renate Meyer and Silviya Svejenova

Time: May 3, 2018. From 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.
Place: Copenhagen Business School, Kilevej 14A, 2000 Frederiksberg, room K4.74

Institutional Interfaces: Aesthetics (2018)

 Speakers’ abstracts and bios

(1) Micki Eisenman, Pilar Opazo, Michal Frenkel, & Varda Wasserman, “Micro-Zoning: Material Work in the Molecular Gastronomy Movement”

Organization theorists have been studying the physical properties of organizational artifacts, those objects that encode social meanings, and the ways in which they construct and constrain behavior in and around organizations (e.g., Bechky, 2008; DeMaron, Le, and LeBaron, 2015; Jones, Boxenbaum, and Anthony, 2013; Jones and Massa, 2013; Norman, 2004; Pratt and Rafaeli, 2006). A key question in much of this research pertains to understanding the intersection between the ways in which physical materials are merely textual manifestations which can be understood in a semiotic context, that is, as signs in a system of signification, and aspects of the material itself, as a substantive physical entity that both enables and constrains social interaction and interpretation (Fayard and Weeks, 2014; Leonardi and Barley, 2010; Orlikowski and Scott, 2008; Phillips and Oswick, 2012). In this paper, we advance these efforts in several ways. First, we study the production of materiality as a meeting point between a tangible, physical entity that can elicit sensory reactions as well as semiotic interpretations. These intersections, we suggest, are linked to the unique affordances embedded in the materials—the set of actions the materials shape, invite, or constrain (c.f., Fayard and Weeks, 2014). Second, we attend to calls for work that is multisensory in its reach (e.g., Islam et al., 2016; Pratt and Rafaeli, 2001). Therefore, we account for the presence of all five senses rather than prioritizing the visual. This allows us to highlight how different sensory affordances are distinct. Furthermore, it allows us to explore how materials embed and evoke senses and how the interactions among these embedded senses affect their affordances and affect the ways in which they are subject to semiotic interpretation as well as how affordances and signification work together to create a more holistic meaning or experience. Third, we highlight that, for the most part, extant work on materiality has viewed artifacts as holistic and has not yet moved towards dissecting artifacts into their various components. We suggest that material objects are in fact a compilation of multiple material components that producers link together in various ways. That is, some of the components evoke semiotic referents while others evoke various sensory reactions and other still offer various constraining affordances. And, these aspects of the material artifact interact. Applying an approach that focuses on such linkages allows us to understand the relationship between materiality and producers’ abilities to plan the evocation of emotional and affective reactions as well as to manipulate the affordances of materials and their effects on the senses.

We address our goals by studying production in the context of the molecular gastronomy movement. We use a broad range of interview, observational data, and archival data to analyze dishes as examples of complex material artifacts. Dishes are material constructions that are able to evoke both sensory reactions along all five senses as well as semiotic interpretations. Further, their composition lends itself to interactions between the sensory evocations and the semiotic interpretations. It is through these interactions and the affordances they elicit that chefs creating them are able to do a form of material work we term “micro-zoning”. That is, chefs are able to manipulate the interactions and behaviors of diners, in the course of a 3 to 4-hour meal, through their manipulations of the materials comprising a dish. Most interestingly, we find that chefs are able to enforce temporal dimensions on behaviors and interactions by linking materials in ways that predetermine a sequence that constrains behaviors and interpretations.

Dr. Micki Eisenman is a senior lecturer in the Organizational Behavior and Strategy groups at The Hebrew University’s Jerusalem School of Business and the Director of the Asper Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. She received her undergraduate degree in English and Communications from The Hebrew University, her M.B.A. from Tulane University, and her Ph.D. in Management from Columbia University. Dr. Eisenman’s research applies a constructivist perspective that examines how new meanings emerge in the context of firms’ innovation efforts. Recent projects work to understand the intersection between the ways in which physical materials are merely textual manifestations which can be understood in a semiotic context, that is, as signs in a system of signification, and aspects of the material itself, as a substantive physical entity that both enables and constrains social interaction and interpretation. She studies these questions in the context of haute cuisine and workspace design. In other work, she examined how organizations communicate by using aesthetic design—the visible design attributes of a product, such as its shape, color, texture, or ornamentation—as well as the sensory, emotional, and cognitive responses these attributes elicit. These ideas are tested in the context of innovative architectural and industrial design using field observations, interviews, and archival data. In yet another series of projects, she examines the concept of generative appropriability, that is, how firms maximize the future potential value of their current innovations. She examines this question using patent citation data from firms in the pharmaceutical and semiconductor industries. Before joining the faculty at The Hebrew University, Dr. Eisenman served as an assistant professor at the City University of New York’s Baruch College. Her work has appeared in the AMR, ASQ, JMS, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Human Relations, and the Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship. She was awarded the first place in the 2004 INFORMS Organization Science Dissertation Proposal Competition and her work was nominated for the AMR’s Best Paper of 2013, Academy of Management’s William H. Newman Award for outstanding dissertation-based research and the Managerial and Organization Cognition Division’s Best Student Paper award. Additionally, Dr. Eisenman is a regular reviewer for leading management journals and serves on the board of AMR.

