5th LUGANO CONFERENCE ON ORGANIZATIONS Theme: Disruptions and Recoveries: Organizations in a Time of Societal Crises

Institute of Management and Organisation

Start date: 28 June 2022 / 17:00

End date: 30 June 2022 / 15:30

The Lugano Conference on Organizations is a bi-annual two-day event aimed at discussing “big questions” in the theory of organizations. While perhaps necessary, the publish-or-perish model predominant in most academic institutions often forces us to focus on narrow research questions built around established theoretical paradigms and, eventually, to lose sight on the broader scientific significance of our work.

The mission of the Lugano Conference on Organizations is to provide a forum for scholars interested in linking their research streams to pivotal questions at the core of management and organization theory, and more broadly, to the social and economic issues that confront society.

In this new edition of the conference, we aspire to go beyond traditional paper presentations and offer an opportunity to distinguished scholars to discuss how their work contribute to address major societal issues. We thus aspire to host an “ideas’ conference” where participants have the opportunity to develop unique arguments based on their research, with a specific focus on the policy and practical implications stemming from their work.

The theme of this edition of the Lugano Conference on Organizations, which is intended as a prompt to favor this kind of discussion, will thus be “Disruptions and Recoveries: Organizations in a Time of Societal Crises.” Despite the relevance of organizational mechanisms to tackle many of the challenges faced by contemporaneous societies, from climate change to rising inequalities or the covid-19 pandemic, organizational scholars have been largely left out of public debate. Possible reasons for this surprising silence include the public’s tendency to associate organizations with their heroic leaders (e.g. Elon Musk at Tesla) and to treat them as unitary, independent actors. This lack of appreciation for the broader societal context of organizing neglects the growing blurriness of organizational boundaries as well as the institutional complexity of organizational fields. With this theme, we hope to provoke engaging and agenda-setting discussions aiming at filling this gap in contemporaneous thinking and the policy implications of organization theory scholarship.

Faculties