As a field of research, organization studies is interdisciplinary, even eclectic, favoring multiple objects, methods, and levels of analysis. Yet, over time, it appears that some of the disciplines involved in this field have grown increasingly unaware of one another. Such is the case for studies and research dealing with public policymaking, public administration, and political regimes. While having contributed in a decisive manner to the emergence of knowledge about social organizations (authors like Weber, Selznick, Blau, Lipset, March, Crozier, Mayntz and others), their influence seems to have declined somehow in the last twenty years. Such is also the case for business administration and management focused knowledge. While playing today a major when not hegemonic role, it may underestimate what to learn from public organization and organizing research, and not address any longer fundamental issues of its core domain. The scientific agendaThis call for papers wishes to break down these disciplinary silos, by putting the emphasis on the reconfiguration of knowledge frontiers and research agendas between public administration, policy making, and organization studies, as well as between public, non-profit and business organizations and organizing. To this extent, we invite theoretical and empirical papers, welcoming those that are situated in diverse geographies and disciplinary traditions, and are exploring knowledge frontiers.• Is cross-fertilization still relevant between organization study perspectives and public phenomena studies? • What could perspectives dealing with the public sector and public affairs still learn from research on profit and non-profit organizations, and vice-versa? Indicative, but not exhaustive, topic areasPublic administration and public policy are themselves interdisciplinary fields that interrelate with organizations studies in very diverse forms.

No abstract

No abstract

Since the late 1990s social science-based studies have allocated much less attention to public organizations. Based on the sixth Organization Studies summer workshop, this introductory paper suggests a diagnosis of such a decline as well as a research agenda. It lists some fundamental issues still to be explored such as publicness and governance. It also considers how social science-based organizational knowledge might be extended to various empirical objects and fields in public domains and set-ups such as inter-organizational arrangements, hybrid organizations, multi-stakeholder arenas, hybrid organizing, and transnationalization processes, that usually are covered by scholars -economists, historians, anthropologists, management academics, etc. -who are not using organizational theory lenses.

Standards have become an important object of investigation in social science and STS scholars have called for a more systematic program of research to study standards or standardization (Busch 2011;Timmermans and Epstein 2010). In this considering concepts paper, we engage with their program for a sociology of standards and propose a new way to think about standards and standardization as "spaces of diversity" so as to push our thinking forward about how standards, standardization and innovation processes are linked. We consider standardization as the dynamic interaction in three spaces (standards in the making, standards in action, and standards in circulation) where diversity reemerges only to be tentatively reduced or limited through new rounds of standard setting. We illustrate how diversity is an integral part of standardization with the example of the Rainforest Alliance standard for tea production as it circulated from Costa Rica to Kenya, where it was made and put into action and then circulated again to other African, Asian, and Latin American countries. We end with a proposition for future research on standards to address these other spaces of standards as loci of standardization and innovation.