PROS 2019

Digital practices are reshaping work and organisation functions and thus requiring organisational transitions. How do digitalisation processes happen? How can digital practices reshape organisational functions and boundaries? Moreover, the nature, scale, and scope of organisational partnerships has been drastically affected by the rise of platforms in which two types of parties meet and exchange. How does innovation travel in platforms and how are relationships among diverse parties established and transformed? How is boundary work redefined in such changing environments?

In organisational environments where the reliance upon sophisticated algorithms increases and AI applications become more prevalent, who does the work and how does this shift? The distinction between human and technological work blurs, which requires workers, managers, and organisations to adjust. How can we make sense of the growing use of digital platforms and algorithms in organisations? How can we reconceptualise human agency and socio-technical processes as these transformations take place? How might traditional bureaucratic organisations cope with external collaborators and co-producers outside organisational boundaries, and what might be some key implications for administrative practices, organisational routines, and organisational identity?

The last few years have seen the proliferations of new spaces dedicated to work and collaboration be they physical (eg innovation labs, co-working spaces) and/or virtual (eg crowdsourcing communities, online communities) that have greatly affected innovating processes. How do these new spaces of work and innovation emerge and how are they nurtured? Do they necessarily enable open and free exchanges of knowledge and ideas among participants? How do innovation processes unfold virtually and/or physically through these new spaces?

New forms of work have provided flexibility for organisations as well as workers. They have also come with ambivalent trends towards both inclusiveness and exclusion. The expectations of flexible work practices and the associated potentials for uncertainty can come with unanticipated consequences for workers. How do workers react to the expectation of ongoing change and increasingly flexible work practices? How do workers perceive these new ways of working and organising? How are their career paths affected as new careers emerge on the digital landscape?

The widespread availability of digital technologies has impacted organising at all levels, from institutional and competitive dynamics, to firms, to organisation behaviour. Grass-root mobilisation enables the emergence of new social movements (eg Occupy). How is this made possible? How might organising in the digital age be understood by considering multiple and inter-related levels? How may digital practices scale up (or not) and reshape work and organisational functions?

The growing use of digital technologies has also opened new possibilities to collect data (eg digital trace data) and to develop empirical analyses (eg netnographies, innovative social network analyses) that can be particularly illuminating for process researchers. At the same time, this unprecedented access to new data and methods leads to unprecedented ethical and epistemological questions for researchers. How could researchers design original methods that are respectful of people and the phenomena they investigate? How do we redefine human and process research in an age of unmatched access to data and of heightened responsibility for researchers?