Openness as Organizing Principle: Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

‘Openness’ has become an organizational leitmotif of our time, spreading across a growing set of organizational domains. However, discussions within these specialized domains (e.g. open data, open government or open innovation) treat openness in isolation and specific to the particularities of those domains. The intention of this Special Issue therefore is to foster cross-domain conversations to exchange insights and build cumulative knowledge on openness. To do so, this Introduction to the Special Issue argues that openness should be investigated as a general organizing principle, which we refer to as Open Organizing. Across domains, we define Open Organizing as a dynamic organizing principle along the primary dimension of transparency/opacity and the secondary dimensions of inclusion/exclusion and distributed/concentrated decision rights. As such, Open Organizing raises an overarching problem of design, which results from more specific epistemic, normative and political challenges.

Organizing for Smart City Development: Research at the crossroads. Introduction to the Special Issue

“…Their conceptual framework for urban commoning opens new avenues for understanding how commoning processes foster inclusive and participatory smart city development. This view aligns with organization studies on alternative forms of organizing, such as solidarity economy initiatives (Daskalaki, Fotaki, & Sotiropoulou, 2019) or open strategy processes (Dobusch, Dobusch, & Müller-Seitz, 2019; Splitter, Dobusch, von Krogh, Whittington, & Walgenbach, 2023). By emphasizing the role of commoning in redefining local bureaucracies and countering the enclosure and marketization of cities, the work of Peter and Meyer (2023) resonates with scholars interested in prefigurative organizing (Reinecke, 2018) and resistance against commodification and enclosure (Mumby, Thomas, Martí, & Seidl, 2017).…”

How Orchestration Both Generates and Reduces Polyphony in Narrative Strategy-Making

“…Furthermore, the pattern we reveal helps to understand how such orchestration is likely to play out, thus illuminating what kinds of issues -whether looked at from a more pragmatic or critical perspective -characterize different parts of these processes. By so doing, our analysis underscores the value of further critical thinking in open strategy scholarship (Splitter et al, 2023) -including the appreciation of alternative and critical voices as an inherent part of the processes. The emerging view is that inclusion in open strategy involves combinations of voices that are brought out or silenced in different ways over time in a dynamic of orchestrated control.…”

Open strategizing and accelerated internationalization process in different contexts

“…, 2017), the digital transformation and leading styles (Doeleman et al. , 2022), the strategy tools (Wawarta and Paroutis, 2019), the roles and power, the skills and will, the ethical conditions, the emotions and the challenges of Open Strategy in the internationalization process of new ventures (Spitter et al. , 2023).…”

“…As a final boundary condition, once our study translates one of the first efforts to connect OS and IE literature, many aspects related to Open Strategizing were left behind. Future studies could focus on the dilemmas of Open Strategizing (Hautz et al, 2017), the digital transformation and leading styles (Doeleman et al, 2022), the strategy tools (Wawarta and Paroutis, 2019), the roles and power, the skills and will, the ethical conditions, the emotions and the challenges of Open Strategy in the internationalization process of new ventures (Spitter et al, 2023).…”