Session Information
15 SES 06, The Power of Design in Open Innovation: Transforming Knowledge in Institutional Cooperation and Partnerships
Symposium
Contribution
Within the paradigms of global knowledge economies (Peters, Murphy und Marginson 2009), „open innovation“ becomes a crucial pattern of governance and design (Weber 2014) and the notion of „openness“ (Peters and Roberts 2011) becomes a „virtue“ in organizing. Not only our economies, but our societies as a whole are imagined as spaces of global creativity, of mobility and synchronicity (Marginson, Murphy and Peters 2010). Reduced technological concepts of innovation are in decline (Rammert 1997) and complex notions of social innovation are seen as a new „postindustrial paradigm of innovation“ (Howaldt and Jacobsen 2010). Here, open and networked coordination is regarded as the future of organizing (Weber 2014). Different models and imaginations of the New compete against each other (Murphy, Peters and Marginson 2010) – a bureaucratic, a market or an integral and wholistic one. Open and networked cultures of the New and of distributed leadership are to be analyzed as in the midst of those discursive fields (Keller 2003), acted out at the level of inter- and intra-organisational cooperation. This analytical perspective asks for underlying rationalities, for power and knowledge dynamics given in complex open innovation processes. What is the knowledge bases coming in here, which ideas „travel“ (Cziarniawska and Sevón 2005) into those networked settings, and which knowledge dynamics become relevant here?
The analytical perspective of network governance helps in addressing the questions. Messner extrapolates seven core problems, such as the problem of the big number (Messner 1994: 567-589); the time dimension of decisions (ibid. 571-572) and the institutional consolidation; the coordination problem; the negotiation dilemma; the tension field of conflict and cooperation (ibid. 589); and the problem of unequally distributed power resources. Even if the implementation of decisions principally relies on the consent of all network actors, the individual actor’s action options are unequal. Power structures result from unequal resource configuration: The mastering of specialized knowledge, the control over information and communication within the network through organizational rules or common values, assigned resources and the disposition of financial resources are given as examples of power sources in networks. This analysis of structural inequalities seems to limit the potentials of organizing institutional cooperation and network partnerships.
So can power and inequality relations in organisational cooperations and partnerships be overcome by means of aesthetical transformation – and if so, how? What is the “power of design” in organizational and network education and transformation processes? And do we face a shift from “power” to “design” in the way we look theoretically at institutional networking and transformation?
The symposium reflects on the symbolic orders of open innovation and coordination, which in a Foucauldian as well as in a Bourdieudian perspective are to be seen as discursive orders of knowledge and power. The symposium offers theoretical approaches in analysis, as well as conceptualizations of modes and methods of transgression and designing transformation. In a three dimensional perspective it highlights the level of transitions by collective rituals (Weber), the process oriented perspective of development of a deep democracy culture and collective leadership (Woods) and the subject related perspective of the transformation of the Self (Czejkowska).
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