WOA 2026: Workshop Dei Docenti E Ricercatori DI Organizzazione Aziendale University of Rome Tor Vergata Rome, Italy, May 27-29, 2026

Submission link	https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=woa2026
Submission deadline	February 15, 2026

WOA 2026

XXVII Workshop dei Docenti e dei Ricercatori di Organizzazione Aziendale

From Doing Resilience to Being Resilient: Organizing Beyond Recovery and Toward Renewal

Rome Tor Vergata – 28-29 May 2026

 

Relevant dates

Opening of the submission process	23rd December
Paper submission deadline	15th February
Notification of acceptance	20th April
Deadline for regular registration	8th May

 

General Theme

Since its inception, the Workshop on Organizational Studies (WOA) has served not merely as a conference, but as a collective laboratory, a space for dialogue, critique, and co-creation among organization scholars. Each edition has mirrored timely and thought-provoking challenges, from the focus on flexibility and performance in the early 2000s, through the turbulence of economic crises, to the critical reflections on power, identity, and sustainability of recent years. WOA’s history forms a living continuum: a community that has learned, adapted, and redefined itself in response to shifting organizational issues.

The 2026 theme, “From Doing Resilience to Being Resilient: Organizing beyond recovery and toward renewal”, invites us to move past the idea of resilience as mere adaptation or recovery. In a world marked by buoyant uncertainty, ecological fragility, and technological interdependence, organizations and societies are called to cultivate skills for improvisation, creativity, regeneration, and transformation. In today’s landscape of continuous and multi-crises, resilience is no longer a response to exceptional shocks but a condition for survival within an enduring state of overlapping disruptions. This shift invites us to understand being resilient as a capability to navigate complexity, mitigate vulnerability, and reimagine organizational life amid continuous turbulence. This call urges us to rethink what it means to “organize” in this context.

To go beyond doing resilience means to explore the design issues, social and organizational dynamics, HRM challenges, and relational infrastructures that pave the way for an enhanced ability to overcome crises and achieve continuous reliability. This also entails questioning how legacies are transmitted and renewed within the organizational community: what intellectual and ethical inheritances have shaped our field? How do we nurture the next generation of scholars and practitioners? And what forms of organizing are capable of generating shared meaning?

WOA 2026 seeks contributions that do not merely describe organizational adaptation, but interrogate the deeper processes through which organizing sustains, transforms, and transcends itself, reaffirming the spirit of WOA as a living workshop for collective thought, rather than a ritual of presentation.

Below are key themes of interest from both scientific and managerial perspectives:

• Exploring how resilience emerges and evolves within individuals, teams, and organizations. This theme invites reflections on adaptive and regenerative HR practices that foster learning, inclusion, and well-being through focusing on people.
• Examining resilience as an evolving paradigm in organizational theory. Contributions may question structural, situational, and temporal assumptions of adaptation, exploring how organizations redesign themselves, substantially, and symbolically, to develop enduring capacities for renewal and collective sensemaking.
• Investigating the technological and digital dimensions of resilience. This theme addresses how information systems, AI, and data infrastructures can enable or constrain regenerative organizing, balancing efficiency and flexibility while shaping new forms of socio-technical interdependence across organizational ecosystems.
• Focusing on resilience as a moral and social process. This calls for exploring how organizations confront fragility, inequality, and vulnerability, developing caring practices and shared responsibilities that transform resilience from an individual imperative into a collective and ethical project for sustainable futures.
• Reflecting on resilience within our own scholarly ecosystem. This theme invites meta-organizational inquiry into the legacies, dialogues, and boundaries of the Organizational community, how it renews its identity, sustains collaboration, and transmits knowledge across generations in changing academic landscapes.

We welcome submissions of original research papers contributing with new empirical evidence and theoretical perspectives on the theme. Below, there is a non-exhaustive list of questions and topics to inspire contributions:

• How is resilience conceptualized across individuals, teams, organizations, and ecosystems, and how do these levels interact to sustain long-term adaptability?
• What organizational routines, practices, and narratives enable resilience to evolve?
• How can leaders cultivate collective resilience that balances empathy, and critical reflection in times of systemic uncertainty?
• How can we reconfigure design practices to achieve enhanced resilience capabilities?
• What does it mean to manage people embracing a resilience perspective?
• How can we change organizations to prompt them to shift from doing resilience to being resilient?
• In what ways do HR and learning practices foster psychological safety, and shared purpose?
• What role do digital technologies and AI play in enabling or constraining resilient organizing?
• How can organizations avoid “toxic resilience”, the normalization of over-adaptation and burnout, and instead nurture humane, sustainable forms of endurance?
• How does resilience intersect with ethics and justice?
• In what ways does the legacy of organizational scholarship shape how we understand, teach, and practice resilience today?
• How might the next generation of organization scholars rethink resilience beyond efficiency and control, toward imagination, connectedness, and renewal?
• How can organizations evolve beyond resilience to embrace antifragility, transforming shocks, uncertainty, and crises into sources of learning, creativity, and regenerative strength?
• How can organizational aesthetics, care, and design practices cultivate forms of “beautiful organizing” that inspire meaning, belonging, and emotional resonance amid complexity?
• How can organizations integrate ecological, social, and human sustainability into resilience strategies, fostering regenerative ecosystems that thrive rather than merely survive over time?
• How can collective resilience emerge through collaboration, shared purpose, and trust, redefining organizing as a communal, interdependent process rather than an individual adaptive effort?

