Call for Applications

Panelists:
Pablo Fernandez, IAE Business School, Argentina
Daniel Geiger, University of Hamburg, Germany
Sherwat Elwan Ibrahim, American University in Cairo, Egypt
Farah Kodeih, IESEG School of Management, France
Dorothy Mpabanga, University of Botswana
Juliana Rodrigues, Aalto University, Finland
Sabyasachi Sinha, Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow, India

Purpose

This PDW aims to jointly reimagine international conferences and other academic fora to improve scholarly dialogues and exchanges. How can we reorganize conferencing as an academic community to ensure better equal geographic representation and, thus, the exchange of diverse mindsets for innovative and impactful knowledge creation?
 
Academic conferencing – and academic exchange more broadly – remains a challenging feature in the lived experiences of many scholars, especially failing those starting on their scholarly journey without the privileges that universities in Europe or North America routinely grant their academics. In fact, structural and cultural barriers continue to keep scholars from the rest of the World at the margins, as the international relations scholar Debangana Chatterjee aptly articulates in her 2022 post (cf. https://medium.com/international-affairs-blog/how-international-conferences-fail-scholars-from-the-global-south-fbde14e5d1f1). Vestiges of colonialism peek through structural cracks, such as inaccessible locations, hefty registration fees that do not account for income disparities, and humiliating visa regimes that are hard to navigate. Culturally, the resulting minority status, alongside discontinuous attendance in the most central academic dialogue and exchange, hampers the experience of belonging to a community that remains dominated by Western scholars – resulting in suppressed voices and making meaningful relationship-building in academia a Sisyphean task that often must begin anew every time.
 
Statistics echo such experiences and substantiate the lack of (regional) representation at well- known international conferences. Interestingly, and counter the claims of many of its proponents, virtual and hybrid conferencing has changed little in this respect. For instance, although the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management 2022 attracted more than 8,000 attendees (on-site and virtually), more than 75% belonged to North American and European universities (AOM Newsletter, August 24, 2022). African and Asian universities, among others, were clearly underrepresented. Due to this misrepresentation, well-known international conferences are thus mainly catalysts for Western thoughts.
 
While regional management conferences organized by Africa Academy of Management (AFAM) or the Indian Academy of Management are well-established academic fora for local scholars, they attract fewer scholars from other parts of the world. Thus, most conferences remain regional, cultural bubbles in which the integration of diverse and new perspectives from people across the globe is limited. These factors finally affect the ability to translate conference participation into the very outcome that matters: providing an academic forum that can boost innovative and impactful knowledge creation by exchanging diverse mindsets. Hence, an open academic forum is missing where scholars from across the globe can meet at equal eye level and by equal regional representation to discuss and enhance management and organization studies jointly.
 
This PDW aims to establish a discussion platform among interested scholars to jointly brainstorm on redesigning institutional arrangements to improve scholarly dialogue and exchange. The workshop is part of an envisioned long-term project, a tri-continental research workshop jointly organized by the Africa Academy of Management (AFAM), the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS), and the Indian Academy of Management (INDAM).
 

Format

The PDW is divided into four parts.

• In Part 1, the convenors give a brief presentation on the workshop topic and elaborate on the reasons for curating academic fora. They conclude the presentation with open questions that should be addressed to improve institutional arrangements for scholarly debates and exchanges.

• In Part 2, the participants will brainstorm in groups to deepen their ideas for addressing the identified problems about current forms of conferencing.

• In Part 3, each group presents their discussed approaches to the plenary. An open debate should end with a list of specific suggestions and a roadmap that will be collected for future processing.

• In Part 4, finally, a range of diverse scholars representing different regional associations shall reflect in a plenary on unaddressed issues and possible future steps. To ensure accessibility for participants beyond Europe, the workshop shall be run in a hybrid format.

Application

The PDW mainly targets early-career researchers and doctoral students but is also open to more experienced scholars. Everyone interested in this workshop is invited to apply; however, priority will be given to scholars in the earlier stages of their careers.
 
Please submit – via the EGOS website – by April 30, 2024, a single application (.docx or .pdf file) that contains the following information:

• On the cover page, a short letter of application containing full details of name, contact (i.e., postal address, phone, and email), affiliation, and date of PhD completion (if applicable, otherwise stage in your doctoral studies);

• A statement of motivation in which you outline why you consider it valuable to attend the PDW (500–1000 words).

 
We will contact applicants to inform them whether they are accepted for the workshop after April 30, 2024.