Calls for Papers

Organization Science currently welcomes submissions for two upcoming special issues:

The Psychology of Organizational Networks
NEW SUBMISSION DEADLINE: November 15, 2012

Routine Dynamics: Exploring Sources of Stability and Change in Organizations
Submission deadline: September 1, 2013

Special Issue on The Psychology of Organizational Networks

Editorial Team

Sigal Barsade, University of Pennsylvania
Tiziana Casciaro, University of Toronto
Amy Edmondson, Harvard University
Cristina Gibson, University of Western Australia
David Krackhardt, Carnegie Mellon University
Giuseppe (Joe) Labianca, University of Kentucky

NEW SUBMISSION DEADLINE: November 15, 2012

Call for Papers

In its purest form, the structuralist perspective that underlies network studies of organizations de-emphasizes (Wellman and Berkowitz 1988) or denies altogether (Mayhew 1980) the importance of social actors’ individual characteristics and psychological processes in favour of explanations of organizational phenomena that focus on the patterns of relationships linking actors to one another, and the topological and positional configurations that drive actors’ behavior. Yet, as social networks, the structural patterns of relationships that emerge in organizations unavoidably implicate human psychology. Unlike neural, molecular, and other networks in the physical world, organizational networks connect feeling and thinking human beings. Acknowledging and leveraging this distinctively human trait, early developments in social network research linked seamlessly social structures and psychological processes (e.g., Heider 1958, Homans 1961, Moreno 1961, Simmel 1950). Over time, however, disciplinary boundaries hardened, making such cross-disciplinary advances less frequent in network research.

Reversing this trend, research on organizational networks has recently been showing signs of a renewed interest in joining structural sociology and psychology in the study of organizations, with social network scholars drawing insights from psychological theory and organizational psychologists adopting network concepts and methods. These advances notwithstanding, social network research has yet to fully leverage the contributions of psychological theory to the understanding of organizational networks. Likewise, the psychological perspective on groups and organizations has still much to gain from incorporating the advances of structural analyses of collectivities.

This special issue aims to renew the early promise of cross-disciplinary research in organizational networks. We encourage submissions that marry, extend, challenge and reconcile sociological and psychological theories and methods to break new ground into our understanding of the emergence, structuration and consequences of organizational networks. We welcome studies of interpersonal networks within and between groups and organizations, as well as studies of how individual perceptions of network structure influence organizational phenomena. Submissions may use a variety of methodologies and data (e.g., field, laboratory, qualitative and quantitative). Possible topics for submissions include, but are not limited to, the following:

How do group network structures and group members’ affective states co-evolve?
How do social categories and schemas affect the perception of organizational networks?
How do individual actors’ positions in the organizational network influence how they are perceived by other group members?
How do particular relational events or reactions to actor behavior shift actors’ positions in the organizational network? What are the implications of these position shifts?
What network configurations operate as antecedents or consequences of pro-social and counterproductive behavior in organizations? What are the boundary conditions for such structural effects?
Are inter-organizational networks affected by how influential organizational decision-makers perceive the network of relationships among organizations in their field of activity?
What are the social encoding and memory processes that underlie network perception and its accuracy?
Given the multitude of personality traits with potential relevance to network configuration, what are the defining features of theories of personality and social structure?
How do employee emotions, attitudes, cognitions or behaviors diffuse through networks? What factors moderate these diffusions?
What is the causal role of negative and positive affective states or traits in the emergence of organizational networks? What are the relevant mediating mechanisms involved?
How do deliberate changes to organizational networks alter group processes and performance?

The above list is only meant to be suggestive—we encourage authors to explore research linking psychology and organizational networks that extends beyond this list.

Review Process

Submissions are due November 1, 2012. Manuscript submission is handled electronically via ScholarOne Manuscripts at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/orgsci.

