Advancing the Science of Organizations: Work and workshops coordinated with the CASBS Summer Institute on Organizations and Their Effectiveness

Organizations are all around us: not just firms, plants, and work groups, but also hospitals, schools, and governments. Given such a broad domain, a huge fraction of economic activity, as well as much political and social activity, is undertaken as organized activity. One might think, then, that academics would be actively studying the science of organizations and their effectiveness.

To some extent, this is true, but the field is badly fragmented: different disciplines operate mostly in isolation; many professional schools focus on only their own kind of organization (e.g., hospitals, schools, public agencies, businesses). Meanwhile, social-science departments often regard the science of organizations as outside their purview, yet doctoral training in professional schools sometimes lacks the depth available in social-science departments.

To better respond to this situation, this project convenes a series of workshops and multi-disciplinary collaborations to advance the science of organizations and imagine its future directions.

These workshops will engage the network and expertise already shaped by the four Summer Institutes on “Organizations and Their Effectiveness” at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University, co-directed by Robert Gibbons (MIT) and Woody Powell (Stanford University). This network includes young, problem-solving scholars researching organizational effectiveness from a wide range of disciplines (e.g., communications, economics, education, management, political science, public policy, social psychology, and sociology) and in the contexts of very different kinds of organizations (e.g, firms, government agencies, hospitals, courts, churches, schools, police departments, and social movements).

This group is well positioned not only to help imagine but also to help implement the future of the science of organizations. Participants will be assigned into small, multi-disciplinary teams and presented with the question of how NSF might continue to advance and fund the science of organization. The teams will discuss the ecosystem of research funding for organizational science, including government agencies such as the NSF, major foundations and philanthropies, and university centers.

After identifying areas of consensus and disagreement, participants will collaborate on strategies that warrant further elaboration and synthesize these recommendations. In this way, these workshops seek two related objectives: to enlist young experts in imagining the future of the science of organizations; and to cultivate potential leaders and collaborators in implementing this future.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.