Leonhard Dobusch

University of Innsbruck | UIBK · Department of Organization and Learning

In this chapter, we analyze scholarly approaches that explicitly imagine organizations as capable of ‘doing good’ and investigate which answers they give to the urgent need of stimulating socio-ecological transformations. We compare three streams of literature on open, inclusive and alternative organizations. We define the transformative potential...

Due to the structural transformation of the scientific public sphere, organizational researchers now frequently come into contact with preprints—scholarly texts that are intended for peer review but have not yet been submitted for or completed this evaluation process. Although reflexive organizational research has long been interested in the relati...

The complexity and increasingly tight coupling of supply chains poses a major logistical challenge for leading companies. Another challenge is that leading companies -- under pressure from consumers, a critical public and legislative measures such as supply chain laws -- have to take more responsibility than before for their suppliers' labour stand...

Die Verletzung internationaler Arbeits- und Sozialstandards entlang der Lieferkette ist bei global agierenden Unternehmen eher die Regel als die Ausnahme. Mittlerweile sind solche Firmen allerdings durch die Gesetzgebung gefordert, nach der Idee der Corporate Social Responsibility Verantwortung für die Beschäftigten ihrer Zulieferer zu übernehmen....

We are currently witnessing a fundamental structural transformation of the scientific public sphere, characterized by processes of specialization, metrification, internationalization, platformization, and visibilization. In contrast to explanations of this structural transformation that invoke a technological determinism, we demonstrate its histori...

Being open about failure as an entrepreneur is an increasingly common practice in and beyond startup communities, for example by proactively and strategically crafting public statements to frame subsequent failure conversations. Combining an impression management perspective with an analysis of communicative genres of failure narratives, we empiric...

Uncertainty about Intellectual Property Regulations (IPR) is prevalent in today’s knowledge-based and creative industries. While prior literature indicates that regulatory uncertainty affects creative processes, studies that systematically analyze the effects of IPR on the experiencing of involved actors in creative processes across fields are rare...

Wir beobachten aktuell einen grundlegenden Strukturwandel der wissenschaftlichen Öffentlichkeit, der charakterisiert ist durch Prozesse der Spezialisierung, Metrifizierung, Internationalisierung, Plattformisierung und Visibilisierung. In Abgrenzung zu technikdeterministischen Erklärungen des Strukturwandels versuchen wir mit einem organisationstheo...

Wir beobachten aktuell einen grundlegenden Strukturwandel der wissenschaftlichen Öffentlichkeit, der charakterisiert ist durch Prozesse der Spezialisierung, Metrifizierung, Internationalisierung, Plattformisierung und Visibilisierung. In Abgrenzung zu technikdeterministischen Erklärungen des Strukturwandels versuchen wir mit einem organisationstheo...

Many early-career researchers are motivated by the prospect of creating knowledge that is useful, not just within but also beyond the academic community. Although research facilities, funders and academic journals praise this eagerness for societal impact, the path towards such contributions is by no means straightforward. In this article, we addre...

The public sphere is important for democracy and it is changing. Its current development is taking place at the point where three sequences of institutional change meet and interact: globalisation, commodification and the digitalisation of social dimensions. The contributions to this volume examine these developments in discussion with the public s...

Soziale Medien spielen eine paradoxe Rolle für Interessenvertretung in globalen Wertschöpfungsnetzwerken. Zum einen bieten Social-Media-Plattformen Arbeitnehmer:innen und Gewerkschaften die Möglichkeit der Mobilisierung über geografische und institutionelle Distanzen hinweg. Zum anderen lassen diese Plattformen aber auch zu, dass Dritte die digital...

Social media play a paradoxical role for matters of interest representation in global value-creation networks. On the one hand, social media platforms offer workers and trade unions the possibility to mobilize across geographical and institutional distances. On the other hand, these platforms also allow third parties to extract and process the digi...

Given the excessive power of Google and other large technology firms, transparency and accountability have turned into matters of great concern for organization scholars. So far, most studies adopt either a causal or critical perspective on the relationship between the two concepts. These perspectives are pitted against each other but share some ba...

Transparency is in vogue, yet oftentimes used as an umbrella concept for a wide array of phenomena. More focused concepts are needed to understand the form and function of different phenomena of visibility. In this article, we develop a definition of organizational transparency as systematic disclosure programs that meet the information needs of ot...

