Convenors: Christopher Marquis, Georg Schreyögg, Jörg Sydow
This sub-theme seeks to bring together researchers from all over the world who study how organizations deal with change when they are confronted with processes that promote stability, including imprinting, path dependence and inertia more generally. The aim is to foster exchange of fresh empirical insights and new theoretical ideas to further understand stabilizing and destabilizing mechanisms in organizations and inter-organizational relations. The sub-theme connects to the general theme of the 36th EGOS Colloquium – “Organizing for a Sustainable Future: Responsibility, Renewal & Resistance” – by examining the dynamics of resistance and renewal in and between organizations. It focuses on the dialectics of making use of routines, its reinforcement and unintended consequences in terms of rigidities, dysfunctional flips, organizational conservatism, and related processes.
The field of stabilizing dynamics – or more generally, the tension between stability and change – provides a particularly advantageous context for exploring the consequences of change efforts as they are developing on different levels: group, organizational, inter-organizational and organizational field, embedded in different institutional environments and numerous strategic contexts. At the same time, research on such types of processes and the evolution of organizational dynamics could benefit from EGOS, as the Colloquium provides a particularly fruitful context for bringing together research from a wide variety of disciplines, theoretical backgrounds, and institutional settings. The sub-theme wishes to attract both high-quality contributions that are ready to be submitted to a research journal as well as research in progress that explores these challenging issues. It seeks to provide an opportunity for engaging in constructive dialogue and to encourage mutual learning among participating scholars. We particularly invite contributions that focus on one or more of the following issues:
- The role of initial conditions, internal and external to an organization, for triggering stabilizing dynamics in terms of imprinting, path dependence and inertial alignments
- Making stabilizing dynamics reflexive in everyday organizing
- Stabilizing processes as systemic forces that transcend individual routine compliance
- Self-reinforcing processes as drivers of stabilizing dynamics
- Diffusion of stabilizing and change dynamics and contextual factors that foster their emergence
- Processes and interventions likely to modify or to stop stabilizing dynamics (e.g. external shocks, paradoxical interventions, charismatic leadership or unlearning)
- Re-conceiving the tension between stabilizing and change dynamics as multi-level-phenomena
Papers studying such issues and related topics, empirically or conceptually, comparatively or monographically, with regard to recent or historical developments, are cordially invited.
Deadline for the submission of short papers: January 14, 2020