Dear colleagues,
You are cordially invited to join us for the Center for Organizational Research End-of-Year Event.
This will be an opportunity to connect with old friends and meet new colleagues.
COR Small Grants recipients will be announced and briefly present their research projects.
Friday, June 9
12:30-2:00
SBSG 1200
Lunch will be provided.
Please RSVP by June 5 to cor@uci.edu.
We hope to see many of you before we disperse for the summer!
A talk of interest to COR community….
Friday Informatics Seminar
Speaker: Jeanette Bloomberg
Principal Research Staff Member
IBM Almaden Research Center
When: Friday, May 26, 2017
Where: DBH 6011
Talk: 2:00pm
Refreshments to follow immediately after in the 5th Floor lobby
Talk title: “Organizational Analytics: The Promise of (Big) Data, Machine Learning, and Predictive Analytics ”
Abstract: The business press summons organizations to manage their data as a strategic resource, helping to guide such decisions as how best to market to customers, adjust inventory, or balance skill portfolios. Organizations (including civic and not-for-profit) are implored to embrace the promise of (big) data, machine learning, and predictive analytics lest they get left behind. In this talk I will explore some of the issues facing organizations that take up this challenge by drawing upon examples from recent research that focuses on the production of organizational data and the in situ consumption of analytics. I will discuss how different knowledge traditions and practical concerns of variously positioned organizational actors shape the meaning of the analytics and influence the ways in which they can be acted upon. I will conclude with some thoughts about whether the current technological environment of cloud computing, machine learning, and predictive analytics present! !s new worries and/or possibilities for harnessing technology for human betterment.
Bio: Jeanette Blomberg is Principal Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California and adjunct professor at Roskilde University in Denmark. Jeanette is known for her research on ethnography in design processes as outlined in two recent publications Positioning Ethnography within Participatory Design and Reflections on 25 Years of Ethnography in CSCW. In her recent book, An Anthropology of Services, she investigates how services are being conceptualized today and the possible benefits of taking an anthropological perspective on services and their design. Currently her research is focused on organizational analytics where she considers the linkages between human action, digital data production, data analytics, and business or societal outcomes. Prior to assuming her current position, Jeanette was a member of the Work Practice and Technology group at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Director of Experience Modeling research at Sapient!! Corporation, and Industry-affiliated Professor at the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden where in 2011 she was awarded an honorary doctorate. Jeanette has received numerous IBM technical achievement awards and recently was honored with induction into the IBM Academy of Technology. Jeanette received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Davis where she also was a visiting professor and lecturer in cultural anthropology and sociolinguistics.
Talk of interest to COR community….
Taekjin Shin
Assistant Professor of Management
San Diego State University
Tuesday, May 16
12:30-1:30
SSPB 4250
“How Demographic Change in CEO’s Education Background Affected Corporate Strategy”
Using data on CEOs who ran large U.S. corporations from 1985 to 2005, we show that CEOs who earned an MBA before the 1970s actively pursued a diversification strategy. Responding to changes in business education in the 1970s, the next cohort of CEOs abandoned diversification in acquisitions.
If you would like to meet with Prof. Shin on May 16 please email Marilu Daum daumm@uci.edu
The Center for Organizational Research (COR) presents
Professor Siobhan O’Mahony
Boston University, Questrom School of Business
April 21, 2017
10:30-12:00
Merage SB1 5200 (Porter Colloquium Room)
ESCALATING INSURGENCY: EXPLAINING REPERTOIRE INNOVATION THROUGH SELECTIVE SYNTHESIS
Abstract: Social movement scholars have shown how insurgents, despite limited access to resources and power, affect powerful targets through the deployment of an innovative repertoire. Repertoire innovation is theorized to occur through novel combinations of existing tools and practices or through the emergence of de novo elements. Extant research usually focuses on the tactics insurgents deploy without explaining how insurgents execute on those innovations. Little research explains how insurgents initially craft, revise and innovate repertoires over time. Without understanding this process, we cannot explain how insurgents escalate or deescalate their operations to achieve social change. We call for a broader conception of repertoire innovation that includes not only the tactics, but also the practices and tools used to carry out insurgency. With an inductive, longitudinal field study, we show how the insurgent community Anonymous crafted, expanded and refined a repertoire of tools, tactics and organizing practices aimed at disrupting increasingly ambitious targets over an eight-year period. Our in-depth examination provides a grounded theoretical explanation of how insurgent communities escalate their operations by selectively synthesizing repertoire elements and a particular explanation of how this process unfolds in an under-explored, extreme context.
Speaker bio: Professor O’Mahony is Chair of the Strategy and Innovation Department at Boston University Questrom School of Business. Her research explores how technical and creative projects organize for innovation. She has examined how high technology contractors, open source programmers, artists, music producers, internet startups and product development teams coordinate their efforts in projects, teams and communities. She is interested in how people create organizing structures that promote innovation, creativity and growth without replicating the bureaucratic structures they strive to avoid. Dr. O’Mahony’s research has appeared in Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Academy of Management Journal, Research in Organizational Behavior, Research Policy, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Industry and Innovation, and the Journal of Management and Governance. A former consultant with Price Waterhouse LLP and Electronic Data Systems, she has consulted to organizations such as IDEO, the Global Business Network, Novell, Cap Gemini, Proquest, Microsoft, McDonald Investments, and the European Union. Professor O’Mahony holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University’s Management Science and Engineering Program.
Any faculty or graduate students who you would like to meet with Prof. O’Mahoney upon her visit, please email cor@uci.edu.