Calls for Papers Galore! Including OSWC 2025.
Hi folks. I have updates on conferences and special issues: 1. Winter Conference, 2. Special issue on Psychologically (Un)Safe Climates, and 3. The new special issue call on Remote and Hybrid Work. I hope you submit early and often, but don’t vote early and often. Well. . . maybe that’s not how the saying goes. Just vote and submit early.
The 2025 Org Science Winter Conference in Los Angeles
We now have the formal call for papers ready for the OSWC 2025 in LA scheduled for Feb 10-12 at the Luskin Center at UCLA. The theme, consistent with this year’s celebration of Linda Argote, is on dynamic knowledge in organizations. The theme is intentionally broad, but certainly a huge part of it is the area of organizational (and individual) learning that Linda is famous for (among other things). There is an interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary theme as well, since dynamic knowledge in organizations is studied across a wide variety of fields. So we hope you submit something soon! Typically there is only room for those whose proposals are accepted, and we try to bring in a substantial number of new attendees each year. But you can also request to attend without submitting, although we were not able to accommodate those requests last year due to overwhelming demand. There will be a doctoral consortium as well that students can apply to. So invitations to attend and registration/hotel info will be provided to successful submitters in early November.
The submissions are long abstracts, as is stated in the call, where you’ll also see details on the structure of the conference. Last year we had a huge number of submissions, and the conference in Zurich was a blast. This year will be awesome too, with a gorgeous facility and hopefully nice SoCal weather. The deadline to submit is rather soon, October 20, so fortunately it’s only an abstract. Sorry it’s short notice. I was so excited about Zurich that I got started a bit late on this. OSWC 2026, in Europe, is already in planning. Please see the attached full call, the conference website, and submission links below.
Conference Website (With Call)—Updates coming soon!
Panel Submissions
Individual Submissions
Doctoral Consortium Applications
Special Issue on Psychologically-(Un)Safe Climates: New December 1 Deadline!
The original deadline for this special issue was September 30, and while our submissions are tracking well, we’re realizing that September is when everyone gets hit by the firehose of teaching. So we’ve extended the deadline to December 1 to give people some breathing room. For those of you making the original deadline, we’re evaluating these on a rolling basis, and not limited in space, so your papers or process won’t be affected. If they are accepted, they will still get accepted on the same timescale. I’m still trying to get the date updated on the website, but wanted to get this info out as soon as possible.
New Special Issue Call on Remote and Hybrid Work
We have finalized a call for papers for a new special issue—Remote and Hybrid Work: Transforming People and Organizations in a New Era. Our outstanding editors for this special issue span fields and expertise:
Ellen Ernst Kossek, Purdue University
Brad Alge, Purdue University
Jennifer L. Gibbs, University of California, Santa Barbara
Terri L. Griffith, Simon Fraser University
Sharon Hill, George Washington University
Alan Benson, University of Minnesota (Org Science Senior Editor)
The submission window isn’t until next Spring, but we wanted to get this out to your attention early. The formal call should show up on the Org Science website by next week, but those of you who are SUPER EXCITED, I’ve attached the full call below, and the abbreviated description below that
Submission Window: March 15, 2025- July 15, 2025
Remote and Hybrid Work: Transforming People and Organizations in a New Era
Theme and Objectives
This special issue fosters new theories and policies for modern work practice involving remote and hybrid work in organizations and their multifaceted impacts on workers' lives, within and beyond a workplace and across diverse occupations. Emerging empirical evidence suggests that the growing flexibility of where job tasks are done due to increasing remote (offsite) and hybrid (mix of on & offsite) work – need not harm performance or advancement (Bloom, Han & Liang, 2024). These work arrangements highlight tensions and opportunities to broaden organization science on the growing prevalence of remote and hybrid work by incorporating insights from various disciplines, fields, and levels of analysis. Considering work as a part of life, versus a place to go, or a role separate from one’s life, illuminates new relationships across location, time, connectivity, processes, and employment conditions. This shifting perspective has disparate implications for people, teams, and organizations across widely divergent economic and social contexts. More than ever, the location and timing of work and personal life experiences are coupled with continuing social and technical changes from within and outside the organization (Lee, 2023). This special issue brings together research speaking to the full human experience pertaining to remote and hybrid working varying in extensiveness (Gajendran, Ponnapalli, Wang, & Javalagi, 2024), and geographic locations from home to third places within and across labor markets, economies, communities, and national borders. Research in this special issue will challenge our thinking and expand our understanding of the opportunities and challenges confronting individuals, teams, leaders, and organizations grappling with this transformation of work in the Remote and Hybrid Era (RAH).
