We encourage organizational scholars participating to the 2024 WOA in Milan to contribute with new empirical evidence and theoretical perspectives on all the themes presented above that may lead us to ask some of the following questions, provided as examples:
- What are the crossroads between organizational policies, public discourses, and everyday practices for intercultural integration? How to put intercultural dialogue and integration into practice within organizations?
- How multicultural social networks can promote ideas flow, creativity, and societal innovation?
- How should we change our decision making when uncertainty increases? What is the new normal of managing in extreme uncertainty when nothing is normal anymore?
- What is the importance of forecasting in times of extreme uncertainty?
- Which new forms of coordination are emerging to achieve effective cooperation at global level and/or including heterogeneous institutions (for example, governments, large corporations, associations, and so forth)?
- How are the relationship among people and among people and organizations taking shape in the “infosphere” (see above: Floridi, 2014), since they become seamlessly connected to each other and surrounded by smart, responsive objects?
- How can organizations be redesigned to enable and empower people “digital happiness” in their “onlife” world?
- How can people in organizations be perceived not only as actors who change the world through technology, but also subjects who are transformed by technology itself?
- How can organizations enhance people’s willingness to experiment with new forms of structuring and routines and generate their own evolution?
- How can crossroads be managed as flux spaces where actors from different industrial sectors, public institutions, associations, and communities can get together allowing the shaping of new evolving ecosystems?
- How can organization studies carry out an effort to reveal basic principles of the complex adaptive systems embedded at the crossroads between different kinds of organizations?
- How to integrate approaches from different disciplines and mix methods from network dynamics and sociology, as well as geography and urban studies to better address the challenge of designing organizations that foster a sustainable evolution for our society?
To guide researchers in framing their potential contributions, in the following table we present some preliminary ideas concerning topics and tracks for the WOA conference. It should be noted that the following represents just some examples, but do not exclude contributions on other topics in the spirit of this conference. Thus, the research community is strongly encouraged, but not limited to making contributions that relate to the following topics:
| ORGANIZATIONAL MODELS | Organizing with More-than-Humans;Organizing and Collaborating for Shared Value;Emerging Forms of Organizing;The Impact of Organizational Practices on Workplace Diversity and Inequality. |
| PEOPLE | The Hidden Role of Emotions; Rethinking Organizational Knowledge: People and Technology;Exploring the Role of Time, Space, and People in Tackling Societal Challenges |
| PROCESSES | Governance at the Crossroad between Structures, Processes, and Leadership;Organizations for Societal Challenges from a Practice and Process PerspectiveInvestigating the Processes of Sustainable Organizations |
| METHODOLOGY | Advancing Qualitative Methods: Strengthening Alignment of Theory and Methods in Empirical Organization StudiesVisual Possibilities in Organizational ResearchMethodological Crossroads: new interdisciplinary perspectives. |