Communication, Organisation and Governance (COG) cluster
Communication, Organisation and Governance (COG) cluster provides a dynamic developmental hub for an international group of scholars working on communication, organisation and governance across diverse contexts.
About COG
The Communication, Organisation and Governance (COG) cluster provides a dynamic developmental hub for a large, international group of scholars from the Department of Management, Society and Communication, as well as many external affiliates.
These scholars study organizational dynamics, management practices, governance structures and forms of communication and discourse in both private and public organizations. They also study the variety of social, cultural, economic and/or political contexts in which these sets of activities and organizations intersect and interact, in particular global and intercultural contexts.
Activities are coordinated by Associate Professors Maribel Blasco and Anne Vestergaard.
Our research environment
Established in 2011, the COG cluster is a research environment with a regular nucleus of around 25 MSC faculty, which extends into a wider research network that includes around 45 faculty members from MSC as well as from other CBS departments (e.g. IOA, MPP, and OM), and neighboring universities (e.g., Lund University, Roskilde University, University of Southern Denmark, and Technical University of Denmark).
These researchers share interests in communication, organization, governance and management more broadly.
COG researchers also have strong international research networks.
Publication record
COG research excellence is evidenced by a record of regular publication in top outlets, such as journals on the AJG list and the SCOPUS/Citescore top 10% segment. This includes influential books and book chapters, regular attendance at high-impact conferences and other events, and a healthy record of attracting external funding.
These achievements are supported by a collegial, constructive and supportive culture that COG researchers cherish and purposefully seek to nurture on an ongoing basis.
Cluster themes
Thematically, the COG cluster offers a dynamic meeting place for researchers bound together by a shared focus on responsible management, social transformation, and cross-sector and cross-domain synergies.
Specific research foci range from gender and diversity to creative and knowledge work, the dynamics of real-time multimodal communication, markets and consumer culture research, strategy and leadership, corruption and transparency in contemporary organizations, management education, and responsible communicative practices.
COG researchers also consider interdisciplinarity to be a cornerstone of their research.
The COG format supports this interdisciplinarity by providing a common meeting ground where these various interests can cross-fertilize each other. This shared environment helps support the development, quality and excellence of each other’s research and members’ academic careers more broadly.
Meeting formats
The COG cluster operates with a flexible format for meetings:
- COG Paper Development sessions, where authors make a very brief presentation and then receive dedicated, high-quality, and collegial feedback delivered by two discussants (one VIP and one PhD), as well as by all other participants who commit to reading drafts in advance.
- COG talks, which consist of presentations of ongoing or planned research within COG and with external stakeholders. At these sessions, participants are not required to read papers in advance.
- COG Workshops, which are interactive sessions about topics of broad interest such as methods, academic writing, and dealing with revise-and-resubmits or rejections.
The COG cluster invests substantial energy in supporting the participation and intellectual development of junior scholars and PhD students, providing opportunities for them to present their own research and to engage with the work of both peers and more senior colleagues through a discussant role.
COG events also regularly attract external and internationally renowned guest scholars as well as practitioners, both as presenters and discussants.
COG subgroups
Communication & Organization Reading Group
The Communication & Organization Reading Group explores critical readings and discussions of classical and contemporary texts on communication, organization, social theory, and sustainability. The group encourages and stimulates non-canonical interpretations of such texts, as well as the exchange of diverse viewpoints and experiences from the readings, nurturing open-mindedness and critical reflexivity.
One of the group’s core interests is to understand how and under which conditions imaginations and aspirations about the future, as expressed through communication, become conducive and formative for organizational and societal change.
The group has a joint affiliation with the COG cluster and the CBS Sustainability Centre.
Contact: Lars Thøger Christensen (ltc.msc@cbs.dk) / Dennis Schoeneborn (ds.msc@cbs.dk)
FairSpeak
FairSpeak is anchored under the COG cluster as a cross-departmental and cross-institutional forum of researchers interested in how people decode complex messages during societal and business interaction — often crossing cultural and cognitive borders and under time pressure.
A central focus is multimodality, meaning the encoding of such messages through elaborate symphonies of words, texts, images, symbols, sensory impressions, and their decoding in real time. Examples include consumers’ attempts to make more sustainable choices in supermarkets or travellers noticing lesser-known cultural heritage while passing by.
The affiliated researchers and practitioners form a flexible network that collaborates in varying constellations across these themes. This includes course and case development and thesis-based student projects. This structure encourages diversity and synergy rather than routine meetings.
A current key activity is work in the EU projects INCULTUM and SECreTour, aimed at developing alternative approaches to supporting sustainable tourism in peripheral areas across Europe. Another major priority is the creation of a new cross-sector alliance to support the development of genuinely new plant-based food products rather than meat imitations. Following completed pilot work, a larger-scale research initiative is now in preparation.
A major priority is to integrate empirical hypothesis testing, drawing on MSC’s experimental facility CogLab.
Contact: Viktor Smith (vs.msc@cbs.dk)
Leadership and Social Change
COG colleagues in the Leadership and Social Change sub-group collaborate on engaged research that explores leadership as a social process of mobilization and transformation in contexts where individuals, groups, organizations, and society intersect and interact.
The sub-group works closely with the CBS Leadership Centre to further leadership-related research, education and outreach at CBS.
Contacts: Eric Guthey (eg.msc@cbs.dk) and Dan Kärreman (dk.msc@cbs.dk)
Management Learning
The Management Learning sub-theme focuses on teaching and learning activities for fostering transformative learning for responsible management. In this sub-theme, researchers explore how explicit as well as implicit dimensions of the learning environment can better support the inclusion and retention of a more diverse student body.
The sub-theme also studies how different learning spaces — based on student experiences of the learning environment — support or undermine responsibility learning both within and outside the classroom.
Contact: Maribel Blasco (mbl.msc@cbs.dk) and Annemette Kjærgaard (ams.msc@cbs.dk)