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Let me point to two calls for papers for Special Issues relating to topics regularly covered on this blog that I am involved with as a guest editor.
“Creativity and copyright in the shadow of GenAI: Managing and organizing creative content in the digitalization frenzy” in the journal “Innovation: Organization & Management,” co-edited with Konstantin Hondros (HSU Hamburg), Astrid Mager (Austrian Academy of Sciences), Patricia Aufderheide (American University Washington) and Patrick Cohedent (HEC Montréal). Deadline for submission of full papers is September 30, 2026.
“Collective actorhood and organizationality: Recalibrating responsibility in business-society relations” in the journal “Business & Society,” co-edited with Dennis Schoeneborn (Copenhagen Business School), Héloïse Berkowitz (LEST, CNRS, Aix Marseille), Frank de Bakker (IÉSEG School of Management) and Consuelo Vásquez (Université du Québec à Montréal). We will be supported in the editorial work by consulting editor Devi Vijay (IIM Calcutta) as well as Business & Society editor Colin Higgins (Deakin University.
(leonhard)
Since the business school accreditation agency AACSB has recently renounced Diversity, Equity and Inclusive (DEI), it is high time that AACSB accredited business schools renounce their accreditations.
Accreditations are questionable in themselves. Expensive, lots of bureaucracy, hardly any noticeable improvements for students or lecturers. Not much substance, mostly a legitimacy facade. I’ve always found cheers about multiple accreditations absurd.
But when global accreditation of business schools immediately abandons DEI standards in anticipatory submission to an authoritarian US president announcing legally questionable decrees, then all the talk of “academic research principles” (p. 57 in the “Guiding Principles and Standards for Business School Accrediation”) is exactly that: just talk.
Read the rest of this entry »The title of Doctorow’s “The Lost Cause” is not immediately understandable outside the USA. It refers to a revisionist historical narrative of the US Civil War, according to which the Southern states had honest motives for seceding from the Union beyond maintaining an economic system based on slavery and racial segregation. While the Lost Cause narrative initially served primarily to paint a heroic picture of secession, it experienced a renewed upswing in the second half of the 20th century in reaction to the US civil rights movement.
Doctorow takes all of this for granted when he describes the near future in a global warming USA in the year 2050. The book is set in Burbank, California, where Doctorow himself lives, and is classified as ‘solarpunk’ or ‘hopepunk’. An entirely appropriate categorization: for as ruthlessly realistic as the description of a world that has clearly missed the 2-degree target in terms of global warming is, the book nevertheless manages to portray life in this world as hopeful and meaningful.
Read the rest of this entry »The Berlin-based re:publica conference series deals with what Felix Stalder calls “The Digital Condition” of our society and attracts about 10.000 peopel each year. At this year’s conference themed “Who cares?” I had the honor to meet UCLA Professor and Philantropist (Arcadia Fund) Peter Baldwin for a Fireside Chat.
Under the headline “Public Domain in the Digital Age: a Paradox”, Baldwin sketched some of his partially countervailing expectations with respect to how the state of the public domain will change in the (not too far) future and how this future might be brought closer to the present due to the advent of LLMs and generative AI. A recording of our chat is available on YouTube:
For my other activities and talks during this year’s re:publica, please check out my (German) blog post over at osconjunction.net.
(Leonhard)
This week, my University of Innsbruck hosted the conference on “Enhancing the voice of science on Wikipedia: How universities can collaborate with the online encyclopedia in science communication”. I had the honor to deliver the opening keynote on “Science (Communication) and Wikipedia: Potentials and Pitfalls”. In this talk, I offer some thoughts on the following questions:
- How ‘scientific’ is Wikipedia?
- How important is science for Wikipedia?
- How important is Wikipedia for science?
- How important is Wikipedia for our common knowledge?
- What are potentials when science communication meets Wikipedia?
- What are the pitfalls?
- Is it worth it?
The slides are available over at Slideshare.
While there is a lot of discussion about new Twitter alternatives and the relevance of journalists and other critical groups of users, the potential of university-based Fediverse instances has hardly been addressed. It is high time for universities to get involved in the Fediverse.
In fact, researchers from around the world are already there, as evidenced by the various disciplinary opt-in lists of Academics on Mastodon. They recognize the Fediverse’s potential to contribute to publicly owned scholarly knowledge, as Björn Brembs and colleagues have advocated for in Nature.
However, the full potential of decentralized social networks will only become clear when universities also bring students into the Fediverse. In order to support this, please check out and share the call to action “Universities of the World, Join the Fediverse!”
In March 2021, Alek Tarkowski and Paul Keller published an essay on the “Paradox of Open” on the occasion of launching their Brussels-based Think Tank Open Future. While sketching an agenda for their adovacy work, the essay offered a more sober perspective on the promises previously associated with openness:
While Open works as a strategic (and narrative) approach in specific fields of application, it no longer provides a more general vision of a more just and egalitarian digital society.
More recently, open future published a collection of essays responding to this text. I had the honor to also contribute a response essay entitled “How Openness Becomes Exclusionary” on imported, created and path-dependent diversity deficits in online communities that explicitly describe themselves as “open”:
Read the rest of this entry »
I delivered this statement as a panelist at the RIPE@2022 conference “Between the Fourth Estate and the Fifth Power: Conservation and Innovation in Public Service Media Journalism”, September 19, 2022.
Facing competition from large platform giants, from Facebook to TikTok, how should, how could nationally embedded legacy Public Service Media providers ever even hope to compete with those global competitors?
One way to do so would require embracing digital remix culture with its three foundational pillars: copy, transform, combine.
Read the rest of this entry »Laudatio delivered by Leonhard Dobusch at the 38th EGOS Colloquium, July 7, 2022, at WU Vienna, Austria.
How can we assess what a pioneering and lasting contribution to “the social sciences dealing with organization, organized and organizing” is, as is required for anyone receiving an EGOS Honorary Membership. To do so, as a proxy, let me briefly sketch what is particular for organization studies as a discipline – and not just particular, but particularly great:
- Organization studies is truly transdisciplinary. At EGOS, Business scholars meet sociologists and political scientists and anthropologists and communications scholars and also the occasional economist.
- Probably because of its transdisciplinarity, organization studies is also characterized by great methodological openness and diversity. Organization studies was about mixed methods long before it was considered cool.
- And, related to both these features, organization studies is a field that sports theoretical pluralism.
And this triad of transdisciplinarity, methodological openness and theoretical pluralism is also, what Sigrid not just contributed to, but rather what she lived, what she exemplified, what she spearheaded.
Read the rest of this entry »
Konstantin Hondros and myself had been invited to contribute to the great series of evidence summaries for the 21 for 2021 project, a CREATe project within the AHRC Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre (PEC). Specifically, we put together a synthesis on “Three Faces of Openness in Organising Copyright”:
In this blog, focusing on copyright-related aspects of open approaches across domains, we will first develop a typology of openness in organising copyright, ranging from permissive over viral to restrictive openness. Based upon this typology, we will review the empirical evidence available for each of these three types of organising copyright-related openness. We conclude with some reflections on potential avenues for future research within and across the various domains of openness.
Check out the blog post in full over at CREATe.
(leonhard)
governancexborders.com 