Openness and collaboration in scientific research are attracting increasing attention from scholars and practitioners alike. However, a common understanding of these phenomena is hindered by disciplinary boundaries and disconnected research streams. We link dispersed knowledge on Open Innovation, Open Science, and related concepts such as Responsib...

While many large and well-known companies publicly advertise their commitment to values of diversity and inclusion, their sheer number of applicants forces them to continuously negotiate both premises for and actual exclusion decisions. By looking at a particularly public membership negotiation process at the company Google, we thus investigate the...

Editorial Die aktuelle Covid-19-Pandemie zeigt uns, dass fast nichts mehr ist wie vorher. Menschen müssen in ihren Wohnungen und Häusern bleiben, falls sie nicht obdachlos sind, um sich vor Ansteckung mit dem Virus zu schützen. Viele wirtschaftliche Sektoren mussten ihre Betriebe schließen, die Arbeitslosigkeit nimmt in einem noch nie dagewesenen T...

Nachdem die niederösterreichischen Grünen sich für ein Wahlvideo bei Star Wars bedienten, schlägt Disney jetzt mit dem Copyright-Schwert zurück.

Eine zeitgemäße, öffentlich-rechtliche Medienplattform sollte jenseits der bestehenden Rundfunkanstalten etwa Inhalte kuratieren, Algorithmen entwickeln und Innovationen fördern. Ein gemeinsam mit Christoph Bieber und Jörg Müller-Lietzkow verfasstes Impulspapier skizziert die Eckpunkte einer Internetintendanz.

Predatory journals have emerged as an unintended consequence of the Open Access paradigm. Predatory journals only supposedly or very superficially conduct peer review and accept manuscripts within days to skim off publication fees. In this provocation piece, we first explain how predatory journals exploit deficiencies of the traditional peer review...

Recognizing the performative effects of organization and management theory, scholars increasingly not only reflect on these but also come up with approaches that are supposed to be intentionally performative. However, we know little about directions and performative potential of such programmatic approaches. By comparing how the literatures on incl...

Two facets are all but universally present in current works on Open Strategy. First, while being aware of and addressing challenges and dilemmas associated with openness in strategy making (Hautz et al., 2017), increasing openness is mostly perceived as normatively good, as an ideal that should be achieved. […] Second, openness is mostly considered...

Vor dem Hintergrund akademischer Debatten über Wohl und Weh der sogenannten „Sharing Economy“ führt dieser Essay die Unterscheidung zwischen allmende-basierten und markt-basierten Formen von Sharing Economy ein. Mit Hilfe einer von Polanyi inspirierten Perspektive auf diese beiden Typen von Sharing Economy lassen sich in der Folge nicht nur gegenlä...

This study examines how the relationship between competition, cooperation and creativity is shaped by regulatory uncertainty related to intellectual property (IP) rights in knowledge-intensive industries like music and pharma. By focusing on music and patent attorneys as key actors dealing with uncertainty about IP rights, we show that these legal...

This study proposes a theoretical framework for understanding how and why certain memes prevail as a form of political discourse online. Since memes are constantly changing as they spread, drawing inferences from a population of memes as concrete digital artifacts is a pressing challenge for researchers. This article argues that meme selection and...

Die veröffentlichten Beiträge im Jahr 2017 zeichnen sich durch eine große inhaltliche und disziplinäre Breite bei einem gleichzeitig starken Fokus auf zentrale gesellschaftliche Herausforderungen aus. Die thematische Vielfalt reicht von der Rolle von Klein-und Mittelunternehmen im politischen Kampf um TTIP, syrischen Aktivistinnen im Bürgerkrieg, S...

A growing number of organizations subscribe to ideals of openness in areas such as innovation or strategy-making, supported by digital technologies and fuelled by promises of better outcomes and increased legitimacy. However, by applying a relational lens of inclusion and exclusion, we argue that, paradoxically, certain forms of closure may be nece...

Transparency is in vogue, yet it is often used as an umbrella concept for a wide array of phenomena. More focused concepts are needed to understand the form and function of different phenomena of visibility. In this article, the authors define organizational transparency as systematic disclosure programs that meet the information needs of other act...

