Call for Papers

In this sub-theme, we look for new research directions in viewing and understanding organizations and organizing on the basis of improved understandings of universities and innovation systems. We try to render visible taken-for-granted understandings that sustain and reproduce established boundaries in between universities, industry, the government, and others. We seek to problematize and rethink these boundaries and other similar notions and cultural meanings, when extant research has often without question considered one or another of these kinds of organization to be more innovative than the other kinds.

We welcome any contributions in this area and more specifically the following:

1. How have organization studies conceived changes, stability, or both in or across universities and other elements of innovation systems?
2. What kind of responses to the above kind of systemic changes have organization studies identified, described and/or explained at the organizational level?
3. What kind of responses to the above kind of systemic changes have organization studies identified, described and/or explained at the individual or group levels?
4. Has there been development toward convergence or divergence of systems of innovation and universities? Why, how, when?
5. If/when actors in universities and/or in other parts of an innovation system have sought to improve their positions relative to other actors, what kind of strategies and solutions have they used?
6. New forms of inter-organizational collaboration and innovation that have possibly emerged in or around universities?
7. Critical and alternative perspectives. For example, in the Finnish context, any form of innovation has discursively been considered to be about usefulness, something that is plain and simply "works", rather than about glamour or "science in ivory towers". The same discourse has required that scientists identify themselves with challenges of industrial innovation in Finland.