Call for Papers
We invite you to join us for the Twenty-Seventh International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations, the annual meeting of the Organization Studies Research Network, taking place in Berlin, Germany and online, held alongside the Creative Bureaucracy Festival.
The Organization Studies Research Network is an established international meeting place for researchers, practitioners, policymakers, public-sector leaders, educators, consultants, designers, and organizational change-makers working across the study and practice of organizations. The conference welcomes proposals that examine organizations not only as formal structures, but as living systems of knowledge, culture, coordination, power, responsibility, and change.
Special Focus + Themes
Can bureaucracy benefit from academic research? Can academia learn from the creativity and ingenuity of bureaucrats? Or do academia and government bureaucracy inhabit fundamentally incommensurable worlds?
Academia and government are often treated as distinct worlds, operating according to different logics, temporalities, and understandings of what matters. Their relationship is frequently framed around the ambition to make research practically relevant, translate knowledge into policy, or bridge the gap between theory and practice. Yet these framings risk reducing a complex relationship to a linear transfer from research to application, with knowledge moving in one direction across the science–policy interface. This raises a more fundamental question: how should we understand the relationship between academic research and the practices through which public problems are defined, policy decisions are made, and collective affairs are governed? This conference invites contributions that rethink the relationship between academia and bureaucratic practice, including the concepts and models through which it is understood.
Connection, coordination, and collaboration offer a useful conceptual language for exploring this relationship. Connection concerns the encounters through which academic research and governance practice come into contact around public problems and policy challenges. It draws attention to whose experiences, questions, and forms of knowledge inform governance, whose remain unheard, and how issues come to be recognized as matters requiring collective attention. Coordination concerns the work of bringing different perspectives, institutional mandates, policy priorities, and practical activities into relation to enable collective action, while avoiding the reduction of diverse forms of expertise to a single framework, set of indicators, or political agenda. Collaboration opens up possibilities for thinking and acting differently together—not simply applying research to existing policy problems, but jointly questioning how these problems are defined, which interests and values shape proposed solutions, and what alternative forms of governance might become possible.
These processes are neither straightforward nor necessarily harmonious. Institutional constraints, power asymmetries, and competing expectations can complicate relationships between academic inquiry and bureaucracy. Research may challenge established policy priorities, while political and administrative imperatives shape which forms of knowledge gain legitimacy and which alternatives are considered feasible. Yet such tensions can also create opportunities to question dominant assumptions and rethink how public problems are understood or how collective decisions are made outside of conventional governance organizations.
This year’s conference seeks to rethink how academic research and governance organizations, particularly public bureaucratic ones, can shape one another, moving beyond the idea that research primarily serves to inform policy or improve decision-making. Rather than treating the difference between academic and bureaucratic worlds as an obstacle to overcome, the conference invites participants to consider how it might become a resource for critical inquiry and the transformation of governance more generally. It examines how encounters between academic and non-academic actors shape the production of knowledge, the framing of public problems, and the possibilities for collective action where bureaucratic organizations are becoming more creative. In doing so, it invites a reconsideration of academia’s role in governance—not simply as a provider of evidence for decision-makers, but as a creative participant in the processes through which public issues are defined, political choices are negotiated, and collective futures are imagined.
We welcome contributions that examine these relationships from theoretical, empirical, methodological, and practical perspectives. Questions of particular interest include:
What kinds of connections enable academic research and governance practice to inform and challenge one another in defining public problems and developing policy responses?
How can coordination bring together different forms of expertise, institutional mandates, and political priorities without obscuring disagreement or reinforcing dominant interests?
Under what conditions can collaboration move beyond the application of research findings to open up alternative ways of framing public problems, making collective decisions, and organizing governance?
Is the distinction between research and practice still a useful way of understanding the relationship between academia and governance? What alternative models might better capture how academic inquiry, policymaking, administration, and other forms of governance practice shape one another?
How do power asymmetries influence whose knowledge counts in governance processes, which problems receive attention, and which policy options become thinkable or politically viable?
What happens when academic and political or administrative temporalities, incentives, and expectations diverge? How might these tensions generate new insights, and when do they undermine meaningful engagement?
How can academic and non-academic actors jointly produce knowledge while navigating competing values, political interests, and different understandings of the public good?
What responsibilities arise when researchers become involved in the governance processes they seek to understand and influence? How can they critically engage with questions of legitimacy, accountability, and the consequences of their involvement?
We welcome contributions in a variety of formats. Rather than conventional academic papers, we encourage interactive workshops, collaborative sessions, and other experimental formats that create opportunities to question established assumptions, explore alternative models of the relationship between research and practice, and put these alternatives into practice. As this year’s conference directly connects with the Creative Bureaucracy Festival, we explicitly invite inventive contributions from public innovation practitioners working both inside and adjacent to government.
We welcome proposals that address organizations as sites of practice and as systems of relation, shaped by people, infrastructures, technologies, cultures, policies, environments, and histories.
- Theme 1: Organizational Cultures, Knowledge, and Change: exploring how organizations create, share, manage, and transform knowledge, culture, identity, leadership, learning, communication, and institutional memory.
- Theme 2: Coordination, Governance, and Public Purpose: examining decision-making, public administration, bureaucracy, policy implementation, institutional trust, accountability, regulation, and the coordination of complex systems.
- Theme 3: Work, Technology, and Organizational Futures: considering digital transformation, AI, platforms, hybrid work, automation, workplace design, labor, skills, innovation, and the changing conditions of organizational life.
- Theme 4: Collaboration, Equity, and Sustainable Systems: addressing cross-sector collaboration, organizational responsibility, inclusion, equity, sustainability, community partnerships, ethical practice, and collective responses to shared social and environmental challenges.
Knowledge Experience and Format
The conference is organized as a hybrid knowledge experience, integrating in-person and online participation within a unified scholarly environment.
For in-person delegates in Berlin, the conference is designed as a human-scale gathering shaped by conversation, shared inquiry, and connection to the city’s wider ecosystem of institutional, cultural, and civic innovation. Held alongside the Creative Bureaucracy Festival, the conference creates opportunities to connect organization research with public-sector creativity, policy practice, administrative imagination, and real-world experiments in institutional change.
For online delegates, the conference is more than a remote viewing option. Accepted proposals become Presentation Pages where presenters share abstracts, media, and supporting materials. Delegates participate through live online sessions, asynchronous engagement, and discussion spaces that remain available before, during, and after the event.
Across both formats, the emphasis is on reciprocal exchange rather than one-way presentation. Whether joining in Berlin or online, participants are part of a shared knowledge environment where ideas can be presented, discussed, revisited, and developed into future collaborations, publications, policy conversations, organizational initiatives, and communities of practice.
Publication Pathways
Presenters are invited to further develop their conference work for possible publication in the peer-reviewed journals of the Organization Studies Research Network:
- The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture, and Change Management: Annual Review
- The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture, and Change Management: Organizational Cultures
- The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture, and Change Management: Organizational Learning
- The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture, and Change Management: Organizational Change
Join Us
We warmly invite you to submit a proposal and join us, either in Berlin or online, for the Twenty-Seventh International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations.
Together, we will examine how organizations are being reshaped by entangled worlds of knowledge, culture, technology, policy, labor, and public responsibility, and how more collaborative and responsive forms of organizational life can be imagined and built.
Sincerely,
Charles Landry, Research Network Chair, Creative Bureaucracy & Civic City in a Nomadic World, United Kingdom
Anke Gruendel, Research Network Chair, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany
Phillip Kalantzis-Cope, Chief Social Scientist, Common Ground Research Networks, United States of America