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Screenshot of the impressively animated header image of »Orders Beyond Borders«
Recently the Global Governance Unit at the WZB Berlin Social Science Centre led by Michael Zürn has launched a new blog entitled “Orders Beyond Borders“. The first post features an Interview with Michael Zürn, in which he also reflects on the rationale behind starting a research blog:
In particular, the Blog is meant to provide a means for those who are interested in our research to get the main messages without having to read 400-page books that some of the doctoral students write after finishing their PhDs. Secondly, the Blog is meant to be a way that we can convey some of the practical and political ideas that follow from the type of work we are doing. […] In addition, it is important to us that the Blog also acts as a platform for interacting and engaging with the community.
The interview is also available as an audio file, thereby constituting the first episode of what is going to be a series of podcast interviews. Of course, the team behind the blog is also on Twitter under @obbblog. We are looking forward to reading more from our fellow bloggers and recommend subscribing to it immediately.
(leonhard)
Sigrid, Markus and I have finally been able to publish another paper on the case of Creative Commons. In a longitudinal analysis we compare three embedded cases of transnational standard-setting: (1) license porting, (2) license versioning and (3) license interpretation. The article “Open to Feedback? Formal and Informal Recursivity in Creative Commons’ Transnational Standard-Setting” has been published in Global Policy and the abstract reads as follows:
In this article, we examine how non-membership organizations that claim stewardship over a transnational public or common good, such as the environmental or digital commons, develop combinations of formal and informal recursivity to develop and maintain regulatory conversations with their dispersed user communities. Based on a case study of Creative Commons, an organization that developed what have become the most widely used open licenses for digital content, we show how rhetorical openness to informal feedback from legitimacy communities in different sectors and countries can improve the feasibility and diffusion of standards. However, as long as the standard-setter’s methods of making decisions on the basis of such feedback remains opaque, its communities are likely to raise accountability demands for more extensive ex post justifications.
The 33rd EGOS Colloquium will take place from July 6–8, 2017 in Copenhagen, Denmark, and together with Georg von Krogh (ETH Zürich) and Richard Whittington (Oxford University) I will be convenor of sub-theme 50 on “Open Strategy: Practices, Perspectives and Problems“. The sub-theme will pick-up threads of discussion from a previous EGOS subtheme on “Open Organizations for an Open Society?” held in 2015 in Athens. Please find the Call for Short Papers below, submission deadline is January 9, 2017:
Many organizations in public, private and non-for-profit sectors are becoming more transparent about their strategies, while also including a wider range of actors in strategy development. These moves involve a variety of strategy practices, for example strategy jamming (Bjelland & Wood, 2008), strategy crowdsourcing (Stieger et al., 2012), strategy blogs and wikis (Dobusch & Kapeller, 2013) or strategy simulations in online games (Aten & Thomas, 2016). Although involving many different practices, this phenomenon has been described most comprehensively as ‘open strategy’ (Chesbrough & Appleyard, 2007; Whittington et al., 2011).
Building upon these studies, recent works on open strategy have begun to look at open strategy from an increasing variety of perspectives such as impression management (Whittington et al., 2016), middle-management inclusion in strategy-making (Wolf et al., 2014) or the inter-organizational explorations of strategic issues (Werle & Seidl, 2015). However, systematic cross-fertilization between the emerging open strategy literature and other areas and concepts of organizational openness are still rare. Read the rest of this entry »
Fueled by new digital technologies and by the perceived success of concepts such as ‘open innovation’, we can observe a growing interest in open forms of organizing more generally both among practitioners as well as among organization scholars (see also the wiki-based course on the matter). One such new field representing the interest in organizational openness is the realm of strategy research under the label of ‘Open Strategy’. The recently launched online community platform ‘Open Strategy Network‘ tries to connect and foster exchange among scholars interested in this emerging phenomenon.
The German Science Foundation is funding a new research unit based at Freie Universität Berlin with the topic “Organized Creativity: Practices for Inducing and Coping with Uncertainty“.
The research unit examines the challenging question of how creativity can be socially organized. It comprises four projects, each of which examines different dimensions of uncertainty in a specific area of organizing practices: collaborative practices, temporal practices, and regulatory practices.
Doctoral positions (and one postdoc) are open at the different partner universities of the research unit, which is comprised of the following scholars:
Prof. Dr. Jörg Sydow, Freie Universität Berlin (spokesperson)
Prof. Jana Costas, Ph.D., Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder
Prof. Dr. Leonhard Dobusch, Universität Innsbruck
Prof. Dr. Gernot Grabher, Hafen City University, Hamburg
Prof. Dr. Oliver Ibert, Freie Universität Berlin and IRS Erkner
Prof. Gregory Jackson, Ph.D., Freie Universtität Berlin
Prof. Dr. Sigrid Quack, Universität Duisburg-Essen
Prof. Dr. Elke Schüßler, Freie Universität Berlin and (from 1.5.16) Johannes Kepler Universität Linz
Please access the individual job offers here (in German only) and check out the general project website for further information.
