Call for Short Paper for EGOS Sub-theme 24: Self-reinforcing Organizational Processes
This subtheme seeks to bring together researchers from all over the world who study self-reinforcing and escalating dynamics in organizations and networks in order to foster exchange of theoretical ideas and empirical insights that might be conducive to further understanding the stabilizing and destabilizing mechanisms that feature prominently in organizations and inter-organizational relations in a global economy. Examples of such self-reinforcing processes are self-justification (escalating commitment), increasing returns, network externalities, cognitive spirals and bandwagon effects.
The sub-theme particularly invites contributions that focus on one or more of the following issues:
• The role of initial conditions, internal and external to an organization, for triggering self-reinforcing processes
• Self-reinforcing patterns in everyday organizing
• Making self-reinforcement reflexive
• Self-reinforcing processes as systemic forces that transcend individual routine com-pliance
• Forms of organizational self-reinforcing processes and their development over time (network effects, economies of scale, complementarities, etc.)
• Analysis of self-reinforcing processes in inter-organizational relations, focusing, e.g., on science-industry relations, regional clusters, local and global financial markets, etc.
• Dynamics of self-reinforcement, forms, intensity, diffusion in organizations, etc.
• The interplay among self reinforcing processes on different levels (individual, group, organizational, network, field, market level) and the various mechanisms that link these levels
• Processes and interventions which are likely to modify or to stop self-reinforcement considering both intentional and unintentional activities (e.g. stopping events, break outs, paradoxical interventions, or unlearning)
The sub-theme intends to foster an exchange of theoretical ideas and empirical research across various substantive issues. Papers that discuss such substantive issues, and possibly others, empirically or conceptually, comparatively or monographically, with regard to recent or more historical developments, are cordially invited.
Please submit a Short Paper of not more than 3,000 words by January 16, 2011 at the EGOS website: http://www.egosnet.org/ Conveners of Subtheme 24 are Huseyin Leblebici, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Georg Schreyögg and Jörg Sydow, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.
Best wishes,
Jörg Sydow
joerg.sydow@fu-berlin.de