| Call for Papers |
| Advances in Strategic Management |
| Organizational Design |
| Volume Editors: John Joseph, Oliver Baumann, Rich Burton, Kannan Srikanth |
| Submission Deadline: December 15, 2017 |
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| Recently, scholarly interest in organizational design has increased significantly. The resurgence of research in this field has been remarkable, and organizational design is once again gaining ground as an important field of strategy and organizational research. With this AiSM volume, our goal is to attract a representative sample of the most significant empirical and theoretical developments at the intersection of organizational design and strategy. |
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| Organizational design has been defined as: |
| · The distribution of property rights, people, and activities across numerous self-governing enterprises in ways that are advantageous for the group (ecosystem) as well as for the designer's own firm or community (Baldwin, 2012: 20) |
| · Partitioning a big task of the whole organization into smaller tasks of the subunits and coordinating the smaller subunit tasks so that they fit together to efficiently realize the bigger task or organizational goals (Burton, Obel and Håkonsson, 2015: 69) |
| · The allocation of decision rights, the definition of subunits, the financing and governance structure, and the boundaries of the organization (Gibbons and Roberts, 2013: 56) |
| · Decisions about the configuration of the formal organizational arrangements, including the formal structures, processes, and systems that make up an organization (Nadler and Tushman, 1997: 48) |
| · A form of human problem solving in which the problem is one of getting multiple individuals with diverse knowledge and interests to collectively achieve something that they could not by acting individually (Puranam, 2012: 18) |
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| The proliferation of definitions suggests a field which is drawing interest from a variety of disciplines and which is growing in diversity and perspectives. Given the current state of the field, understanding the implications of organizational design choices for strategy, performance and firm heterogeneity is an important step in bringing the fields of organizational design and strategy together, and in generating useful insights for managers. Also, opportunities exist for the study of organization designs as the unit of analysis, since there has been only limited recent research since foundational work linking strategy and structure. |
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| For this AiSM volume, we are especially looking for work which links different disciplines (e.g., sociology, organizational economics, social psychology, history, organizational theory, strategy), blends theories, mixes methods or is otherwise particularly integrative in its approach. Put another way, we hope to prioritize the "and" in research topics, questions, theories and empirics. We would like to offer scholars a chance to explore topics which may be considered exploratory, risky or unusual for mainstream journals. In doing so, we hope to renew attention to foundational theories and highlight new and interesting efforts that develop and augment theories and methods in the pursuit of a better understanding of organizational design and strategic management. |
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| We seek contributions that analyze the drivers and consequences of organizational design choices at multiple levels, including individuals, groups, business and corporate-level, markets and industries, ecosystems and institutional fields. Potential research topics may include, but are not limited to, the following: |
| · Organizational design choices and firm adaptation |
| · Organizational structure and knowledge creation/innovation |
| · Relationship between formal and informal structure and strategy |
| · Cross-level perspectives btw macro-organizational design and individual level decision making |
| · Interplay between cognition and incentives in organizational design |
| · Role of ecosystems and their impact on strategy-related outcomes |
| · Relationship between design choices, cognition and capabilities |
| · Flexibility and organized playfulness |
| · Relationship between organizational design and management control systems (e.g., performance measurement, target setting, etc. |
| · Relationship between organization design and corporate strategy (e.g., resource allocation, diversification) |
| · Interaction of human and artificial organizational designers (organizational design and artificial intelligence) |
| · Organizational design and organizational growth |
| · Relationship between micro-structure and macro-structure |
| · Design and self-organizing systems. |
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| SUBMISSION GUIDELINES |
| Submissions are due no later than December 15, 2017. All papers submitted must represent original research not previously published elsewhere. All submissions will be subject to in-depth peer review. Editorial decisions and revision requests will be communicated to authors by January 30, 2018. The targeted delivery of the manuscript to the publisher is April 15, 2018. |
| To submit a paper, or to ask questions about the content of this AiSM volume or the editorial process, please contact one of the volume editors, John Joseph (johnj2@uci.edu), Rich Burton (rmb2@duke.edu), Oliver Baumann (oliv@sod.dias.sdu.dk), or Kannan Srikanth (ksrikanth@smu.edu.sg), or the AiSM series editor, Gino Cattani (gcattani@stern.nyu.edu). |
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| References |
| Baldwin, Carliss Y. (2012). Organization design for business ecosystems. Journal of Organizational Design. 1(1): 20-23. |
| Burton, Richard M., Børge Obel, and Dorthe Døjbak Håkonsson, (2015). Organizational design: A step by step approach, 2006 with Gerardine DeSanctis, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 3rd edition. |
| Gibbons, Robert and Roberts, John. (2013). The handbook of organizational economics, Princeton, Princeton University Press. |
| Nadler, David A. and Tushman, Michael L. (1997). Competing by design: The power of organizational architecture. New York, Oxford University Press. |
| Puranam, Phanish. (2012). A future for the science of organization design. Journal of Organizational Design. 1(1): 18-19. |