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The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered one of the deepest economic recessions in human history, largely as a result of the full lockdown strategy adopted by many national governments. This lockdown strategy was primarily motivated by the limited capacities of Intensive Care Units and a lack of medical staff and equipment. In this essay, I argue that the COVID crisis and the widely used lockdown response are socially constructed, which invites a public discourse on how we can design societal solutions that would prevent the need for an indiscriminate lockdown response to a future pandemic or any other similar crisis. One potential solution is further developed in this essay: the design of latent capabilities for responding to any future emergencies. These latent capabilities, embedded in many host organizations, can help in quickly resolve shortages in professional skills and resources, which are likely to occur in any future crisis. Here, the COVID-19 crisis provides a major learning opportunity, to be exploited as soon as possible.

Unanimity rule is an important benchmark for evaluating outcomes of decisions in the social sciences. However, organizational researchers tend to ignore unanimous decision making, for example, because unanimity may be difficult to realize in large groups and may suffer from individual participants blocking decisions. This paper reconsiders unanimity rule in view of the development of circular systems for organizing decision making. It focuses on developing a theory of decision making under unanimity rule. The author uses a system dynamics model to explore the conditions under which unanimity rule supports the organization's ability to make decisions. Simulation experiments suggest that the dynamics and outcomes of unanimous decision making under and exceeding a critical threshold level of decision pressure are fundamentally different. Under this critical threshold, the decision-making system is capable of recovering from severe shocks to the system. If decision pressure is close to its threshold, a relatively small change can cause the decision process to collapse. In this respect, large groups operating under unanimity rule are less sustainable because they are more likely to exceed their critical threshold than small groups. Decomposing the decision-making system in small units, embedded in a hierarchical structure, therefore appears to be a necessary condition for sustainable performance in large organizations applying unanimity rule.

Mainstream organizational research is based on science and the humanities. Science helps us to understand organized systems, from an outsider position, as empirical objects. The humanities contribute to understanding, and critically reflecting on, the human experience of actors inside organized practices. This paper argues that, in view of the persistent relevance gap between theory and practice, organization studies should be broadened to include design as one of its primary modes of engaging in research. Design is characterized by its emphasis on solution finding, guided by broader purposes and ideal target systems. Moreover, design develops, and draws on, design propositions that are tested in pragmatic experiments and grounded in organization science. This study first explores the main differences and synergies between science and design, and explores how and why the design discipline has largely moved away from academia to other sites in the economy. The argument then turns to the genealogy of design methodologies in organization and management studies. Subsequently, this paper explores the circular design methodology that serves to illustrate the nature of design research, that is, the pragmatic focus on actionable knowledge as well as the key role of ideal target systems in design processes. Finally, the author proposes a framework for communication and collaboration between the science and design modes, and argues that scholars in organization studies can guide human beings in the process of designing and developing their organizations toward more humane, participative, and productive futures. In this respect, the organization discipline can make a difference.

AbstractNon‐participation is currently one of the most pertinent problems confronting large organizations. The non‐participation problem is related to two untested assumptions made by the conventional wisdom of participative management: first, power is assumed to flow from top to bottom rather than the other way around and, second, participation schemes provide sufficient opportunities for worker participation. The sociocratic organization provides a participative management model derived from system dynamics concepts which challenges both assumptions. Sociocratic organizations are based on a circle structure, decision making by consent, and double linking between circules. The circular and reflexive nature of these organizations appears to open up real opportunities for participation at all levels.

AbstractThe sociocratic model has progressed beyond the experimental stage and is being used successfully in several organizations. It relies on four ground rules: decision making by consent; a hierarchy of circles, in which every member of the organization participates; double linking between circles; and election of persons by consent.Together these rules promote downward as well as upward information processing.In contrast to conventional methods for advancing information processing (project teams, quality circles), the circle organization is integrated into the administrative hierarchy.

There is increasing debate about the role that public policy research can play in identifying solutions to complex policy challenges. Most studies focus on describing and explaining how governance systems operate. However, some scholars argue that because current institutions are often not up to the task, researchers need to rethink this 'bystander' approach and engage in experimentation and interventions that can help to change and improve governance systems. This paper contributes to this discourse by developing a design science framework that integrates retrospective research (scientific validation) and prospective research (creative design). It illustrates the merits and challenges of doing this through two case studies in the Netherlands and concludes that a design science framework provides a way of integrating traditional validation-oriented research with intervention-oriented design approaches. We argue that working at the interface between them will create new opportunities for these complementary modes of public policy research to achieve impact.

