My blogposting activity is lagging. So here is another summary:

Have joined LMU Munich and work with a wonderful team at the Professorship of Innovation, Entrepreneurship & Sustainability as well as the LMU Innovation & Entrepreneurship Center.

Three publications I’d like to mention are on resilience, digitalization & sustainability, religion and entrepreneurship, and management task forces.

A lot is also happening on futures including a Call for Papers for a special issue in Organization Studies on Utopias-Dystopias as sources of organizations and organizing, activities by our EGOS Standing Working Group, and multiple symposia and workshops at AOM including on organizational imaginaries, impact measurement and digital organizing.

Lastly, I’d also like to mention a related BMBF project: The Impact Measurement and Valuation Lab (IMV-Lab) research project explores the impact measurement and valuation potential for social innovations. The project focuses on the assessment, critical reflection and empirical employment of approaches for measuring ecological and social factors. The objective is to develop and apply a set of instruments for measuring the ecological and social impact of social innovations.

And we have also just started a project on “Transformative Skills for Sustainability” and finished a very large project on “Sustainability, Entrepreneurship and Global Digital Transformation“.

I hope the links offer a pathway into these topics.

So there were no blogposts in 2022. It’s been hectic. Here are a few items:

I had joined the University of Cambridge as a Visiting Fellow, specifically as a Research Fellow at Cambridge Judge Business School, Visiting Associate at Hughes Hall, and Visiting Scholar at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. My research focused on AI, Grand Challenges, and the Future of Organizing.

There were a couple of exciting publications including a study on AI, entrepreneurship & society with a quick overview on our blog, a brief piece on the future of work, a chapter on sustainable business and an article on organizations, institutions and war with a related open access lecture here, an article on platforms, and a whole open access volume on grand challenges. Please find more here.

We also got some awards including the European Management Review best paper award for a piece on contextual expertise, new funding for projects around digital organizing and organized multiple events on the twin transitions/transformations digitalization & sustainability. Let me stop here. I was more thorough with updates throughout the year on Linkedin.

New review of the book “The Society of Singularities” by Andreas Reckwitz published in Organization Studies.

“Reckwitz offers a grand social theory of late modernity. His quest is to comprehend and conceptualize the social present. The gist of the book’s argument is that in modernity a societal structural transformation has occurred: the societal logic of the particular has taken precedence over the logic of the general. Reckwitz denotes the distinctive character, which is neither changeable nor comparable, as singularity. Both individuals and collectives, such as groups, organizations, or social movements, may seek exceptionalism. We curate and perform our lives and strive for authenticity, attraction, and positive valuation to generate short-term affective experience and long-term cultural value. This fits squarely with core organization studies concerns and arenas of attention of ‘organizations, organizing and the organized in and between societies’ and has the potential to shape organization theories’ depiction and prediction of social reality.”Unfortunately, wonderful comments by Andreas Reckwitz himself, Daniel Geiger and Oskar Piegsa had to be taken out during the review process. So I’d like to share them here:

Andreas Reckwitz: “The motive of my book was to clarify which consequences the reversal of a phenomenon at the margin into a dominant structure has in society. What happens if the orientation towards the singular, the extraordinary, the authentic – which in classical, industrial modernity was a side-phenomena – turns in late-modernity into a structure everything and everybody strives for and expects?”

Daniel Geiger: “For me this book is a perfect example to prove the analytical richness and explanatory power of a practice lens for studying organizations, the organized and societies. Reckwitz manages to connect the texture of different practices which cannot be studied in isolation – something that is often forgotten in recent practice-based studies. The idea of singularization and the valorization practices that are practiced in economics, culture, and life-stiles have a great potential to explain late modern societies. For me the book holds up a mirror to my own life. In a sense I would argue it is the new “Social Systems” (Luhmann, 1995) for the 21st century.”

Oskar Piegsa: “In Reckwitz I discovered quite a few theories that have been floating around in journalism and in the humanities in recent years. I found traces of David Brooks’ (2000) bourgeois bohemians and of Boltanski and Chiapello’s (1999) ‘Le nouvel Ésprit du Capitalisme’, to name only two. This is not to suggest his work is a meta-study or epigonal. ‘Singularities’ is highly original and its greatest purpose is in providing a grand theory that seems to explain a lot of what is happening today in culture and society. Where others described parts of contemporary culture, Reckwitz tackles the whole thing, all of it. However, I wonder if Reckwitz doesn’t overestimate the value of narrative, originality, and creative work. He argues that every college graduate today works in some way creatively, adding immaterial value to material things. I doubt that. And I’m afraid that categories such as ‘creative work’ or ‘cultural industries’ will lose their descriptive value if we apply them to, well, everything.”