Organization Studies Research Network

Organizational knowledge, institutions, publics, and design.

The Network’s themes address who produces organizational knowledge and how it becomes actionable; how institutions adapt and coordinate across scales; the role of publics, alliances, and grassroots experimentation in change; and how design, leadership, and technologies shape temporalities and outcomes of transformation.

Themes & Tensions

Organizational Knowledge

  • Who produces knowledge, and how? What new forms of organizational knowledge exist? How is plural knowledge generated?
  • How do organizations reflect on epistemic limitations or evaluate their limits of knowledge?
  • Whose knowledge is typically excluded, and how can marginalized forms of knowledge become more central to governance?
  • How do knowledge networks function within and across organizations? How is knowledge encoded and formatted? What makes knowledge shareable?
  • How is knowledge made actionable? What forms of intervention do different kinds of knowledge enable?
  • How is success or failure measured in governance experiments? How are these evaluative mechanisms embedded into organizations?
  • What are the organizational limits of pluralizing knowledge? Is knowledge a fundamental cost of organizational learning?

Institutional Structures

  • How do institutions adapt to changing circumstances?
  • How do organizations conceive of and prepare for change?
  • What are the differences in adaptive structures between governmental and non-governmental governance institutions?
  • Which legal and regulatory frameworks enable or constrain adaptation to a constantly changing environment?
  • How do organizations institutionalize? What does institutionalization mean in contexts of rapid change and complexity?
  • On which scales do organizational structures function, and how do they coordinate across these scales? What does this imply at the international, global, or planetary levels?

Publics and Collectivities

  • Where are the boundaries of organizations? What roles do outsiders play in organizational change?
  • What is the proper role of the public in public-sector innovation? How can “publics” become partners in innovation processes?
  • Which networks, clusters, or alliances contribute to enduringly collaborative organizational cultures?
  • Where are the productive links to grassroots-driven change? How can community organizations become governance partners?
  • Which local forms of collective decision-making can serve as exemplars for change management? Can central or federal government institutions become allies of local change?
  • How can organizations coordinate diverse local practices? Can local experiments serve as learning opportunities for state organizations or NGOs?
  • What possibilities exist for organizational allyship between governments and grassroots efforts? Can there be meaningful space for collaboration?

Organizational Design

  • Which possibilities for directed change exist? How does planned organizational design operate in practice?
  • What are the different temporalities of organizational change?
  • What are the histories of organizational design, and which legacies remain influential today?
  • What spillover effects have arisen historically from deliberate organizational design?
  • How do foresight, anticipatory governance, or predictive technologies impact institutional design?
  • How does leadership shape organizational design, and what forms of leadership foster institutional learning?
  • What are sustainable organizational cultures in an era of rapid change? How do different organizations (government, community, NGOs) cope with uncertainty, and what role does institutional learning play in organizational design? How do different learning processes (formal vs. informal learning, training, and education) affect outcomes?
  • How do organizational knowledge cultures influence organizational design?
  • Which procedures or technologies mediate organizational change?

Get Support

Have a question? We’re here to help. Visit the help center to get started.

Support Center

Common Ground Research Networks

University of Illinois Research Park
60 Hazelwood Drive
Champaign, IL 61820 USA

Phone: +1-217-328-0405
Fax: +1-217-328-0435
Email: support@cgnetworks.org

Terms and Conditions

Site Map

2026 Conference

Journals

Books

About

Support

Common Ground’s Knowledge Communities

All content © 2025 Common Ground Research Networks. Built with care by &Phil;.