Program announcement
INFORMS Organization Science Winter Conference 2024
25th Anniversary
Organizing in the Age of Uncertainty:
Multiple Rationalities and Novel Possibilities
We are pleased to announce the 25th INFORMS Organization Science Winter Conference (OSWC 2024), sponsored by Organization Science. The 2024 OSWC is the first in-person conference since the pandemic and is dedicated to advancing research about organizations and organizing in the age of uncertainty. Our fireside chat series will feature distinguished scholars such as Marya Besharov, Georg von Krogh, Dan Levinthal, William Ocasio, Robert Seamans, and Effy Vayena to explore our conference theme.
The conference theme intends to explore new directions in theoretical and empirical work that addresses the uncertainty of current environments created by major trends, including new technologies, political tensions, climate change, and growing economic disparities. These trends create pervasive uncertainty requiring people, organizations, and governments to rethink the future of work, well-being, inclusion, productivity, and sustainability.
At this year’s conference, we examine these trends and their impact on organizing amidst diverse interests, preferences, cognitions, and decisions driven by multiple forms of rationality. We seek to understand better how organizing in this dynamic landscape is conditioned by the plurality of identities, coalitions, goals, vocabularies, and logics and how these forces shape, for the organizations and their members, the possibilities they advance and the novel solutions to the complex problems of the world they pursue.
All this creates new demands on organizations and organizing and new challenges for organizational scholars. Fields as diverse as management, economics, sociology, marketing, political science, neurosciences, robotics, and AI are looking to offer new theories and new insights on the future of organizing. We invite papers and proposals that articulate forward-looking theoretical and empirical agendas for advancing organizational theory in the 21st century. A few illustrative but not exhaustive topics of interest include:
Decision making under uncertainty entails the interplay of different processes and skills. Whereas organizational research has historically strongly emphasized rationality understood from a cognitive perspective, research in various disciplines is bringing forward the role of emotions, imagination, and values. With the diffusion of new tools such as generative AI, these topics are more relevant than ever. These
ideas suggest the importance of exploring multiple rationalities and developing a more complete picture of human – and artificial – rationality.
Memory and attention have become central topics in the study of individual and organizational decision making. In the age of uncertainty, understanding the role of memory and attention as a source of both flexibility and constraint becomes increasingly important. How do individuals resolve these tensions and manage tradeoffs? How do organizations manage the balance between the two? How does AI change the management of memory and attention by individuals and organizations?
Organizational scholars have long emphasized the importance of reliable information, access to information, and information processing structures. In the age of uncertainty, sensemaking processes that weave together cognition, identity, narratives, and cultural code take center stage as individuals and organizations seek to navigate uncertainty and change. How do individuals and organizations manage greater heterogeneity in the resources brought to bear on communication, knowledge generation, and decision making? And how do new digital technologies impact our understanding of reliable information?
Organizational scholars have long viewed organizations as adaptive systems comprised of multiple actors with inconsistent preferences and identities. Under conditions of uncertainty, multiple goals, values, and ideologies could contribute to broader exploration and knowledge generation but may also compound uncertainty due to multiple goals, pluralistic values, and clashing ideologies. How do such tensions affect organizational design, identity, strategy, and performance? How do we deal with goals, values, and ideologies embedded in the technologies we use to make decisions?
Bounded rationality is a core principle of the behavioral theory of the firm. It is related to limits in cognition, time, and information when making decisions. While previous waves of digitalization might have helped human intelligence overcome information or attenuated constraints on information, recent developments in computer sciences and AI promise to attenuate the limits on time (as they decreasingly require direct human supervision or even participation to collect and analyze data) and cognition (as AI is approaching and indeed overtaking human cognition in several tasks). Is bounded rationality a legacy of the past in the age of AI? Or will it remain a central tenet of behavioral approaches to the firm and human decision making? What is the relationship between AI-assisted information processing and organizational decision making?