@bout time seminar and OT@IOA seminar with Jörg Sydow

Recently, we had the pleasure and privilege to welcome Jörg Sydow at COT and IOA. Jörg Sydow is a leading organizational scholar, with wide impact in the field. He is a proliferous writer, has been on the editorial board of many top journals, and received several honors throughout his career, including an EGOS Honorary Member. While in Copenhagen, Jörg has given two talks.
 
OT@IOA lecture with Jörg Sydow
With the provocative title: When practices control practitioners, Jörg presented his work on self-reinforcement cycles (like escalation of commitment and path dependence) “in vivo and in situ” by connecting integrating self-reinforcing dynamics into practice-based theorizing. His work opened a broader discussion and closer look at a life lived forward, where outcomes are necessarily uncertain, and practitioners can always choose to act differently. Tor Hernes kicked-off the conversation, extending some of the notions on self-reinforcing processes and their myriad interfaces with temporality. Participants then embarked on a rich conversation about self-reinforcing practices of e.g. learning, forgetting, destroying and the like in organizational life.
 
@bout time seminar with Jörg Sydow
On 8.11 we had the pleasure to host a seminar with Jörg Sydow about temporary organizing and practices involved in creating semi-permanent structures out of the temporary organizations. His talk started by contextualizing temporary organizations as an increasingly important field of organization studies, not least with respect to the dimension of time. He then introduced a practice-based understanding of temporary organizing and explored the interplay of the temporary and the “permanent” based on his former studies of project networks (in the television industry) and a more recent study of emergency response. The talk stimulated a rich conversation about time, the temporariness in all forms of organizing, among many other topics.