Call for papers - NEON 2023

Organizing in changing landscapes: Threats, challenges, and novel opportunities?

Throughout the year, the water flows in Norwegian rivers and streams at a predictable and familiar pace, in paths that are well established and where, at a close but safe distance, we have our schools, businesses, and homes. The burble of the river is a dear sound in everyday life, and life goes on at its regular pace. But some years, when spring and mild weather arrive, snow and ice loosen and accumulate in piles, building higher and stronger into a dam that resists the powerful pressure.

An ice pile formed by individually harmless lumps of ice, a form that grows and grows, waiting to burst. Suddenly, on a beautiful sunny day, the structure begins to melt, and the ice breaks into the creek at a furious pace. Ice and huge masses of water sweep away what stands near the river. Buildings, soil, roads and young trees are never seen again, and it is only when the ice comes out into a gentler and wider landscape that it calms down. 

Foto: Bjørnar Kibsgaard fra Pixabay

Photo: Bjørnar Kibsgaard fra Pixabay

In 2023, it feels like we are watching the construction of such an ice-build-up. Many disturbing and isolated events both near and far seem to gather into a chaotic mixture, which threatens to break what we have built together. There is war in Europe, political fronts are steeper than in a long time, and our planet is in peril, but the solutions create new tangles. Digitalization demands new ways of handling tasks and leading human beings and organizations. The rapid rise of artificial intelligence penetrates and disrupts the «regular flow» of everyday life, and challenges our traditional ways of working, learning, leading and organizing. Do the challenges appear manageable, or do we have to seek new directions for organizing and the field of organization science? 

Our society and our communities are under pressure. Organizations are often hoped to offer solutions: providing arenas for coordination, negotiation and compromise, achieving sustainable development goals, and generally overcoming the “grand challenges” of our time. At the same time, organizations also seem to create problems: as arenas of inequality and exclusion, conflicts that cannot be solved with today’s organizing, and as forces of nature destruction. At NEON23, we hope to come together to discuss how we as researchers, teachers, students, and professionals are able to respond to these challenges and successfully navigate these complex times.

We strongly believe in the need for interdisciplinarity and pluralism of organizational research as an advantage. The NEON conference – having for many years served as a meeting place across disciplines and between researchers and practitioners – is an excellent arena for professional discussions about what constitutes positive visions for the future and how to organize present and future organizations with an eye to a better future. In order to develop NEON’s potential of filling such a role further, we invite you to submit proposals for papers and we encourage all participants to embrace broad interdisciplinary issues also for this year’s conference.

We therefore invite you to submit paper proposals focusing on what organizing and management on various levels (macro, meso and micro) which in turn may help us gain further understanding of the increasing uncertainty and conflicting times facing the world today.

This call is in English to also attract paper presenters outside Norway. Our language policy is still to organize the session programme in both English and any of the Scandinavian languages. We welcome presentations under the proposed track-themes of NEON 2023, listed below. You may also submit a paper proposal on themes that are not in the list.

List of tracks

Agile structures and the "projectness" of organizations

The "projectness" of teams, organizations, sectors and societies should be a core issue in the field of organization studies. Project management researchers have advocated the increased significance of projects using concepts such as project society and projectification, and rightly so. See for example: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/emre.12568. However, this development is not linear or uniform. Surely there are also processes of deprojectification? A few examples:

  1. Conventional wisdom in agile software development has changed from agile projects to 'permament' cross-functional product teams, that overcome the rigidities of the project logic. See LinkedIn page.
  2. The diffusion of agile approaches outside the software sphere supports the same development. Here, project units and logics may be under pressure.
  3. Teams that works well together, may take on a long term character and be used for several projects over time.
  4. Projects are also management ideas and "recipes" that may be "overused", and not aligned with tasks and contingencies.
  5. The uniqueness of specific projects may be overstated, and more (parts of) projects may be standardized and performed in specialized departments.
  6. While the rate of change and uncertainty have accelerated, it does not follow that a project (f.ex. a change project) is the best answer. Continuous change may be a better approach. More change: Yes. More projects: Well, maybe not...? There are (as we know!) no "one-best-way" of organization, and projects have their own pros and cons.

 

In this session we invite ordinary papers (Norwegian or English) and opinion pieces (10 minutes, Norwegian or English) on the issues of: - Organizational aspects of project management: Tensions and dilemmas - Projectification - Deprojectification - Agile structures, processes, logics and tensions We welcome empirical or theoretical contributions, as well as practitioners’ voices. There are no restrictions as regards sectors of study, methods or perspectives.

 

References:

Locatelli, G. 2023 A manifesto for project management research, European Management Review, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/emre.12568 Nesheim, T. 2023 Deprojectification of agile, Irish Journal of Management, https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ijm-2023-0010.

 

The list of relevant topics includes, but are not limited to: