Call

Our knowledge of organizations is constituted through work and through our understandings of work. Twenty-five years since the call to “bring work back in,” workers and their activities are increasingly central to theories of organizing.

The 2026 Organization Science Winter Conference brings together scholars who examine how the organization and accomplishment of work relate to interactional processes, workplace experiences, institutional dynamics, and technological change. We also invite reflections on the work of doing organizational research in a time of rapid and significant technological and institutional change.

The conference encourages submission of original research that investigates how work and workers inform organization science theory and practice, while also inviting reflections about how the changing conditions of academic labor are transforming the work of organization science and its implications for the future of our field. We welcome research employing a range of methodological approaches across global contexts, and from both contemporary and historical perspectives.

Illustrative but not exhaustive topics of research to be included in the conference are:

Organizing Jobs, Roles and Tasks

Jobs, roles, and tasks are the building blocks of organizational life but how they are structured, differentiated, and connected varies widely across settings and over time. We invite research that examines how organizations allocate tasks, define roles, and construct or contest occupational boundaries. How is work parceled out, combined, or coordinated? How do organizational, technological, and institutional forces shape job structures and task assignments and with what consequences? We especially welcome studies that illuminate the everyday practices, tensions, and negotiations through which jobs and roles are enacted, maintained, or transformed. We encourage papers addressing these questions at any level of analysis (individual, team, and/or organizational).

The Dynamics of Collaboration and Interaction

Through daily interactions and acts of collaboration workers accomplish organizational goals. Understanding these accomplishments depends on studies the behaviors and processes of collaboration, communication, conflict resolution, coordination, routines, and role systems as the means through which knowledge, expertise, and skill are integrated and orchestrated in workplaces. We invite research that examines how work is enacted by individuals and teams within organizations as well as across organizations. Going beyond well-studied settings, we especially encourage attention to remote and hybrid work, work in the public sector, and work in the global south.

The Evolving Experience of Work

How work impacts the experience of workers offers interesting questions as the nature of work is changing. How technologies, structures, processes, policies, and routines impact the day-to-day experience of workers, including among different worker groups, pose important questions for the study of organizations. We invite research that looks at how the worker experience is shaped by the organization context, especially in ways which impact the ultimate success and viability of organizations themselves.

Markets, Institutions, and Intermediaries

Work is embedded in and influenced by the institutional and market contexts in which it unfolds. Markets, whether labor, capital or product, define the demand for skills, drive firm strategy, as well as impact wages and working conditions. Institutions, including legal frameworks, welfare systems, along with educational and training structures, provide norms and rules that govern employment relationships, worker protections and access to opportunities. Intermediaries such as financial institutions, platforms, labor market agencies, certification bodies, trade unions and professional associations mediate access to opportunities, resources, and recognition. We invite research that examines how these forces affect how work is organized, valued, and transformed across different institutional environments and market systems. This includes studies of how platforms and intermediaries impact the structure, meaning, and experience of work. How do they affect access to work, the distribution of rewards, or the construction of legitimacy and expertise? How do financial or legal changes alter job design? How do institutional logics and market pressures jointly influence organizational responses to new forms of labor, employment, and organizing? We welcome work that illuminates the macro-micro linkages through which work is constructed and contested.

Emerging Technologies

As new technologies spanning artificial intelligence, quantum computing, blockchain, and immersive platforms (AR/VR) take root in the workplace, organizations face complex decisions about adaptation, timing, and strategic response. How do emerging technologies reshape work, organizing, innovation, and expertise? We invite research that explores how technologies transform work practices and innovation processes, as well as work that examines the temporal dynamics and the complex processes through which organizations adapt to, resist, or actively shape emerging technological landscapes. This includes how emerging technologies are restructuring task allocation and coordination in digitally-mediated work environments and reshaping innovation ecosystems, R&D, and team partnerships.

Work as Strategy

People have always been core to the design and execution of firm strategy, from boundary of the firm questions such as M& A to the role of culture, operations, executive decision-making, human capital, delegation and control, incentive design, and innovation. As the strategy field has grown to embrace the study of people, there are new opportunities to understand the complementarities between policies around people and the other activities and design decisions of the firm.

The Work of Organization Science in a Changing World

Researchers in the field of organization science have access to a growing range of technologies, empirical settings, and data sources that may change both how we do research and what we study. At the same time universities are under threat, the authority of expertise in societal matters is contested, and managers and firms' demands for new knowledge about organization science are evolving. Research that considers how changing technological and social contexts are transforming the resources and roles of organization scientists across the world is welcome.