This coming Thursday, I’ll be a panelist on one of The Guardian’s online Live Q&A’s, a series of events which they’ve been running since 2013. The topic of this session is What are the barriers to financial inclusion in fragile states? and questions include: “How can more opportunities be created for people to save and borrow in volatile economies? What expertise can NGOs, the telecoms industry and policymakers offer around innovative ways to reach the most cut off communities? And how do we measure success in countries where conditions are volatile?”
The Q&A will run on Thursday 5 Nov. from 13:00 to 15:00, with a panel of invited experts who answer readers’ questions and comments online and discuss with each other; the whole panel should be confirmed by Wednesday. Of course, input and participation in the Q&A by the readers of this blog would be very welcome and should enrich the debate. As much as it may appear a niche topic, the session connects to questions about the exact role of financial services in development, the priority which donors give to financial development vis-a-vis alternative strategies for income-generation and social inclusion, and the microfinance experience of countries like Bosnia-Herzegovina.
(phil)
The Conference FUTURE€$ – Prospective Money and Money’s Prospects, which I’m organising together with Axel Paul and Cornelius Moriz, will take place from 24-26 September 2015 at the University of Basel, Switzerland.
In February we circulated a Call for Papers that generated an overwhelming response in terms of cutting-edge submissions, from which we could select the very best and put together a set of panels on the nature of money, the Euro crisis, and new monetary technologies. This comes in addition to a stream of talks from leading scholars of money worldwide. A main highlight of the conference is the evening roundtable on Friday 25 September, which assembes four prominent panelists (Christoph Fleischmann, Keith Hart, Dimitris Sotiropoulos, and Rainer Voss) to reflect on the problematic role played by money in our present political-economic juncture.
The conference will bring together multidisciplinary and exploratory perspectives on the nature(s) and future(s) of money. With this list of speakers (from academia, practice, activism and media), it may well be the academic event of the year in its field:
One of the things that make blogs particularly interesting are series. The “series” series recommends series at related blogs.
Logo of the AoM Interest Group Strategizing, Activities & Practices
For some time now, the digital revolution has reached and changed everyday research practices. There is hardly any part of the research process for which no digital tool is available, starting from creating a mind map of your first idea (e.g. “Freemind”) over collecting (e.g. “Sitesucker”) and coding your data (e.g. “WebQDA”) to collaboratively annotating and writing (e.g. “eLaborate”). And while many of these digital tools require substantial financial investments, a growing number of tools is available open access and free of charge.
Unter dem Titel “Entgrenzte politische Teilhabe? Beiträge zu einer politischen Soziologie transnationaler Mobilisierungs- bzw. Partizipationsprozesse” plant der DVPW-Arbeitskreis “Soziologie der internationalen Beziehungen (SiB)” seine nächste Arbeitstagung in Kooperation mit dem Verein für Protest- und Bewegungsforschung und dem Bereich soziale Bewegungen, Technik, Konflikte des Zentrums Technik und Gesellschaft der TU Berlin. Die Arbeitstagung findet am 12. Juni 2015 in der TU Berlin statt. Für die Beteiligung an der Tagung ruft das Organisationsteam jetzt zur Einreichung von Beiträgen auf. Read the rest of this entry »
« Riches is assumed by many to be only a quantity of coin, because the arts of getting wealth and retail trade are concerned with coin. Others maintain that coined money is a mere sham, a thing not natural, but conventional only, because, if the users substitute another commodity for it, it is worthless … and, indeed, he who is rich in coin may often be in want of necessary food. But how can that be wealth of which a man may have a great abundance and yet perish with hunger, like Midas in the fable, whose insatiable prayer turned everything that was set before him into gold? »
… thus wrote Aristotle in his book on “Politics”.
More than 2000 years on, it is far from clear that we as societies have developed an understanding of money that surpasses the conundrums the great Greek grappled with. Certainly the modern Greeks are grappling their own monetary conundrums. Only this much is clear: today money is everywhere.
Present crises and the emergence of new ideas are reshaping money’s forms, functions, politics and meanings in ways that promise to shape our societies for years to come. The conference which Axel Paul, Cornelius Moriz, and I are hosting in September at the University of Basel engages some of the problematic questions underlying attempts to obtain satisfying theories of money, as well as contemporary attempts to shape and change money. Our conference focuses on the politics of money (in the broadest sense), the different forms and functions of money, and utopias and dystopias of money. Read the rest of this entry »
governancexborders.com 