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International Summer School
On the logic of Self-reinforcing Processes in Organizations, Networks, and Markets
to be held at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, July 13 – 17, 2009.

Convenors:

Georg Schreyögg and Jörg Sydow (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)

in collaboration with Huseyin Leblebici (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)

Call for Applications

Self-reinforcing dynamics have been identified as highly important drivers of technological and organizational standardization, of path dependence, of escalating commitment to problematic decisions, of regional clustering of industries, of organizational inertia and strategic persistencies, to name but a few. Patterns of self-reinforcement are set into motion through various forces such as increasing returns, continued self-justification, external network effects or complementarities. Once underway, these processes are difficult to stop and even more difficult to reverse into a different, more preferable direction. Although well-known phenomena up to now a dearth of attention has been given in research to self-reinforcing processes. The key objective of the International Summer School therefore is to bring together researchers from different disciplines studying self-reinforcing phenomena and to elaborate jointly on their dynamics on different levels, on the individual, the organizational, the network or on the market/field level respectively. In the end, the Summer School aims at reaching a deeper theoretical and empirical understanding of the logic of self-reinforcing dynamics.

In order to get a deeper insight into self-reinforcing processes it is necessary to employ different theoretical perspectives and a variety of research methodologies. To this end, the Summer School invites contributions from different disciplines that focus on one or more of the following issues:

• The role of initial conditions for self-reinforcing developments;
• Dynamics of self-reinforcing mechanisms, and lock-ins;
• Forms of path dependence and their development over time;
• Analysis of inter-organizational dynamics, focusing, e.g., on science-industry relations, global alliances, regional clusters, etc.;
• The interplay among self-reinforcing processes between different levels of analysis (individual, group, organizational, network, field, region, society);

Applications discussing such substantive issues, and possibly others, empirically or conceptually, comparatively or monographically, with regard to recent or more historical developments, are cordially invited.

Interested participants should submit to an abstract to joerg.sydow@fu-berlin.de of no more than 1000 words for their proposed contribution by May 4th, 2009.

The submission must be made via email and it must be a Word or PDF attachment. It should contain author’s CV incl. list of publications, institutional affiliation, email and postal addresses. Authors will be notified of acceptance or otherwise by May 18th, 2009. Full papers would have to be submitted by June 30, 2009.

Those who will be accepted for presenting their research at the International Summer School will receive a grant covering travel and accommodation costs. These grants are awarded by the Centre for International Cooperation (CIC) of Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.

For more details please consult

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