Call for papers: Organizational Design and Engineering for Inter-organizational Collaboration and Competition

A special issue of International Journal of Organisational Design and Engineering

Globalization, market deregulation, shorter product life cycles, the pressure to constantly innovate, and the need to follow the customer require businesses to decentralize, distribute work, collaborate with stakeholders and establish new organizational structures. Firms have to manage numerous external collaborative relationships with corporate partners such as other companies, customers, or even politics. Furthermore, traditional internal structures are being broken up in order to give way to more flexible and responsive work setups.

Innovative technologies provide new opportunities and tools for companies to manage these challenges. Enterprise systems as well as social software are used to collaboratively produce knowledge and content. It is time for organizations to implement these novel tools and philosophies to create new collaboration models, realize cooperative concepts such as open innovation and customer integration approaches, and to manage, govern, and actively maintain inter- and intra-organizational collaboration. The new collaboration technologies can be used - when properly applied – to help businesses solve pressing problems, capture dispersed and fast-changing knowledge, highlight and leverage expertise, generate and refine ideas.

We are pleased to invite scholars from any methodological background to contribute papers that advance our knowledge of the diffusion, appropriation, usage, impact, and role of collaboration technologies, in the context usage of social software in intra- and inter-organizational networks. We welcome theoretical, conceptual, design-oriented and especially empirical contributions using both qualitative and quantitative research methods. Research efforts may focus on different organization relations such as business to business, business to customer or business to other stakeholder.

Suitable topics include, but are not limited to:

* Theory Foundations

• Innovative collaborative methods and science
• Innovative concepts, models and frameworks for intra- and inter-organizational collaborations technologies and management concepts
• Shared knowledge representation, discovery and management with respect to innovative collaborations technologies and management concepts
• Social networks, collective intelligence, security, trust

* Technical infrastructures

• Context-aware infrastructures
• Situation aware infrastructures
• Distributed systems and technologies
• Next generation technologies, web 2.0, social software
• P2P, Grid and cloud computing
• Web services
• Mobile and wireless collaboration systems

* Environments, tools and applications

• Enterprise systems
• Collaborative working environments
• Collaborative management tools
• Social software, web 2.0, virtual worlds
• CSCW, groupware and decision tools
• Data management and sharing tools
• Intra/inter collaborative tagging
• Knowledge management tools
• Massively distributed collaboration
• Designing collaborative and virtual organizations

* Benefits realization and social implications

• Collaborative strategies and policies
• Scientific and business models
• Accessibility and user interfaces
• Trust, compliance, policies and QoS
• Cross organizational studies
• Human and market dynamics
• Privacy and identity management
• Support for vulnerable communities
• User acceptance and use
• Community engineering, community governance

Important Dates
Deadline for submission: 15 March 2011