To fulfill the cross-disciplinary goals of the special issue, each submission will be co-handled by a two-person editorial team composed of an organizational psychologist (Sigal Barsade, Amy Edmondson, or Cristina Gibson) and a social network researcher (Tiziana Casciaro, David Krackhardt, or Joe Labianca). The specific composition of the editorial teams will be determined by the nature of each individual submission.

All authors will receive an initial screening, and only papers deemed to have a reasonable chance of acceptance after two rounds of accelerated review will enter the process. After a maximum of two rounds of review, a rejection or acceptance decision will be made by the editorial team.

Bibliography

Heider, F. 1958. The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. New York: Wiley.
Homans, G. C. 1961. Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.
Mayhew, B. H. 1980. Structuralism versus individualism 1: Shadowboxing in the dark. Social Forces, 59(2): 335-375.
Moreno, J. L. 1961. Role concept, a bridge between psychiatry and sociology American Journal of Psychiatry, 118(6): 518-&.
Simmel, G. 1950. The Sociology of George Simmel. Glencoe, IL.: Free Press.
Wellman, B. & Berkowitz, S. D. 1988. Social structures: A network approach Cambridge Cambridge University Press

Call for Papers: The Psychology of Organizational Networks

Special Issue on Routine Dynamics: Exploring Sources of Stability and Change in Organizations

Editorial Team

Luciana D’Adderio, University of Edinburgh
Martha S. Feldman, University of California, Irvine
Nathalie Lazaric, University of Nice, Sophia Antipolis
Brian T. Pentland, Michigan State University

Submission deadline: September 1, 2013

Call for Papers

The increasingly uncertain and fast-changing environments in which today’s organizations operate call for a shift of attention from organizations—and organizational practices or routines—as fixed entities to the study of the distributed (Hutchins 1995) and situated (Suchman 1987, Lave 1988) dynamics by which they emerge and are constructed. Capturing how organizations learn to strike a balance between stability and coherence, on one hand, and flexibility and change, on the other, however, is non-trivial (Tsoukas and Chia 2002, Farjoun 2010). It requires abandoning static views of organization to reveal the microdynamics of organizing, including the processes through which organizational routines and capabilities emerge and evolve.

The first crucial step forward in this direction has been to relinquish a fixed characterization of routines as monolithic objects to study the internal mechanisms by which they emerge as practices (Feldman 2000, Feldman and Pentland 2003). As a result, we have moved from conceptualizing routines as automatic, as dead or as opaque black boxes, to seeing them as alive, embodying agency and the potential for change (Cohen 2007, Pentland and Feldman 2008). In particular, this reconceptualization has proposed that routines themselves have dynamics. These routine dynamics have generally been theorized around the interaction of performative and ostensive aspects of routines. Empirical research and modeling of routine dynamics has extended our understanding of the role of routines in producing stability and change (Howard-Grenville 2005, Levinthal and Rerup 2006, D’Adderio 2008 and 2011, Salvato 2009, Zbaracki and Bergen 2010, Lazaric 2011, Rerup and Feldman 2011, Pentland, Haerem and Hillison 2011, Salvato and Rerup 2011, Turner and Rindova 2012; Pentland, Feldman, Becker and Liu 2012).

While some of the questions made possible by the practice turn in research on organizational routines have been addressed, many questions remain. The following is a thematic list of questions. We do not propose these themes as mutually exclusive as we recognize the substantial interconnection among them. Instead we suggest the themes as points of entry that provide opportunities to explore the effects of routine dynamics in complex empirical field settings.

Coordination. Since Stene (1940), routines have been described as way facilitate coordination. At the same time, we find many instances of routinized action that seem to undermine effective coordination (e.g., when two routines have different time scales). How does focusing on the actions people take as they produce and reproduce routines enable us to understand the role of routines in enabling and inhibiting coordination? What role do the ostensive aspects of routines play in coordination?

Interdependence. Routines have been defined as repetitive, recognizable patterns of interdependent actions, carried out by multiple actors (Feldman and Pentland 2003). Interdependence is an element of this definition that has not received much attention. What is the role of interdependence in the formation and dynamics of routines? Some attention has been paid to the interaction between performative and ostensive aspects of routines. What can we say about the interdependence of performative aspects within a routine, the interdependence of ostensive aspects of the same and of different routines?

