Our research connects organization studies with topics related to the management of strategy, technology, and sustainability. Core research foci include organizational change and persistence, new forms of organizing and organizational design, organizational temporality, and business sustainability. Empirically as well as theoretically, our studies foreground the interplay of organization and society in the context of the grand technological, ecological, and economic challenges of our time.
An important part of our research deals with the emergence and dynamics of organizational and strategic lock-ins that can prevent organizations from innovating and tackling radical technological and social change. Our research has been published in the field’s leading international journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, and Organization.
Our research activities share a theoretical interest into the constitutive role of time and temporality in organizational processes and practices. Our "temporal research lens" foregrounds time as a fundamental dimension that shapes the behavior of organizations and their members in a subtle but profound way. We are and have been engaged in a number of empirical and conceptual projects on topics such as the negotiation of past, present, and future horizons, the constitution and change of temporal routines and structures, as well as the temporal coordination of routines in complex work settings.
The study of change and innovation in and around organizations constitutes a second important concern of our research. Change represents one of the most important and greatest challenges for organizations and their management, not least because change initiatives rarely achieve their intended results and often simply fail. Such failure, in turn, can threaten the very survival of organizations in light of changing environmental conditions. This fundamental tensions between the change and persistence of organizational structures, practices, and routines is a core concern in our research. We have, for example, explored the causes of organizational persistence as well as the possibilities of changing rigid, path-dependent structures and routines in private and public organizations.
How do organizations need to change to meet the grand challenges of the 21st century: climate change, digitization, dealing with the unexpected (such as the COVID-19 pandemic)? Our research in this area deals in particular with intertemporal tensions in business sustainability, that is with conflicts, trade-offs, and contradictions between present-day and future organizational demands. We are particularly interested in how organizations can shift from existing, predominantly near-future temporal orientations towards embracing a so-called distant future orientation, not least because such an orientation is essential for the implementation of ambitious sustainability strategies.
Over the last two decades, the horizon of possible forms of organizing has significantly widened. Think of open source communities, coworking spaces, or crowd-based organizing. According to many scholars, the established theoretical vocabularies of organization studies fail to keep up with these developments. Some of them even argue that organization theory is currently in a stage of crisis. Our research in this area critically examines this diagnosis and explores how new forms of organizing enable us to rethink organization. For example, we have empirically investigated the social rituals, routines and control mechanisms of coworking spaces, the organizational practices of open science communities, as well as the limits of self-manging organizations and less-hierarchical organizing.
Crisis changes the way actors construct the future and past and therewith affects how people act in the present. So far organizational crisis literature studied crisis as an event that can and should be overcome in order to stabilize the context of action. In contrast to this, organizations and individual actors nowadays experience an overlap of crises that need to be simultaneously addressed, have escalating effects and interdependencies between each other, and are highly dynamic, but oftentimes consistent over time. Crises are competing for action as a result.
Within this context, diverse actors are affected differently by crises which creates tensions when acting collectively. Collective action for the common good however is crucial in order to address the complexity of some of the ongoing crises like climate change. How is it possible then to foster collective action in times of competing crises?
The study is set in the German Energy Market which is strongly affected by an overlap of crises. Most prominently the crisis tension between climate change calling for more sustainable energy sources and the Russian war against Ukraine leading to a shortage of energy supply and calling for short-term replacements. The purpose of this work is theory building on collective action in competing crises by applying a temporal perspective on organizational practices of actors who are collectively acting in a competing crises context. The contribution is two-fold. First, to conceptualize collective action from a temporal perspective and thus extend our understanding of organizing for the common good. Second, to integrate the competing crises context into the discourse on grand challenges and thus alter our understanding of the conditions of coordinated actions towards sustainable development.
contact person: Alexandra Engström
The influence of algorithmic applications is growing, including in the matter of sustainability which raises the question of how organizations committed to achieving the SDG's will be impacted using AI. AI promises to be a helpful tool to address sustainability concerns. However, it is a complex task to restructure an organization.
The purpose of this research project is to understand how algorithms transform organizational routines. The study design provides for an inductive procedure that is oriented towards an ethnography and the associated methods of qualitative interviews, participant observation, and the analysis of available documents. The project aims to contribute to research on routine interdependence, which is located within routine dynamics research, and to critically expand knowledge about the course of algorithm-human interactions, and foster efforts to become more sustainable.
contact person: Chris Schäfer
Accelerating crises, climate change, and related extreme weather events constitute new unforeseeable threats for organizations. Anticipation and prediction, thus, become key organizational practices to manage the imposed risks prospectively. Today, these practices increasingly happen in the interplay with smart technologies such as machine learning and are based on large amounts of data. Drawing on the insurance industry as a critical case for risk anticipation, this thesis aims to investigate how the digitalization of techniques transforms anticipation and prediction practices in organizations.
contact person: Lena Rieck