432: Seeing Anew: Studying Organization During Social Transformation (18233)

Current transformations in capitalism, such as digitization and climate change, pose fundamental challenges to the categories of observation that have been used in studying management and business: firm, employee, industry, market, performance (Davis and DeWitt, 2022; Bansal and Desjarine, 2014). How might management scholars study business in a moment when such basic building blocks of managerial research are contested? This PDW draws on history to help participants develop creative ways to observe and study transformations in business today. During the first part of the PDW, the panelists present a series of commentaries on history as both an approach for thinking about transformations and a set of methods for studying them. We highlight that transformation involves not just change or evolution but the need to see the world in a fresh light (Lubinski et al, 2024) and we point to specific historical examples of socioeconomic transformation and how they unfolded. We also discuss the value of specific methods (Wadhwani and Sorensen, 2023; Hargadon and Wadhwani, 2023) for studying transformations over time and consider their application to transformations in business today. During the second part, participants will have the opportunity to creatively apply these ideas in breakout groups devoted to five specific categories under contestation and transformation today: work, firm, industry, market, and performance.