(2) Timon Beyes, “Flat, intense and shiny: the colour chart’s aesthetics of organizing”

Colour has agency. It helps creating and shaping social relations. Yet social theory and the study of organization are largely immune to the ubiquity and efficacy of colour understood as a genuine, if unstable and treacherous medium of organizing. My talk will focus on the colour chart as aesthetic object or technology and its organizational efficacy. A disposable arrangement of readymade colours, the colour chart, writes David Batchelor, offers three types of autonomy: “that of each colour from every other colour, that of colour from the dictates of colour theory, and that of colour from the register of representation”. These autonomies have ushered in a proliferation of ‘industrial’ (and now digital) colours. They have made colours endlessly commodifiable and now digitally available at our fingertips. They shape the colours of things and surfaces, images and forms. The colour chart, once an inconspicuous piece of paper, now a digital palette for everyday clicking and choosing, is arguably at the heart of the aestheticization of organized life.

Timon Beyes is Professor of Sociology of Organisation and Culture at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Leuphana University Lüneburg and at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, CBS. He is also director of the Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC) at Leuphana University.

Timon has a background in Sociology and Management Studies and has done his doctoral and post-doctoral research at the Institute of Sociology and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. In 2008, Timon was a Leverhulme Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Urban Theory, Swansea University, UK; more recently, he has held visiting positions at University of St. Gallen and Université Paris-Dauphine. From 2010 to 2012 he has been a research professor at the Institute for the Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media at Leuphana University Lüneburg in Germany, where he directed a large-scale EU-funded research and development project on digital cultures. Informed by recent developments in cultural and social theory, his research and teaching focuses on the processes, spaces and aesthetics of organization in the fields of media culture, art, cities as well as higher education.

Related publications include ‘Colour and Organization Studies’ (Organization Studies, 38(10): 1467-1482, 2017), ‘Adorno’s grey, Taussig’s blue: Colour, organization and critical affect’ (with Christian De Cock, Organization, 24(1): 59-78, 2017), ‘Art, Aesthetics and Organization’ (in B. Czarniawska (ed.), A Research Agenda for Management and Organization Studies, 2016), ‘Strangely familiar: The uncanny and unsiting organizational analysis’ (Organization Studies, 34(10): 1445-1465, 2013)

Ethnography and Institutions (2018)

Institutional Interfaces: City Identity (2017)

The role of images (verbal and visual) in organization research (2012)

Invited external academic speakers:

Roy Suddaby, Eldon Foote Chair in Law and Society, Eric Geddes Professor of Business, Director of Canadian Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility; Department of Strategy and Organization, University of Alberta and Australian School of Business, Editor-in-Chief of the Academy of Management Review
&
Joep Cornelissen, Professor of Communication and Organisation, VU University Amsterdam, General Editor of the Journal of Management Studies

Discussants:

Majken Schultz, Renate Meyer and Eva Boxenbaum, professors at the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School

Position papers:

Paper from Roy Suddaby

Paper from Joep Cornelissen

Tid: 17.09 kl. 9.00 -11.30
Sted: Copenhagen Business School, Kilen, Kilevej 14A, 2000 Frederiksberg, K.4.74

Future of organization studies (2012)

Invited external academic speakers:
David Courpasson, GDF-Suez professor of strategy and Chair of the Strategy & Business Policy department, HEC Paris, Editor-in-Chief of Organization Studies
&
Rodolphe Durand, Professor of sociology, Strategy and Organization department, EM Lyon 

Discussants:
Kristian Kreiner, Professor at Department of Organization
&
Susanne Ekman, Assistant Professor at Department of Organization

Position papers:

Courpasson discussion paper

Tid: 26.04 kl. 14.00-17.00
Sted: Kilen, Kilevej 14A, 4., 2000 Frederiksberg, K4.74

Conversations on Relevance and Engagement with Practice (2010)

Invited external academic speakers:

Andrew Van de Ven, Professor, Strategic Management and Organization, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota , USA.
&
Chris Grey, Professor, Industrial Relations & Organisational Behaviour, Warwick Business School, The University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

Discussants:
Morten Thanning Vendelø, Associate Professor, Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School
&
Rikke Stampe Skov, Director, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, DK

Position papers:

Article by Majken Schultz for inspiration: Reconciling Pragmatism and Scientific Rigor

Tid: 08.10 kl. 9.00-12.00
Sted: Copenhagen Business School, Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, SPs13 Velux Aud.

The first seminar on Conversations about the future of organization studies (2010)

Invited external academic speakers:

Mary Jo Hatch, Professor Emeritus at University of Virginia and Adjunct Professor at CBS
&
Eero Vaara, Chairman of European Group for Organization Studies (EGOS), Professor at Hanken School of Economics, Management and Organization, Helsinki and Adjunct Professor at CBS

Discussants:
Eva Zeuthen, Director, Gentofte hospital
&
Signe Vikkelsø, Associate Professor, IOA

Position papers:

Mary Jo Hatch - Future of OT Blurb

Eero Vaara Organization theory is not a problem but a solution

Tid: 15.03 kl. 9.00-12.00
Sted: Copenhagen Business School, Kilen, Kilevej 14A, 2000 Frederiksberg, K150