Blurring Boundaries – Within and Between Organizations and Institutions

The theme of the conference has been announced:

Globalization has created new ways of doing business, new institutions to oversee them, and has introduced a spectrum of new protagonists to the international arena.

Scholars and practitioners have been challenged by this environment to find new ways to interact and, in the process, many of the traditional boundaries that have existed within and between organizations and institutions have become increasingly blurred.

Between organizations, for example, boundaries are fading as organizations find new and innovative ways to join forces. The rising popularity with which ‘joint service centers’ are being created, for example, raises some interesting questions. Because when competitors become colleagues, and are welcomed into the fold, some of the most fundamental boundaries – the boundaries between ‘them and us’ – begin to loose their significance.

As the business environment changes, so too does the role of the state in regulating it. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, for example, some of the most basic boundaries between organizations and institutions, public and private, have become increasingly unclear. As firms have failed, state actors have acquired an ever more significant share of private industry. In the process, however, the question of where the state stops, and where the private sector begins, has become an increasingly difficult question to answer.

Within organizations too, boundaries are also blurring. Different product lines and development projects within the firm, for example, are increasingly encouraged to compete for internal resource allocations. And colleagues are increasingly treated as ‘internal customers’. The use of external benchmarks for the measurement of internal performance creates new boundaries within the organization, and raises new and interesting questions.

The 11^th PREBEM Conference aims to shed light on the issue of blurring boundaries in a variety of fields, and welcomes submissions of both a theoretical and empirical nature.

The conference offers participants the opportunity to present their research to their peers, and to receive feedback and reviews from senior colleagues. The conference is intended for all PhD researchers, at all stages of their research projects. Contributions on the topic are welcomed, but not limited to the fields of: economics; strategic management and organization; finance and accounting; marketing; human resources management; information systems; innovation, entrepreneurship and small business management.