In this special issue, we are interested in scholarship from the many disciplines and fields examining remote and hybrid work. This includes, but is not limited to business, cognitive science, communications, computer science, family studies, economics, engineering, entrepreneurship. human resource management, information systems, innovation, labor relations, management, political science, psychology, organizational behavior and theory, sociology, strategic management, technology, and related disciplines and fields. Additionally, we especially encourage, cross-disciplinary papers that provide multiple lenses on remote and hybrid work. We encourage both conceptual papers pushing theory in new directions and rigorously designed and executed empirical papers. We are open to different levels of analysis (individual, team, organization, society/culture), so long as papers are not limited to only the individual level of analysis but also consider other nested contextual influences that have implications for employing organizations. We invite a variety of methods: such as qualitative, quantitative, mixed methods, lab, field, multi-level, longitudinal, experimental, and archival. We welcome papers that integrate multiple levels of analysis, compare multiple stakeholder and/or disciplinary lenses, and examine the possible mixed consequences of remote and hybrid work. Below we list illustrative research questions (not exhaustive) that might be appropriate for this special issue.
Remote and Hybrid Work and Teams (and Social Relationships).
· How are individual and team boundaries, as well as personal and work boundaries, affected by digital transformation?
· What types of remote and hybrid work designs allow for autonomy and flexibility while also combatting social and professional isolation?
· Is remote work inherently isolating?
· How do temporalities change and align for multicultural global teams that communicate electronically?
· How do different configurations of remote and hybrid collaboration differentially influence team dynamics and outcomes?
· How do remote and hybrid work arrangements affect relationships in a blended social environment with frontline workers, leaders, co-workers, customers?
· Can emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality address the reduced social connection in remote and hybrid work?
· How does remote and hybrid work affect team collaboration and innovation
Remote and Hybrid Work and Organizational Culture.
· What role does the formal office, plant or other workplace play in modern and future work?
· Can organizational culture be created when a majority of workers are remote or hybrid?
· How is remote and hybrid work transforming workplace culture and norms?
· How does remote and hybrid work affect collective understanding across organizational stakeholders?
· How do organizations ensure consistency in the organizational acculturation process, including, but not limited to onboarding?
· How do our conceptualizations of time and productivity change as a result of hybrid and remote working in the digital economy?
· How can gig workers be better protected in the remote and hybrid era?
· What role do unions, professional organizations, or guilds play in the education or support of remote and hybrid workers?
Remote and Hybrid Work: Leaders, Technologies, and Strategies.
· How can organizations and leaders balance organizational strategic goals with employee flexibility demands?
· What are strategies for creating sustainable remote and hybrid work arrangements that contribute to organizations’ competitive advantage? How do job designs, strategies, technological arrangements of remote and hybrid work affect the likelihood of augmenting or automating work?
· How do remote and hybrid work designs engender staffing decisions across crowdsourcing, gig work, or automation?
· Will theories involving frequent high touch or high contact leadership become less (or more) relevant as remote and hybrid work increases?
· What new forms of leadership are necessary for meeting the unique challenges of remote and hybrid work settings? How do effective leadership strategies differ between fully remote and different configurations of hybrid work?
What new skills and competencies do leaders need to manage remote and hybrid work in their occupational contexts?
Remote and Hybrid Work: Knowledge Sharing, Creativity, and Innovation
· What factors drive individuals, teams, organizations, and industries to acquire and/or share knowledge with other entities within or across boundaries?
· What processes do individuals, teams, organizations, and industries utilize to source knowledge and determine its credibility?
