GENERAL THEME

Relevant dates

General Theme

Since its inception, the Workshop on Organizational Studies (WOA) has served not merely as a conference, but as a collective laboratory, a space for dialogue, critique, and co-creation among organization scholars. Each edition has mirrored timely and thought-provoking challenges, from the focus on flexibility and performance in the early 2000s, through the turbulence of economic crises, to the critical reflections on power, identity, and sustainability of recent years. WOA’s history forms a living continuum: a community that has learned, adapted, and redefined itself in response to shifting organizational issues.

The 2026 theme, “From Doing Resilience to Being Resilient: Organizing beyond recovery and toward renewal”, invites us to move past the idea of resilience as mere adaptation or recovery. In a world marked by buoyant uncertainty, ecological fragility, and technological interdependence, organizations and societies are called to cultivate skills for improvisation, creativity, regeneration, and transformation. In today’s landscape of continuous and multi-crises, resilience is no longer a response to exceptional shocks but a condition for survival within an enduring state of overlapping disruptions. This shift invites us to understand being resilient as a capability to navigate complexity, mitigate vulnerability, and reimagine organizational life amid continuous turbulence. This call urges us to rethink what it means to “organize” in this context.

To go beyond doing resilience means to explore the design issues, social and organizational dynamics, HRM challenges, and relational infrastructures that pave the way for an enhanced ability to overcome crises and achieve continuous reliability. This also entails questioning how legacies are transmitted and renewed within the organizational community: what intellectual and ethical inheritances have shaped our field? How do we nurture the next generation of scholars and practitioners? And what forms of organizing are capable of generating shared meaning?

WOA 2026 seeks contributions that do not merely describe organizational adaptation, but interrogate the deeper processes through which organizing sustains, transforms, and transcends itself, reaffirming the spirit of WOA as a living workshop for collective thought, rather than a ritual of presentation.

Below are key themes of interest from both scientific and managerial perspectives:

• Exploring how resilience emerges and evolves within individuals, teams, and organizations. This theme invites reflections on adaptive and regenerative HR practices that foster learning, inclusion, and well-being through focusing on people.
• Examining resilience as an evolving paradigm in organizational theory. Contributions may question structural, situational, and temporal assumptions of adaptation, exploring how organizations redesign themselves, substantially, and symbolically, to develop enduring capacities for renewal and collective sensemaking.
• Investigating the technological and digital dimensions of resilience. This theme addresses how information systems, AI, and data infrastructures can enable or constrain regenerative organizing, balancing efficiency and flexibility while shaping new forms of socio-technical interdependence across organizational ecosystems.
• Focusing on resilience as a moral and social process. This calls for exploring how organizations confront fragility, inequality, and vulnerability, developing caring practices and shared responsibilities that transform resilience from an individual imperative into a collective and ethical project for sustainable futures.
• Reflecting on resilience within our own scholarly ecosystem. This theme invites meta-organizational inquiry into the legacies, dialogues, and boundaries of the Organizational community, how it renews its identity, sustains collaboration, and transmits knowledge across generations in changing academic landscapes.

We welcome submissions of original research papers contributing with new empirical evidence and theoretical perspectives on the theme. Below, there is a non-exhaustive list of questions and topics to inspire contributions:

• How is resilience conceptualized across individuals, teams, organizations, and ecosystems, and how do these levels interact to sustain long-term adaptability?
• What organizational routines, practices, and narratives enable resilience to evolve?
• How can leaders cultivate collective resilience that balances empathy, and critical reflection in times of systemic uncertainty?
• How can we reconfigure design practices to achieve enhanced resilience capabilities?
• What does it mean to manage people embracing a resilience perspective?
• How can we change organizations to prompt them to shift from doing resilience to being resilient?
• In what ways do HR and learning practices foster psychological safety, and shared purpose?
• What role do digital technologies and AI play in enabling or constraining resilient organizing?
• How can organizations avoid “toxic resilience”, the normalization of over-adaptation and burnout, and instead nurture humane, sustainable forms of endurance?
• How does resilience intersect with ethics and justice?
• In what ways does the legacy of organizational scholarship shape how we understand, teach, and practice resilience today?
• How might the next generation of organization scholars rethink resilience beyond efficiency and control, toward imagination, connectedness, and renewal?
• How can organizations evolve beyond resilience to embrace antifragility, transforming shocks, uncertainty, and crises into sources of learning, creativity, and regenerative strength?
• How can organizational aesthetics, care, and design practices cultivate forms of “beautiful organizing” that inspire meaning, belonging, and emotional resonance amid complexity?
• How can organizations integrate ecological, social, and human sustainability into resilience strategies, fostering regenerative ecosystems that thrive rather than merely survive over time?
• How can collective resilience emerge through collaboration, shared purpose, and trust, redefining organizing as a communal, interdependent process rather than an individual adaptive effort?