Prof. Dr. David Wagner / Digital Business, Transformation and Communication

AOM PhD Consortia and Professional Development Workshops

The Academy of Management Conference in Boston is just around the corner. It’s taking place from August 3-7, 2012. I had the privilege to attend the conference for the first time last year and wrote several blog posts about the experience. First of all, I’d like to say that the conference is great value for money. Students pay 90 USD for the annual membership and another 90 USD to sign up for the conference. In return, they get five days of high quality symposia, paper sessions, roundtable discussions, and much more.

If you’re a PhD student like myself, you should definitely consider applying for one of the several doctoral consortia. Last year, I attended a session hosted by the Organizational Development and Change (ODC) division. This year, I found another one that suits my research interests even better. It is the PhD consortium organized by the Organizational Communication and Information Systems. The organizer, Professor Yoo, even managed to secure a research grant, which helps most of the attendants finance their stay.

The second most outstanding offer next to the PhD consortia is probably what is called, in AOM speak, a PDW, i.e. a Professional Development Workshop. This type of workshop is targeted at established researchers who want to familiarize themselves with methods they haven’t used before or with emerging fields of research. I’ve listed my favorites below.

Researching the Informal Economy: Opportunities and Challenges of Social Media Research
Sociomateriality in Practice: Considering Consequences in Organizational Life and Research
Advanced Networks PDW: Cutting-Edge Social Network Theoretical Work and ERGM

To my mind, these workshops are a great way to get in touch with the people whose work I’m reading on a daily basis. I’m particularly looking forward to seeing Steve Borgatti, Ann Majchrzak, Samer Faraj, Sirkka Jarvenpaa, Wanda Orlikowski, Jerry Kane, as well as Martin Kilduff present and discuss their recent research projects.

AOM Party Calendar

Besides the above described Professional Development Workshops at the Academy of Management Conference, it is, of course, also important to mingle with other researchers at some of the receptions hosted by the various divisions or by particular universities. For this reason, Professors @SekouBermis and @Unzueta have set up a public Google Calendar (thanks to this great tutorial).

Social Media and Knowledge Management: Opportunity or Threat?

I’ve acquainted myself with the work of Georg von Krogh when I first dealt with Nonaka and Takeuchi’s (1995) Knowledge Creating Company in a module on Organizational Learning at the University of Nottingham. That is mainly because in 2006, Nonaka, von Krogh, and Voelpel published a review on Knowledge Creation Theory in the journal Organization Studies that I happened to come across while finishing my coursework for the above mentioned module.

More recently, Professor von Krogh and his colleagues edited a very interesting issue of the journal Long Range Planning dealing with social software and strategy, which I referred to in an earlier blog post. In his most recent article published in the Journal of Strategic Information Systems, von Krogh deals with the impact of social software on knowledge management. von Krogh states that, on the upside, employees who use social software can do their work more flexibly. In addition, they can take better, more timely local decisions and they can solve tasks and communicate more efficiently. On the downside, the protection of critical knowledge assets becomes increasingly difficult, threatening the overall value of the firm. As a consequence, costs and risks need to be carefully balanced against the potential gains.

von Krogh further poses a number of questions that need to be addressed by future research in the field of strategic information systems, namely:

What are the choices and implications of social software for knowledge processes in organizations, and how do these differ from those of traditional knowledge management?
What are the barriers and enablers to the adoption of knowledge management by social software in ﬁrms?
How does the ﬁrm ensure the value of knowledge when implementing knowledge management by social software?
How do ﬁrms balance implementations of knowledge management?
What are the consequences of knowledge management by social software for competitive advantage?
How do ﬁrms dynamically recreate boundaries?

References:

Nonaka, I., & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation. New York: Oxford University Press.

Nonaka, I., von Krogh, G. von, & Voelpel, S. (2006). Organizational Knowledge Creation Theory: Evolutionary Paths and Future Advances. Organization Studies, 27(8), 1179–1208.

von Krogh, G. (2012). How does social software change knowledge management? Toward a strategic research agenda. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems. 21(2), 154-164.

Save the date: Sunbelt 2013 in Hamburg May 21-26, 2013

Here are some interesting news for the ones among you who are interested in social network analysis (SNA) and live in Germany. Next year’s SUNBELT conference is going to be conveniently close as it is held in Hamburg from May 21-26. It will be organized by Betina Hollstein, Sonja Drobnic, and Michael Schnegg, all from the University of Hamburg. More information should follow shortly on the website, the INSNA blog, and on Facebook.

Talking about network analysis, @bkeegan pointed me to an extremely interesting article by Tom Valente published in the journal Science the other day. In the article, Tom describes different types of interventions that help to drive change in a network. Some of you probably find this interesting as well. Please see below for the full reference and the link to the article.

Reference:

Valente, T. W. (2012). Network Interventions. Science, 337(6090), 49–53. doi:10.1126/science.1217330