ESADE Business School
Barcelona, Spain

Energizing the study of organizations and organizing

What better place than Barcelona and the Mediterranean for explorations in and dialogues on passion for creativity and innovation in organization studies and celebration of the plurality of theoretical and empirical approaches, which EGOS stands for!

Passion is about excitement, enthusiasm, zeal, and delight. Passion for creativity and innovation is essential for energizing the study of organizations and organizing in various ways and at different levels: societies or parts of them, such as social movements, urban milieus, or youth cultures, play an essential role as contexts of creativity and innovation and are, in turn, re-shaped by them. Organizations co-create – with their stakeholders, competitors, regulators, or partners in alliances and networks – practices, policies, processes, and narratives about their own becoming, which influence societies. Entrepreneurs engage in institution building efforts to push their ideas forward. They go against the grain and persist in the face of failure, bringing to life new organizations, which can displace a field’s centre of gravity. Scholars, passionate about the study of organizations and organizing, revisit old problems with new approaches or discover new lands and lenses of academic inquiry, thus revising, revitalizing, or challenging the field's conventions.

We welcome divergent thinking and challenging questions that help ignite imagination and create spaces for the exchange of brave new ideas on organizing and organizations; explorations into forgotten areas and uncharted territories as well as exploitation of existing ideas with new interpretations and in different contexts; attention to peripheral themes that have the potential to move to the core of the field or to core themes that call for reinvention; discovering and bringing to the fore of opportunities for creative disruptions; focus on unusual organizational settings and new methods' combinations; learning from other 'languages', those of philosophy, psychology, economics, and political science.

Organizing Committee at ESADE Business School

Silviya Svejenova, Associate Professor (silviya.svejenova@esade.edu)
Alfons Sauquet, Professor (alfons.sauquet@esade.edu)
José Luis Alvarez, Professor (josel.alvarez@esade.edu)
Luis Vives, Assistant Professor (luis.vives@esade.edu)