Category: Conferences

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In Search For Meaning: The Real Challenges for the World Economic Forum 2019

tl;dr: Globalization needs new meanings beyond economic growth

This year’s World Economic Forum catchphrase is ”Globalization 4.0“ and focuses on a ”New Architecture in the Age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution“. The discussions this year will not be affirmative of new technologies and optimistic about new economic opportunities. Rather a very concerned view on the new global realities dominates, especially but not exclusively:

  • the rise of Neo-Nationalism and the politics of isolation and confrontation, especially in the former globalization heartlands like the USA and UK, but also in emerging countries like Brazil and core European countries like Hungary and Poland;
  • the ongoing and accelerating human-made climate change that requires global cooperation for successful mitigation, not national isolation.
… Read more
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Notes from AOM 2018

tl;dr: Management scholars need to embrace activism, not just because of the state of the world but because of the state of their field.

Every August since 2009 it is AOM season for me: the Academy of Management holds its annual meeting and around 10,000 management scholars from around the planet converge on one place for five days, filled with workshops, symposia, paper sessions and endless debates on the relevance, impacts and challenges of management as society’s dominant practice.… Read more

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Digital Sustainability and Social Innovation

tl;dr: Social innovators are political entrepreneurs and the sustainability of the digital age requires a new political economy

Can digitalisation aid in achieving Sustainable Development? The answer is ”definitely maybe“. Digitalisation comes with great potentials of empowering active prosumerism and new forms of creative collaboration beyond the market, but also with great rucksacks of material and energy consumption. Digital Sustainability then demands fundamental economic change towards a circular economy, but also a transformation of social behaviours and structures.… Read more

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Digitalisation and Sustainability

tl;dr: Those who want to talk about digitalisation should also talk about the circular economy and sufficiency

Is the digital economy an enabler for a sustainable society? What role do commons, both digital as well as physical, play when it comes to inclusion, equity and mitigating climate change? How can different actors in society frame digital technologies from the normative perspective of Sustainability? These and other questions have been discussed at a recent ideas conference of the TU Berlin on digitalisation and sustainability – “digitalisation” being a very German-English description for the increased use of digital technologies throughout society and their economic, social, political and ecological implications.… Read more

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Notes from AOM 2017

tl;dr: Putting politics in management and organization research while managing cultural differences in transatlantic scholarship.

Attending a large international management conference with more than 10,000 participants from all over the planet is a great opportunity for some second-order observations: observe how others observe. This exercise in the sociology of international, cross-cultural scholarship reveals some interesting insights. One of these insights is the lack of politics in management research, the blindness to the political economy – in Paul Adler’s words – in which managerial activities take place and organizations thrive, survive, struggle and die.… Read more