· In what way will emerging technologies expand individual, team, organizational, and industry capabilities to share knowledge, create, and innovate?
· How can individuals, teams, organizations and industries structure their hybrid work in such a way as to maximize creative or innovative potential?
· What structures and processes best support divergent thinking in teams? What structures and processes best support convergent thinking in teams?
· What is the best configuration to position teams (e.g., global product development teams) for success?
· With artificial intelligence increasing, how can organizations have confidence that workers’ contributions are their own? What risks do informational source ambiguity and proprietary ownership of knowledge pose to the organization? Will organizations care?
Remote and Hybrid Work: Privacy, Control, and Digital Surveillance?
· How does remote and hybrid work affect the nexus of control between organizations and individuals?
· What is the effect of organizational and other forms of surveillance that create an ‘always on’ visibility of individuals? How does this visibility or inescapability affect their well-being and performance?
· How does digitalization in the remote and hybrid workplace, especially through algorithmic systems, lead to new forms of organizational surveillance and control?
· How do strategies to ensure control in remote and hybrid work affect behavior?
· How can individuals and teams leverage the digital exhaust of their work in productive ways?
· In what ways is remote and hybrid work empowering versus a tool of managerial control?
Remote and Hybrid Work: Well-being and the Work-Life/Work-Family Nexus
· What are the effects of remote and hybrid workplaces on employee well-being outcomes such as stress, burnout, physical, mental health, work-life balance, and family satisfaction?
· How are employees’ nonwork relationships (e.g., families, friends, community networks) and well-being influenced by the extent and type of hybrid and remote work arrangements and the growing digitization of work?
· How do employees’ nonwork interactions spill over into the workplace and influence organizational culture and norms in remote and hybrid work arrangement compared to fully face to face settings?
· How do fully remote organizations manage expectations of constant connectivity? What does it mean to have ‘downtime’ in the digital era of 24/7 availability?
· What are the implications of remote and hybrid work for work-nonwork boundaries over time?
· What new types of leader and employee skills and capabilities are needed to facilitate effective work and life relationships in the Remote and Hybrid Work Era?
· How does remote and hybrid work influence the ability to detach from work, and attention spans, and the ability to turn work (or family) off to focus on contrasting roles?
Remote and Hybrid Work and Equality.
· To what extent do remote and hybrid work designs increase or decrease inequality at work?
· How can new work designs be more equitable and inclusive?
· How do algorithmic systems lead to – or help overcome – bias and inequities among women and marginalized groups in the remote and hybrid workplace?
· Can the growing digitalization and the datafication of work allow for the development of new work designs that enable greater time and location flexibility for traditional location-tethered frontline workers who are often left behind?
· What contextual factors at different levels (e.g., group, organization, industry, country) influence inequalities in remote and hybrid work for different employee groups?
· What are the career consequences of being a heavy users of remote and hybrid work?
Instructions for Authors
We encourage scholarly submissions addressing these questions, or any other aspects of remote and hybrid work aligned with Organizational Science’s mission and audience. This includes fundamental research about organizations and their processes, structures, strategies, economics, technologies, identities, forms, social purpose, and people. We encourage authors to consider the Organization Science editorial statement with its inclusion of fields and disciplines indicated above. As noted in the editorial statement, above on the scope of the special issue, we are receptive to a broad range of theoretical perspectives and particularly value papers that connect them. Submissions only examining individual-level phenomenon, without considering at least one aspect of their relationship to their group/team, organizational or the societal context in which they are embedded are less likely to be a fit for this special issue. Similarly, if macro-economic factors are considered, such papers should also consider linkages to individuals, work groups, organizations, or workplace policy.
We do not have a quota on the number of articles we can accept for the issue. Given it is not a “tournament” or zero-sum game and the focused expertise of submitting authors, authors are expected to accept an invitation to review at least one special issue submission. We also invite authors to publicize this call across their broad networks. Authors should submit papers to the special issue between March 15, 2025- July 15, 2025 or earlier to https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/orgsci. For questions on the special issue, please reach out to any of the special issue editors.