Multiplicity and ecologies of routines. Existing research has generally focused on one routine at a time. What happens when routines are interconnected? What happens when single performances contribute to multiple ostensive aspects? What happens when multiple patterns or ostensive aspects impinge upon the same performance?

Actants and artifacts. What is the role of artifacts (material and immaterial), such as standard operating procedures, classifications, computer systems, and so on in the production and reproduction of routines? What is the role of artifacts as intermediaries and mediators (D’Adderio 2008, 2011) in the performance of routines? And how do they interact with the ostensive and the performative aspects? More generally, how are networks of action related to networks of actants (human and non-human, material and non-material)? How do different configurations - or sociomaterial entanglements - of actors and actants influence and shape routines?

Routines and institutions. While research focusing on the dynamics of routines has been fruitful, routines exist within institutional and organizational contexts. What is the role of routines in (re)creating institutional contexts (and vice versa)? How does the practice-based nature of routines play a role in creating and recreating the contexts in which they are practiced? How do the interactions of routines within a context affect the nature of the context?

Mechanisms for feedback and change.Under appropriate conditions, individuals can learn and change their patterns of action through feedback. Do these processes apply to organizational routines and if so, how? What is the role of feedback in the stability or change of routines? How is mutual constitution similar to or different from feedback? Why do some routines stay the same when we want them to change, while other routines change when we want them to stay the same?

Recombinations and mashups. Some argue that routines evolve through variation, selection and retention, but what is the role of recombination (e.g., recombining chunks of routines to create a new routine) and mashups (e.g., combining in ways not defined by predetermined chunks) in routine dynamics? When are recombination and mashups possible? Is there any evidence that they actually occur? What factors facilitate or limit recombination and/or mashups?

Granularity and levels of analysis. Organizational researchers often rely on traditional levels of analysis (individual, group, sub-unit, organization, field…). Can we construct a similar hierarchy for routines? How would that relate to traditional levels in organizational research? How does stability/change at one level influence (or fail to influence) stability/change at the other levels (up or down) in the hierarchy? Would this focus help us understand the relationship between organizational capabilities and routines (Becker, Lazaric, Nelson and Winter 2005)?

Time scales. Routines operate on very different time scales (seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, months, years). The temporal dimension of routines has received very little attention. Does this matter to issues such as coordination, interdependence, institutions, stability, change, etc.? Do time scales help us understand path dependence, path creation and drift in routines?

Performation. Routines are becoming increasingly distributed across projects and organizations. How do routines spread over time and space? How do the ostensive aspects and/or the formal or informal descriptions of a practice become instantiated at different points in time and across different locales? How are different spatial or temporal instantiations/enactments of the routine coordinated? What is the role of artifacts in this coordination?

Cognition. Routines have traditionally been seen as reducing cognitive load and operating through procedural memory. When agency is conceptualized as a feature of routines, then otherwise settled questions of cognition become open to scrutiny. For instance, how do routine dynamics influence cognition, interpretation, and sense-making and how are routine dynamics influenced by cognition, interpretation, and sense-making? To what extent are these phenomena (traditionally conceived as individual level psychological processes) shaped by the sociological processes of organizational routines?

Generativity and novelty. Some routinized processes (e.g., project management routines) are capable of producing significantly different substantive results each time they are performed. For example, an architectural firm may use a recognizable, repetitive process for designing buildings, yet each design is different. Other routines are focused on producing exactly the same result every time. What governs this difference? Are there limits to the generative power of routines? Can routines generate other routines in this manner? What is the role of formal descriptions of routines (such as standards or “best” practices) and templates (actual examples) in guiding and shaping actions in routines? At what point, and in which circumstances, does innovation/adaptation erase the value of the template or model? And what implications should we expect for innovation and adaptation when formal routines and models become embedded into artifacts?

