APROS 13 – Objective

The main objective of the conference, “Times, they are a changing: Understanding organizations in complex, emergent and uncertain environments” is to develop knowledge from international, grounded, theoretical, case study, and ethnographic research strategies for understanding management and organizations in times of disorder.

While we note the usefulness of existing general management theories being applied as functional universals to diverse regions, these theories need to be enriched with concepts or terms that are unique to environments with unstable structural characteristics because of their singular historical and cultural development.

Academics and practitioners around the world are invited to contribute with their research and expertise in the academic program. In order to achieve a better understanding of different theory building processes and how they are understood in emergent or transitional economies.

Justification

Nascent concepts based on cultural hybridism, salient stakeholders, new humanism and pragmatism are emerging for theory building in management and organization studies. These new strands have particular relevance for studies of organizations in emergent economies because of the traditional management practices and organizational arrangements in these contexts, which have some degree of divergence from more rationalist assumptions and models.

There are notable common themes across organizations in developing countries or transition economies, based on contexts of localism, traditionalism and patrimonial organization.

Today, these economies are undergoing the ‘shock of the new’ as both externally sourced FDI and internally liberalizing economies opens them to wider rationalizations of modernity already institutionalized in the dominant global economies and societies. In this conference, we seek to build a coherent understanding of changes occurring in these organizations in these complex, emergent, and uncertain environments.