Call for Papers

In the last century, organized economic activities have created significant financial wealth for some at enormous costs to nature and societies. Prior approaches to tackling the harmful impact of such economic activities often take a risk mitigation lens wherein organizations simply seek to ‘lessen the harm’ from their activities to nature and societies relative to the past. However, lessening harm from economic activities will not repair past damage that has pushed the Earth beyond several planetary thresholds important to sustain life. Instead, organizations must ‘do good’ in the world by innovating for desirable futures, for instance, by developing solutions such as capturing and storing carbon from the atmosphere.
 
Desirable futures through innovation inevitably brings time into consideration. While this is evident, it remains an under-researched topic. Accordingly, in this sub-theme, we invite scholars to explore how a temporal lens can bring an alternative approach to better understand the socio-ecological relations and provide new ways for organizations to innovate for desirable futures. Indeed, numerous scholars have called for a temporal lens to be applied to sustainability (e.g., Garud & Gehman, 2012; Slawinski & Bansal, 2015; Wright & Nyberg, 2017) and innovation (e.g., Bansal & Grewatsch, 2020; Kumaraswamy, Garud & Ansari, 2018). Their and others’ work highlights the presence of multiple temporal issues that generate challenges for navigating our ways to a sustainable future. First, materials and technologies may inhere different temporal rhythms or structures, which leads to asynchrony and diachrony (Garud & Gehman, 2012). Second, desirable futures may require solutions including technologies and production methods that are yet unknown or have yet to be developed. Third, desirable futures may require connecting processes with different temporal perspectives, e.g., the short and long term (Slawinski & Bansal, 2015) or past, present, and future (Kim, Bansal & Haugh, 2019). For instance, organizations may use the past as a generative resource to co-create forward thereby making imagined futures actionable in the present (Garud, Kumaraswamy & Karnøe, 2010). Fourth, desirable futures may require organizations to engage in new forms of collaboration between entities with different temporal frames (George, Howard-Grenville, Joshi & Tihanyi, 2016; Pinkse & Kolk, 2012), e.g., across companies, universities, startups, and even competitors (Bowen, Bansal & Slawinski, 2018).
 
This sub-theme is part of the EGOS Standing Working (SWG) 10 on “Organizing Desirable Futures: Sustainable Transformation, Impactful Scholarship & Grand Challenges” which aims to provide a platform for scholars to develop new ways of organizing desirable futures, uniting various research streams and traditions. The sub-theme aims to bring together submissions from a variety of theoretical, empirical, and methodological approaches to innovating for desirable futures, including novel forms of presentation, such as art-based or design-oriented approaches. Consistent with EGOS’ general theme “Crossroads for Organizations: Time, Space, and People”, we invite participants to explore the intersections among the topics of innovation, sustainability, and time. In particular, we invite scholars to shed light on the “multiple temporal rhythms and experiences” generating temporal complexity (Garud, Tuertscher, & Van de Ven, 2013: 795), the synergies between different temporal perspectives (Slawinski & Bansal, 2012), and the dynamic and ongoing social processes (Feuls, 2018) in undertaking innovations for desirable futures.
 
With this focus, the intersection of innovation, sustainability, and time can be explored from a variety of perspectives, including (but not limited to) the list below:

• What are innovations – e.g., products, processes, technologies, platforms? How might we understand their emergence, evolution, and transformation? How might we introduce sustainability into creative destruction processes that have so far informed technological change?

• What is the role of imagination in innovating for desirable futures (Gümüsay & Reinecke, 2021)? What roles do utopia and dystopia play in spurring innovating? Do utopia and dystopia constrain or facilitate innovations for desirable futures?

• How do actors not only imagine desirable futures but actualize them in the present? How do actors translate desirable futures into innovations (Hernes & Schultz, 2020)? What roles do prototyping, experimentation, and piloting play?

• What are the mechanisms to further actors’ commitment to creating desirable futures, e.g., becoming net positive? Is it possible that furthering such commitments can lead to an escalation of commitment to failing courses of action?

• How can design approaches to innovation inform sustainability (Romme & Holmström, 2023)? How can design science support organizations in managing and organizing with nature? What is the intersection of science-based approaches and design-based approaches in innovating for desirable futures?

