Call for Submissions

The world is in a state of accelerating political, economic, social, and technological change. Long-standing alliances are fraying, established relationships are being renegotiated, and the arrangements that might replace them remain uncertain. These shifts are unfolding at local, regional, national, and international levels, redetermining the conditions under which organizations operate. Organizations must interpret and respond to this changing world, often with considerable speed and without a clear understanding of the pathway forward.

Organizations are not, however, simply recipients of change. Through the strategies they pursue, technologies they develop and deploy, relationships they forge or abandon, and practices they sustain or challenge, organizations actively determine the environments in which they operate. Their actions change the opportunities and constraints facing others, prompting further responses that may reinforce, redirect, or undermine their original intentions. Therefore, change also emerges through the interplay of organizations, individuals, communities, technologies, and institutions, often across multiple locations and over different time horizons.

In this vein, the Organization Science Winter Conference (OSWC) invites submissions addressing “Organizations in Motion: Processes, Pathways, Uncertainty, and Transformation.” The stakes of these processes are substantial. How organizations respond to changing conditions has consequences for their own performance and survival as well as for workers, communities, and society more broadly. We therefore encourage scholarship that examines not only how organizations change, but also whose interests these changes serve, how their consequences are distributed, how organizational actors understand and enact their responsibilities amid uncertainty, and how the actions they take might reify existing conditions or expand new possibilities for organizational innovation.

We seek innovative, high-quality submissions from junior and senior scholars working across micro, meso, and macro perspectives. We welcome theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions, drawing on qualitative, quantitative, experimental, computational, historical, comparative, and mixed-method approaches. In addition, we strongly encourage participation and research from across the globe. We are interested both in deeply situated research and in work tracing connections across locations, actors, and time periods. Our emphasis is on new work that opens productive questions, challenges established assumptions, and advances understanding of organizations and organizing.

Processes, Pathways, Uncertainty, and Transformation

We invite scholars to engage with the theme broadly and imaginatively. The following areas provide broad guidance on the type of work we seek to receive.

ProcessesHow does organizational change unfold?

How do everyday interactions, routines, decisions, and practices accumulate into consequential organizational developments? How do individuals and groups interpret changing conditions, coordinate responses, and negotiate competing understandings of what should happen next? We welcome research that makes the unfolding of organizational life central to its explanation, including work on the maintenance, repair, and reproduction of arrangements that might otherwise appear stable.

PathwaysWhy do organizations follow different trajectories?

Organizations facing similar conditions may respond in markedly different ways. How do histories, resources, identities, relationships, and prior commitments shape the pathways available to them? When do earlier choices constrain subsequent action, and when can actors create departures from established trajectories? We are interested in research on turning points, sequencing, cumulative processes, and unrealized alternatives, as well as work explaining why organizational paths converge, diverge, or reverse.

UncertaintyHow do organizations act when the future is uncertain?

How do organizational actors make commitments, allocate resources, and coordinate action when outcomes are difficult to anticipate or even imagine? How do they balance demands for speed with the need for learning, deliberation, and responsibility? How might responses to uncertainty reinforce, disrupt, or reimagine existing arrangements among actors, particularly those governing inequality, resource allocation, power, and status? We invite research on how uncertainty is interpreted, experienced, distributed, and managed, as well as how organizational action itself can generate uncertainty for others.

TransformationWhat changes, what persists, and with what consequences?

When do adjustments to practices and relationships amount to more fundamental changes in organizations or organizing? How do structures, identities, technologies, and boundaries become reconfigured, and what remains durable through these transitions? We welcome research on transformation that is intended or unintended, welcomed or contested, generative or destructive.

Submission process for the conference

We invite submissions from scholars at all career stages whose research engages with the conference theme, broadly conceived. Submissions should be 3–5 pages double spaced, inclusive of references, figures, and tables.

The conference program will combine plenary presentations with evening poster sessions, providing opportunities for rigorous scholarly discussion and informal exchange. The program committee will allocate accepted submissions to either plenary or poster sessions. Given the conference’s intentionally intimate format, we can guarantee participation for only one author per accepted submission.

Please submit your proposal by Friday, November 20, 2026 at 11:59 pm PST: submission form. The program committee will communicate decisions by December 18. Registration and accommodation details will be shared with successful applicants at that time.

For questions regarding conference submissions, please contact oswc27.main@gmail.com.

Doctoral students: see the Doctoral Consortium page for its separate application.