New Ways of Working: Institutions, Identity, and Power (Symposium)

The Corona pandemic has accelerated the growing trend for organizations to adopt so-called new ways of working, including practices such as conducting meetings and teachings through video conferencing, working from home, when commuting or in co-working spaces as well as hot desk arrangements, agile methods and holocratic structures. What seems to unite these empirical phenomena is the fact that they grant organizational members intentionally increasing discretion in terms of what to work on (autonomy to set priorities), when to work (temporal autonomy) and where to work (spatial autonomy). However, most of our received wisdom of organizational theories and concepts relies on the implicit premise of a 9-5-fixed-desk-clear-hierarchy work environment. As organizational scholars, we thus seem to be witnessing a substantive shift in our 'object of inquiry' that we have yet to fully understand empirically and to theorize conceptually much better. To increase our knowledge on new ways of working and its implications and effects on theory, we want to elaborate these aspects in three paper presentations on the following three conceptual foci: institutions, organizational identity, as well as power and politics. First of all, we see that new ways of working challenge existing institutions. The flexibilization and digitalization of work led to taken-for-granted assumptions being questioned, e.g. with regard to place, time, interactions and boundaries of work. Secondly, we realize that all of these new ways of working affect the mode and modalities of social interactions. Organizational identity as a social construct, though, rely substantively on social processes of meaning negotiations. Thirdly, we recognize that most of these new ways of working are technology enabled. New practices and technology are never innocent. Rather, they affect how power and politics are distributed and enacted in organizations. At the end of the symposium, similarities and differences of these three perspectives shall be further elaborated together with a discussant and the audience.