• How do different concepts of time advance our understanding/theorizing of innovations for desirable and sustainable futures? What are the temporal rhythms, structures, orientations, and perspectives in socio-ecological relations? How might asynchronies and diachronies be managed through notions of migration pathways (Garud & Gehman, 2012)?

• How do multiple temporalities such as multiple time horizons complement one another through mutual interplay (Schultz & Hernes, 2020)?

• How do actors deal with the unknowability and uncertainty of the future when innovating for desirable futures?

• What is the role of the past in innovating for desirable futures (Garud et al., 2010)? How do actors make use of the past in creating desirable futures?

• How can we expand our ways of knowing that can innovate for and co-create desirable futures (Sharma & Bansal, 2020)?

• What are the methodological challenges (Feuls, Plotnikof & Stjerne, 2022) when studying the role of time in innovating for desirable futures? How can we further develop our methodological practices to study innovations for desirable futures?
   

References

• Bansal, P., & Grewatsch, S. (2020): “The unsustainable truth about the stage-gate new product innovation process.” Innovation, 22 (3), 217–227.
• Bowen, F., Bansal, P., & Slawinski, N. (2018): “Scale matters: The scale of environmental issues in corporate collective action.” Strategic Management Journal, 39, 1411–1436.
• Feuls, M. (2018): “Understanding culinary innovation as relational: Insights from Tarde's relational sociology.” Creativity and Innovation Management, 27 (2), 161–168.
• Feuls, M., Plotnikof, M., & Stjerne, I. (2022): “Timely Methods: A Methodological Agenda for Researching the Temporal in Organizing.” Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, 18 (1), 102–122.
• Garud, R., & Gehman, J. (2012): “Metatheoretical Perspectives on Sustainability Journeys: Evolutionary, Relational and Durational.” Research Policy, 41 (6), 980–995.
• Garud, R., Kumaraswamy, A., & Karnøe, P. (2010): “Path Dependence or Path Creation?” Journal of Management Studies, 47 (4), 760–774.
• Garud, R., Tuertscher, P., & Van de Ven, A.H. (2013): “Perspectives on Innovation Processes.” Academy of Management Annals, 7 (1), 775–819.
• George, G., Howard-Grenville, J., Joshi, A., & Tihanyi, L. (2016): “Understanding and Tackling Societal Grand Challenges through Management Research.” Academy of Management Journal, 59 (6), 1880–1895.
• Gümüsay, A.A., & Reinecke, J. (2021): “Researching for Desirable Futures: From Real Utopias to Imagining Alternatives.” Journal of Management Studies, 59 (1), 236–242.
• Hernes, T., & Schultz, M. (2020): “Translating the Distant into the Present: How actors address distant past and future events through situated activity.” Organization Theory, 1 (1), https://doi.org/10.1177/2631787719900999.
• Kim, A., Bansal, P., & Haugh, H. (2019): “No Time Like the Present: How a Present Time Perspective Can Foster Sustainable Development.” Academy of Management Journal, 62 (2), 607–634.
• Kumaraswamy, A., Garud, R., & Ansari, S. (2018): “Perspectives on Disruptive Innovations.” Journal of Management Studies, 55 (7), 1025–1042.
• Pinkse, J., & Kolk, A. (2012): “Addressing the Climate Change—Sustainable Development Nexus: The Role of Multistakeholder Partnerships.” Business & Society, 51 (1), 176–210.
• Romme, A.G.L., & Holmström, J. (2023): “From theories to tools: Calling for research on technological innovation informed by design science.” Technovation, 121, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.technovation.2023.102692.
• Schultz, M., & Hernes, T. (2020): “Temporal interplay between strategy and identity: Punctuated, subsumed and sustained modes.” Strategic Organization, 18 (1), 106–135.
• Sharma, G., & Bansal, T. (2020): “Cocreating Rigorous and Relevant Knowledge.” Academy of Management Journal, 63 (2), 386–410.
• Slawinski, N., & Bansal, P. (2012): “A Matter of Time: The Temporal Perspectives of Organizational Responses to Climate Change.” Organization Studies, 33 (11), 1537–1563.
• Slawinski, N., & Bansal, P. (2015): “Short on Time: Intertemporal Tensions in Business Sustainability.” Organization Science, 26 (2), 531–549.
• Wright, C., & Nyberg, D. (2017): “An Inconvenient Truth: How Organizations Translate Climate Change into Business as Usual.” Academy of Management Journal, 60 (5), 1633–1661.
•