Review Process

All authors will receive an initial screening, and only papers deemed to have a reasonable chance of acceptance after the two or three rounds of accelerated review will enter the process. Submissions are due September 1, 2013. Manuscript submission is handled electronically via ScholarOne Manuscripts: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/orgsci.

Bibliography

Becker, M.C., N. Lazaric, R.R. Nelson, S.G. Winter. 2005. Applying organizational routines in understanding organizational change.Indust. Corporate Change 14(5) 775-791.

Cohen, M.D. 2007. Reading Dewey: Reflections on the study of routine. Organ. Stud. 28(5) 773-786.

D’Adderio, L. 2008. The Performativity of Routines: Theorising the Influence of Artefacts and Distributed Agencies on Routines Dynamics. Res. Policy 37(5) 769-789.

D’Adderio, L. 2011. Artifacts at the centre of routines: Performing the material turn in Routines Theory. J. Institutional Economics 7(2) 197-230.

Farjoun, M. 2010. Beyond dualism: Stability and change as a duality. Acad. Management Rev. 35 202-225.

Feldman, M.S. 2000. Organizational routines as a source of continuous change. Organ. Sci. 11(6) 611–629.

Feldman, M.S., B.T. Pentland. 2003. Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a source of flexibility and change. Admin. Sci. Quart. 48(1) 94–118.

Howard-Grenville, J.A. 2005. The persistence of flexible organizational routines: The role of agency and organizational context. Organ. Sci. 16(6) 618–636.

Hutchins, E. 1995. Cognition in the Wild. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Lave, J. 1988. Cognition in Practice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Lazaric, N. 2011. Organizational routines and cognition: an introduction to empirical and analytical contributions. J. Institutional Economics 7(2) 147-156.

Levinthal, D.A., C. Rerup. 2006. Crossing an apparent chasm: Bridging mindful and less mindful perspectives on organizational learning. Organ. Sci. 17(4) 502-513.

Pentland, B.T., M.S. Feldman. 2008. Designing routines: On the folly of designing artifacts, while hoping for patterns of action. Inform. Organ. 18(4) 235-250.

Pentland, B.T., T. Haerem, D. Hillison. 2011. Comparing organizational routines as recurrent patterns of action. Organ. Studies 31(7) 917-940.

Pentland, B.T., M.S. Feldman, M.C. Becker, P. Liu. 2012. Dynamics of organizational routines: A generative model. J. Management Studies, doi: 10.1111/j.1467-6486.2012.01064.x.

Salvato, C., C. Rerup. 2011. Beyond collective entities: Multilevel research on organizational routines and capabilities. J. Management 37(2) 468-490.

Suchman, L.A. 1987. Plans and Situated Action: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA.

Stene, E.O. 1940. An approach to a science of administration. Amer. Political Sci. Rev. 34(6) 1124–1137.

Tsoukas, H., R. Chia. 2002. On organizational becoming: Rethinking organizational Change. Organ. Sci. 13(5) 567-582.

Turner, S.F., V. Rindova. 2012. A balancing act: How organizations pursue consistency in routine functioning in the face of ongoing change. Organ. Sci. 23(1) 24–46.

Zbaracki, M.J., M. Bergen. 2010. When truces collapse: A longitudinal study of price adjustment routines. Organ. Sci. 21(5) 955-972.

Special Issues Currently in Production

Special Issue on Digital Challenges in Innovation Research: Guest Editors Youngjin Yoo, Temple University; Kalle Lyytinen, Case Western Reserve University; Richard J. Boland, Case Western Reserve University; Ann Majchrzak, University of Southern California. Yoo-Call for Papers

Special Issue on Organizational Economics and Organizational Capabilities: From Opposition and Complementarity to Real Integration: Guest Editors Nicholas Argyres,Washington University in St. Louis; Teppo Felin,Brigham Young University; Nicolai Foss, Copenhagen Business School; Todd Zenger, Washington University in St. Louis. Special Issue Argyres et al