Organization Studies

The Third Organization Studies Summer Workshop:
‘Organization Studies as Applied Science:
The Generation and Use of Academic Knowledge about Organizations’

7- 9 June 2007, Crete, Greece


Convenors: 	
Paula Jarzabkowski, Aston Business School and AIM, UK
Susan Mohrman, University of Southern California, USA
Andreas Georg Scherer, University of Zurich, Switzerland


Keynote Speakers:	
Helga Nowotny,  Wissenschaftszentrum Wien, Austria &  co-author of Rethinking 
Science
Sara L. Rynes, University of Iowa, USA & Editor of the Academy of Management
Journal
Richard Whitley, University of Manchester, UK & author of The Intellectual
and Social Organization of the Sciences


About the Workshop
The Organization Studies Summer Workshop is an annual activity, launched in
June 2005, to facilitate high-quality scholarship in organization studies.
Its primary aim is to advance cutting-edge research on important topics in
the field by bringing together in a Greek island, in early summer, a small
and competitively selected group of scholars, who will have the opportunity
to interact and share insights in a stimulating and scenic environment. 

Following on the tremendous success of the first two Organization Studies
Summer Workshops, held in Santorini and Mykonos, we are happy to announce
that the Third Workshop will take place at Grecotel Rithymna Beach Hotel
(http://www.grecotel.gr/grecotel-rithymna-beach/welcome_444_1.aspx),
Rethymnon, Crete, between 7-9 June 2007. Crete
(http://www.crete.tournet.gr/), a legendary island, renowned for its
spectacular gorges and mountainous landscapes, picturesque villages, sandy
beaches, and ancient history, will provide an ideal setting for Workshop
participants to relax and engage in authentic dialogue. With this Workshop
we aim to create a setting in which the juices of intellectual creativity
will naturally flow. The conference venue is close to Rethymnon, one of the
prettiest Cretan cities, accessible by airplane via the airports of Chania
or Heraklion, to both of which there are several daily flights form Athens
as well as chartered flights from international destinations. Alternatively,
several high speed ferry boats leave daily for Rethymnon from the port of
Piraeus. More about the practicalities and costs of the Workshop will appear
later in the journal’s web site (www.egosnet.org/os). 



About the Topic
The academic community has long been concerned about the nature of knowledge
produced in management and organization theory and its application to
practice. Whilst academic management knowledge is not produced in a vacuum,
as it arises from the study of management problems and issues, academic
theory and management practice have canonically been seen as separate
endeavours. While academics are usually concerned with methodological rigor
managers seek the practical relevance of knowledge. These concerns, which
are grounded in the different ways in which knowledge is produced and
consumed by management academics and by practising managers, are reflected
in the wider social science domain. For example, Pelz (1978) suggests that
social scientific knowledge lends itself to three different types of use in
practice, instrumental, conceptual and symbolic uses . Instrumental use is
the direct application of theory to practice, suggesting a clear link
between theoretical principles and their relevance to practical action.
Conceptual use highlights the use of theoretical knowledge as a way to think
about or represent the practical world that does not imply a direct
correlation between theoretical principles and practical action. Symbolic
use highlights the political nature of knowledge and its potential adoption
in order to legitimize preferred practical action, frequently in ceremonial
ways that do not imply any corresponding commitment to applying theory in
practice. 

These earlier studies draw out the complex nature of the relationship
between academic theory and practical action, based on an ontological
assumption that academic theory provides a precedent for practical action.
That is, that academic theory provides a sufficient representation of the
practical world that it may be consumed by practitioners in instrumental
(direct application to action), conceptual (thinking prior to action) or
symbolic (justification of action) ways. More recent studies conceptualize
the social production of knowledge from a different ontological basis. They
explain two different modes and purposes of knowledge production and
consumption in academic and practical communities, referred to as Mode 1 and
Mode 2 . Briefly, Mode 1 knowledge production may be considered the
traditional, disciplinary-based forms of knowledge production and
consumption inside universities and academic communities, which tend to have
relatively homogeneous views of what constitutes appropriate forms of
knowledge. Mode 2 deals with knowledge production and consumption in the
wider social domain, drawing upon and applied to the solving of practical
problems in cross-disciplinary, heterogeneous communities from a range of
organizations, not only universities. We may thus understand Mode 2
knowledge as arising from the co-production of knowledge between multiple
groups in society, including universities, who have different objectives and
needs in the consumption of that knowledge. 

The articulation of these quite different concepts of the social sciences
has fuelled further debate in the management and organization community
about the relevance of management theory to policy and practice ..
Increasingly, these debates call for management scholars to develop research
designs that can operationalize the relationship between management
knowledge and practical action empirically. For example, research councils
fund research that incorporates practitioners in the design of the research,
not only in the dissemination of its results , while professional doctorates
have also grown to satisfy the knowledge production and consumption needs of
practising professionals. While much existing empirical research is based on
ontological assumptions that academic knowledge precedes practical action,
for example examining the extent to which current academic knowledge is
relevant to practice, increasingly research is being designed with specific
regard for the nature and objectives of co-produced knowledge and the
different ways that it is consumed by different audiences. This Workshop
seeks to address the relationship between academic theory and practical
action in novel ways that can address the different assumptions underlying
knowledge production and consumption. 

The Workshop will be limited to about 50 papers to ensure in-depth
discussion. We welcome both theoretical and empirical papers that
demonstrate rigorous analyses and approaches. Papers could consider, but are
not restricted to, the following topics on the generation and use of
academic knowledge about organisations:

1.	Epistemological issues concerning what counts as valid knowledge
(including aspects such as truth, objectivity vs. subjectivity, etc.);
2.	Methodological issues about how valid knowledge is generated; 
3.	Praxeological issues about how valid knowledge is used in practice;
4.	Sociological issues regarding the social settings in which academic
knowledge is produced and the forms that knowledge traffic between academics
and practitioners takes; and 
5.	Critical issues regarding the political nature of knowledge and the
various interests that are served during the process of knowledge production
and application (including aspects such as power, dependency, legitimacy, etc.);
6.	Learning in terms of teaching management students; how and why
understanding the relationship between knowledge production and consumption
might inform our teaching practices. 

In keeping with the topic of the Workshop, we encourage contributors to go
beyond a high level restatement of the issues of various modes of research,
and to ensure that their treatments provide examples that jointly address
the topics of practice and theory and provide a rich context for discussion
and debate.

Special Issue of Organization Studies
The Workshop will be followed by a Special Issue of Organization Studies on
this topic, which will be published in 2009. While we anticipate submissions
from the workshop, participation in the workshop is not a condition for
submission to the Special Issue, which will be separately advertised in the
journal.

Submissions
Interested participants must submit to the Editor-in-Chief
([log in to unmask]) an abstract of no more than 1000 words for their
proposed contribution plus a brief biographical note by January 31st, 2007.
The submission must be made via email and it must be a Word attachment. It
should contain authors’ names, institutional affiliations, and email and
postal addresses, while the subject matter line of the email should indicate
the title of the Workshop. Authors will be notified of acceptance or
otherwise by February 28th, 2007. Papers should be submitted to the
Editor-in-Chief by May 15th, 2007 and will be uploaded on the journal’s web
site.