At the heart of this research led by Dr. Gümüsay are concerns around how hybrid and new forms of organizing engage with multiple values, logics, purpose, and meaning, in particular in the face of institutional pluralism and grand societal challenges. While organizations encounter competing pressures, they seek to maintain unity in diversity. To examine this further, our work is guided by two broader research streams.
First, we focus on how multiple values, logics, purpose, and meaning shape hybrid organizations and how they become more resilient to better cope with complex, competing, contradictory, conflictual and even paradoxical demands. In this research stream, we have published papers on academic entrepreneurship in Research Policy, entrepreneurship and Islam in Journal of Business Ethics, institutional logics and religion in Business & Society as well as entrepreneurial opportunities and values in Innovation: Organization & Management. Further working papers look at organizational hybridity and paradox plus organizational hybridity and institutional complexity.
Second, we study how novelty in forms of organizing facilitates engagement with grand challenges. Grand challenges represent fundamental, global societal challenges of ecological and social nature that require coordinated and collective efforts. In our empirical cases, we focus on digital, flexible, fluid, multi-jurisdictional, and temporary forms of organizing such as co-creation spaces, social movements, social incubators, and sustainable community hubs that tackle challenges like climate change, decent work and sustainable growth, gender equality, populism and racism, societal cohesion, responsible consumption and production, and sustainable cities and communities.
In addition, we reflect on how societal complexity feeds back methodologically and conceptually in our research endeavors, in particular research team constellations, ethnographic practices, and multimodal methodologies.