„OER“ hat sich in den letzten Jahren, auch im deutschsprachigen Raum, als Abkürzung für „Open Educational Resources“ (engl. für offene Bildungsressourcen) etabliert. OER-Schulbücher bieten unter anderem die Möglichkeit der rechtssicheren Nutzung, des kostenlosen Zugangs auf die digitale Version sowie die Möglichkeit der Modifikation und Wiederveröf...

Die Studie richtet sich an die (Bildungs-)Politik in NRW und entwirft Handlungsszenarien zur Förderung von Schulbüchern unter freier Lizenz (Open Educational Resources, OER). Der Fokus der Studie liegt auf der (sozio-)ökonomischen Bildung an Schulen in NRW und zwei ihrer akuten Probleme: Der zunehmende "Remix" digitaler Lehrmaterialien führt zu wac...

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 Creativ...

In the wake of new digital technologies, organizations rely increasingly on contributions by external actors to innovate or even to fulfill their core tasks, including strategy-making processes. These external actors may take the form of crowds, where actors are isolated and dispersed, or of communities, where these actors are related and self-iden...

This paper presents a systematic analysis of the similarities and differences between the fields of open innovation and open strategy. In particular, we examine the concept of openness from a communication-centered perspective and compare processes of open innovation and open strategy with regard to the openness they exhibit. By distinguishing betw...

Nach einer ersten Phase des Hypes rund um (vermeintliche) Potentiale von „Sharing Economy“ ist mittlerweile Ernüchterung eingekehrt. Proteste gegen Mobilitätsplattformen wie Uber und der Boom von AirBnB in Gegenden mit knappem Wohnraum lassen die Skepsis gegenüber den Versprechen der Sharing Economy wachsen.

Financialization–the increasing relevance of financial markets, financial actors and financial logics–and the related rise of originate-to-distribute-cycles in the mortgage industry have been considered key explanations for the emergence of financial crises. Analyzing a case study in the European real estate industry, we show how actors strategical...

In der ersten Ausgabe des Jahres liefern die HerausgeberInnen einen Blick hinter die Kulissen von Momentum Quarterly und blicken zurück auf das vergangene sowie voraus auf das kommende Jahr.

While previous open strategy studies have acknowledged open strategy's function as an impression management instrument, their focus has mostly been on short episodes. The impression management literature, meanwhile, pays openness scant attention. By studying how new ventures engage in open strategy-making, we track how open strategy-making and resp...

In this paper we compare the emerging field of open strategy to the established field of open innovation in order to facilitate their cross-fertilisation both in research and practice. Taking a communication-centred perspective, we argue that in both fields ‘openness’ concerns opening-up the communication process towards previously excluded individ...

This paper examines how fluid social collectives, where membership is latent, contested, or unclear, achieve “organizationality”, that is, how they achieve organizational identity and actorhood. Drawing on the “communicative constitution of organizations” perspective, we argue that the organizationality of a social collective is accomplished throug...

By increasing transparency in corporate strategy-making, open strategy approaches potentially limit possibilities to tailor respective information to specific audiences. Taking an impression management perspective in this paper, we explore why and how new firms use open-strategy making to establish their position in the marketplace. Empirically, we...

In seiner „Theorie der Gerechtigkeit“ erklärt John Rawls individuelle Freiheit zum zentralen normativen Orientierungskriterium und zum relevanten Maßstab für die Gestaltung einer gerechten Gesellschaft. Diese Betonung individueller Freiheit verleitet dabei so manche Kommentatorinnen und Kommentatoren dazu, Rawls als Vertreter eines ökonomischen Lib...

Deutschland war in Sachen OER Spätstarter und ist verglichen mit Ländern wie den USA immer noch Nachzügler. Dennoch ist seit gut drei Jahren eine gestiegene Dynamik in der deutschen OER-Debatte zu beobachten, die inzwischen auch den Bundestag erreicht hat: Im Haushalt des laufenden Jahres 2015 sind erstmals explizit Gelder für OER eingeplant. Vor a...

While open innovation is an established field, open strategy is on the verge of recognition as a newly emerging empirical research phenomenon. Taking a communication perspective, we introduce a framework that distinguishes between two different dimensions of openness: sharing information with external participants and audiences, and receiving a bro...