There is increasing debate about the role that public policy research can play in identifying solutions to complex policy challenges. Most studies focus on describing and explaining how governance systems operate. However, some scholars argue that because current institutions are often not up to the task, researchers need to rethink this 'bystander' approach and engage in experimentation and interventions that can help to change and improve governance systems. This paper contributes to this discourse by developing a design science framework that integrates retrospective research (scientific validation) and prospective research (creative design). It illustrates the merits and challenges of doing this through two case studies in the Netherlands and concludes that a design science framework provides a way of integrating traditional validation-oriented research with intervention-oriented design approaches. We argue that working at the interface between them will create new opportunities for these complementary modes of public policy research to achieve impact.

Human-driven changes on this planet have been giving rise to global warming, social instability, civil wars, and acts of terrorism. The existing system of global governance is not equipped to effectively address these enormous challenges. It is slow where one must move quickly, favors bureaucracy and politics over authentic deliberations and effective interventions, and caters to power-brokers and mega-corporations. The world therefore needs a model of global governance that serves to make and implement collectively binding decisions that acknowledge the interests of all those affected, including future generations. This governance model must coordinate the work of great (e.g. national) powers, and at the same time enable billions of people to bring their intelligence and creativity to bear on these challenges. In many ways, the quest for a new system of global governance is a grand societal challenge in itself. In this paper, we draw on idealized design to develop an ideal model of global governance and explore the collective search and experimentation efforts it implies. This so-called United People (UP) model involves a circular hierarchy in which power and communication flow in ways that help the global community to effectively address transnational challenges and problems. It involves several, relatively small, governance bodies— rather than a large parliamentary assembly that tends to cripple responsive decision making. The UP model also serves to effectively uncover and address power abuse, simplify the financial household of global governance, and support systemic forms of collaboration with NGOs and other organizations.

This paper proposes science-based organization design that uses construction principles and design rules to guide practitioner-academic projects. Organization science implies construction principles for creating and implementing designs. These principles serve to construct design rules that are instrumental in developing organization designs. Testing and implementing designs require pragmatic experimentation in complex, dynamic settings. The authors explore a circular design process as an example of science-based organization design. Tests of this circular process in over 30 organizations suggest that construction principles are important for creating new design rules as well as for a deeper understanding of the systems and practices created from these rules. In addition, explicit principles and rules for organization design appear to facilitate the transfer of learning between different projects. As such, they can help reconnect organization research to ongoing design work.

The success factors and challenges of interorganizational collaboration have been widely studied from different disciplinary perspectives. However, the role of design in making such collaborations resilient has received little attention, although deliberately designing for resilience is likely to be vital to the success of any interorganizational collaboration. This study explores the resilience of interorganizational collaboration by means of a comparative case study of Dutch maternity care providers, which have been facing major challenges due to financial cutbacks, government-enforced collaborative structures, and the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings make two contributions to the literature. First, we further develop the construct of interorganizational resilience. Second, we shed light on how well-designed distributed decision-making enhances resilience, thereby making a first attempt at meeting the challenge of designing for interorganizational resilience.

The power literature's focus on criticizing power relations comes at the cost of deliberate attempts to improve organizational practices. How can critical performativity and other scholars address power as an enabling force, thereby also allowing for more engagement with practitioners? We integrate the literature on power in and around organizations with studies of organizational change and behavior. By focusing on enabling instead of restrictive power, we draw attention to the potentially pivotal role of key actors—managers, other practitioners, and scholars—in fostering empowerment and emancipation within organizations. Our review points at four social mechanisms that drive enabling power: formal authority, language-shaping-action, community formation, and the dynamics of safety and trust. Furthermore, we identify various types of actions that can trigger these mechanisms that, in turn, may give rise to outcomes such as empowerment and emancipation. The main contribution of this article involves an integrated framework of power as an enabling force. By synthesizing various separate discourses, this framework extends prior reviews focusing on power-over, resulting in a systemic understanding of enabling power and thereby creating novel avenues for research on power. The integrative framework also provides a foundation for an intervention-oriented body of knowledge on enabling power.

Previous studies of the effects of resource slack and constraints on creativity and performance offer contradictory findings. To resolve this debate, some authors operationalize resource slack and constraints in ways that actually may have concealed their underlying complexity and dynamics. This study seeks to demonstrate how perceived resource positions influence entrepreneurial decision making and creativity by drawing on in-depth case studies of three high-tech start-ups. The authors show that resource positions are perceived, relative, transient and multidimensional; that is, they reflect the entrepreneur's perception of available resources relative to demand. Moreover, perceived resource positions are not static but change over time, and entrepreneurs can experience different types of resource constraints and slack simultaneously. The influence of perceived resource positions on decision making in turn depends on individual, temporal and resource position dynamics. These findings link perceptions of resources to the emergence of organizational ingenuity, by explaining how perceived resource positions influence decision making.