Paper development workshop a great success ‘down under’

A group of over 30 national and international organization theory scholars gathered ‘down under’ to present and discuss their work in various formats, including plenary panels and roundtable sessions.

The paper development workshop offered the opportunity for scholars to present and develop their ongoing work related to the broad theme of ‘Organizing Practices’. The overall theme was deliberately indexical and open-ended, signifying analysis of both practices that organize as well as analysis of theories of how practices are organized. In this way, it intended to cross-fertilize the fields of practice studies and institutional theory which have been remarkably fecund in recent years. The combined insight is the co-constitutive relationship between institutions and social practices: institutionalized meaning systems and power relations essentially structure social practices, which in turn sustain and transform institutions.

 

The workshop was organized in collaboration with Organization Studies, and co-sponsored by the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) and the Organization and Management Theory (OMT) Division of the Academy of Management. The local organizing committee – Stewart Clegg, Antoine Hermens, Markus Höllerer, Hokyu Hwang, Emmanuel Josserand, Danielle Logue, Jaco Lok, and Gavin Schwarz – was delighted to welcome Frank den Hond, the incoming co-editor of Organization Studies, in providing the keynote for the workshop.

 

With a strong scholarly focus on further developing individual manuscripts, and situated in one of the most beautiful locations on the globe, both participants and organizers agreed that the workshop was a great experience and big success. The next one will follow!