Most research on organizational identity tends to adopt an essentialist perspective, usually differentiating between an organization’s identity, which is constructed internally by the organization’s members, and image, which is constructed by external actors. However, an essentialist view on identity does not capture adequately more fluid organizat...

Alongside macro-institutional perspectives on the recent global financial crisis, organizational research is increasingly concerned with the rise of finance and seeks to unravel the intentionality of financialized forms of strategy-making. In this paper we add to these debates by exploring the relations between valuation and accounting practices. I...

we study how event organizers with an eye towards shaping the evolution of organizational fields enact a situation of disruption in germany's popular music industry. we find that the organizers of three new industry event series experimented with alternative event formats, modeled alternative value chains, and embedded events regionally to stage al...

Letzte Woche entschied der EuGH, dass Bibliotheken Bücher digitalisieren, auf Leseplätzen anbieten und auch den zumindest teilweisen Download ermöglichen dürfen (siehe auch “Lesen leicht gemacht“). Mit diesem Urteil ist aber die digitale Bibliothekswelt keineswegs in Ordnung – und nicht alle Bibliotheken profitieren gleichermaßen davon. Warum das s...

Öffentliche Institutionen wie Städte und Gemeinden müssen sich zunehmend mit der Frage des offenen Zugangs zu digitalen Werken auseinandersetzen, insbesondere deshalb, weil digitale Gemeingüter immer mehr an Bedeutung gewinnen. Vor dem Hintergrund dieser Entwicklung wird in diesem Beitrag die Freigabe öffentlicher Archive und Datenbanken im Bereich...

Die Bewegung für offenen Zugang zu Lehr- und Lernunterlagen (Open Educational Ressources, OER) ist getragen von der Idee, dass neue digitale Technologien mehr ermöglichen – und erfordern – als die bloße Digitalisierung von Schul- und Lehrbüchern. Organisationen wie die UNESCO, die OECD und zahlreiche Bildungseinrichtungen auf der ganzen Welt sehen...

This panel will discuss tendencies promoting more open strategizing processes in a variety of contexts. Openness here refers both to greater transparency (internal and external), and to wider inclusion of stakeholders (internal and external). Panelists will draw on their empirical research across a range of sectors and types of organizations, inclu...

In the literature on different forms of online collaboration, a growing variety of empirical phenomena is subsumed under labels such as “crowdsourcing” or “community”. Defining online collaboration as a form of organizing self-selected actors leading to a joint outcome, we try to clarify these concepts in form of a three-dimensional continuum. On o...

Based on a conception of strategy as a practice and theoretical arguments related to ‘open strategy’, this paper analyzes six cases of open strategy initiatives situated in two transnational non-profit organizations (Wikimedia and Creative Commons). With regard to openness, we look specifically at the inclusion of external actors in strategy-making...

Research has shown the importance of a functioning governance system for the success of peer production communities. It particularly highlights the role of human coordination and communication within the governance regime. In this article, we extend this line of research by differentiating two categories of governance mechanisms. The first category...

We argue that the main reason for the prevailing dissent in path dependence research methods is the futile attempt to capture “path dependence as a whole” within either a single-method research design or a single all-encompassing theoretical mechanism. By delineating two conceptual building blocks, path creation/emergence and positive feedback/lock...

Inspired by new digital technologies, diverse actors in cultural and creative industries propagate conflicting visions of how to adequately innovate – or rather preserve and strictly enforce – copyright-related business models, which has resulted in substantial amounts of regulatory uncertainty. Looking at a decade of regulatory discourse at indust...

Most research on organizational identity tends to take an essentialist perspective, differentiating between an identity construed internally by members of the organization and an image construed by external actors. However, the duality of identity and image struggles with capturing more fluid, open, or partial organizational arrangements, where it...

Pluralism is a key term in the current discourse in heterodox economics, emphasizing the need for greater theoretical integration and institutional cooperation of different economic traditions. However, both the nature of pluralism and the concrete role ascribed to pluralist thinking for the development of economics have been somewhat contested, po...

In this paper we analyse discursive struggles over what is referred to as legal and illegal user practices in the internet as an outcome of regulatory uncertainty. The latter, in turn, is examined in the context of a multi-layered transnational copyright regime characterised by three features: the absence of an universally recognized single authori...

Implementing rules as a means of governance represents the attempt to replace fundamental uncertainty with regulatory uncertainty and thereby coordinate the conduct of different actors. One type of regulatory uncertainty is related to the ambiguities inherent in any rule, which, at least partially thwart the attempt to reduce uncertainty. Looking a...

While many heterodox economic scholars hope for a paradigmatic change in economics due to the great financial crisis, this paper emphasizes that path-dependent elements and institutional factors within the economic community constitute a substantial barrier for paradigmatic change. Focusing on the citation behavior of economists in heterodox journa...

Recent research on organized events highlights their transitory and distinctive nature. In contrast, we reconceptualize events by challenging their singularity. We focus on events as recurring and organized activities in terms of serial singularities, while still acknowledging their individual distinctiveness. Using a case study of Wikimedia, the f...

Research on strategizing focuses primarily on intra-organizational settings at the expense of external contributors. Against this background that this exploratory case study elucidates how strategy is practiced in the case of the Wikimedia organization in a collaborative fashion by literally inviting thousands of globally dispersed volunteers to co...

The concept of path dependence has often been criticized as vague and only narrowly applicable. Although we can find some very refined definitions of the concept, we also find a wide range of empirical phenomena being described as path-dependent. We argue that more detailed accounts of the positive feedback mechanisms that form paths can take path...

Following the agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) intellectual property rights, and more specifically copyright, have become the subject of highly politicized conflicts. In this paper we analyze how these conflicts shifted from the political arena to private standard-setting sites, where two opposing coalition...

After clarifying the notion and different areas of the (digital) "public domain" the paper engages in discussing literature on its relevance for society in general and economic innovation in particular. The effectiveness of the utilization of these abstract potentials however depends on the respective public domain regulation. In this context, the...

Das "grundlegende Problem der Gegenwart" ist Colin Crouchs (2008) Buch "Postdemokratie" zu Folge die "Macht der Wirtschaftseliten". Eine Macht, die sich auf vielfältigste Weise manifestiert: als Verhandlungsmacht transnationaler Konzerne gegenüber Regierungen wenn es um Verlagerung von Produktionsstandorten geht; als Expertenmacht wirtschaftsnaher...

After clarifying the notion and different areas of the (digital) "public domain" – specifically with reference to related terms such as public goods and (anti-)commons –, the paper engages in discussing literature on its relevance for society in general and economic innovation in particular. For one, the public domain is not only inherently relevan...

In this paper we investigate the management of the relationship between formalized network organizations and informal digital communities by comparing the cases of Wikimedia and Creative Commons. Both cases are exemplary for the growing importance of contributions from communities external to organizations for the latter's proper service provision....

Transnational communities are social groups that emerge from mutual interaction across national boundaries, oriented around a common project or 'imagined' identity. This common project or identity is constructed and sustained through the active engagement and involvement of at least some of its members. Such communities can overlap in different way...

Traditional regulation of copyright has recently been criticized from two opposing angles: While copyright holders and industries bemoan insufficient protection of copyrighted material in the digital era of lossless copying and file-sharing, a diverse coalition of dissident copyright lawyers, artists and activists claims that the prevalent copyrigh...

Addressing the question why Economics as a discipline is not subject to evolutive processes itself, we explain the paradigmatical dominance of neoclassical theories in Economics as a path dependent process. Recognizing economics as "locked into neoclassical thinking," we first identify three positive feedback mechanisms leading to strong barriers t...

First paragraph Mit dem Ausbruch der größten Wirtschaftskrise seit den 1930er Jahren sehen manche, insbesondere heterodoxe Ökonominnen und Ökonomen, auch bereits das Ende der neoklassischen Vorherrschaft im Bereich ökonomischer Forschung und Lehre dräuen. Wie schon vor 1930 hat die herrschende volkswirtschaftliche Lehre die Krise nicht nur nicht vo...

Only recently researchers from international relations (IR) and organization studies (OS) have begun to reciprocally recognize each other's works on transnational governance processes. Both sides, however, mostly focus a priori on one type of organization (e.g. international) or regulation (e.g. private or public) only. Using organization and socia...