 

Submission

WOA 2026 will be characterized by the presence of two different types of sessions (Papers and Research Ideas) and a Doctoral Consortium.

• PAPER SESSIONS (SHORT PAPER) May 28th (afternoon) and May 29th (all day):

Short papers presenting completed research – including theoretical, methodological, findings, and discussion and contributions sections – may be submitted in such a session. The author/authors may express in the EasyChair System their willingness to be redirected to the poster session if their contribution is evaluated by the Scientific Committee as not yet ready to be presented in a paper session. Short papers of a maximum of 5000 words (incl. graphs, references, figures and tables) will be double-blind reviewed. Short papers should summarize the research purpose, the theoretical background, the research gap, the approach taken, the methods of analysis (in empirical papers), main findings, and contributions (if any). If accepted, the papers will be discussed during the parallel sessions.                                                                                                                                              

• RESEARCH IDEAS (POSTER) May 28th (afternoon) and May 29th (all day):

Abstracts about work in progress, research ideas, or early-stage works eliciting feedback can be sent to this session to receive advice and discuss more broadly. Indeed, this session is suitable for exchange of suggestions and open discussion of research projects and ideas in an early development phase.Research ideas are structured-abstracts comprising 300 words and should include: Purpose, Design/Methodology/Approach/Intervention, Results, Limitations, Research/Practical Implications, Originality/Value. All the accepted research ideas will be presented as a poster with the support of printed presentations displayed on large boards (100h x 70w centimeters; portrait format). Every author has to bring her/his own poster). Individual posters will be clustered in thematic “call for ideas” sessions lasting 60-90 minutes each. Since this session aims to generate a dynamic discussion among presenters and the audience, a facilitator will lead an introductory round in which each presenter introduces her/his poster, specifying what kind of advice is expected (approx. 3 minutes each). Then, the audience members will be able to interact with the presenter for around 7-10 minutes.                                                                                                                                                

• DOCTORAL CONSORTIUM May 27th (afternoon) and 28th (morning):

The Doctoral Consortium welcomes both full papers—including theoretical framework, methodological approach, results, discussion, contributions, and future research directions—and early-stage research proposals, presenting initial ideas, conceptual developments, and methodological approaches still in progress.

Short papers and research ideas must be submitted electronically via EasyChair at the following link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=woa2026

Notification of acceptance will be communicated by 20th April

All the accepted contributions will be published online as conference proceedings with an ISBN.

DOCTORAL CONSORTIUM – WOA 2026

The Doctoral Consortium is conceived as an empowering meeting, which pursues three main aims:

 

• unleash the doctoral candidates’ potential, by inviting them to a critical reflection on their research project;

• stimulate doctoral candidates’ ideas through an engaging and dialogic conversation with senior scholars;
• build a strong and vivid community, where ideas flow, collaboration flourishes, and collective reasoning paves the way for impactful research.

 

In achieving these goals, the Doctoral Consortium offers compelling training sessions that focus on two main themes: core skills for persuasive communication and raising awareness of the underlying philosophy that inspires research.

The doctoral consortium aims to serve as a cornerstone in the candidates’ academic experience, providing insights into the steps that foster excellence in research. Themes will be consistent with the study domains embraced by the ASSIOA community, focusing on novel and compelling interpretations of organizations and organizing in contemporary society.

 

Submission Guidelines

PhD students must submit a structured synthesis of their research proposal (about 3,000 words, inclusive of references, tables, figures, and appendices), following the format available on the WOA website.

More specifically, the proposal should include the following sections:

 

• Biographical and academic information about the submitter
• Title
• Short abstract
• Keywords
• Research Aims and Scope
• Conceptual Background and Theoretical Framing
• Research Design and Methods
• Prospective Findings
• Expected Implications for Theory and Practice

 

Important Dates

Research proposals must be submitted via EasyChair by February 15th, 2026.

Notification of acceptance will be communicated by April 20th, 2026.

To participate in the Doctoral Consortium, registration for WOA 2026 is required.

Preliminary Program

 

Time	Session
	Travelling
13:00–14:00	Welcome lunch / coffee
14:00–14:30	Welcome to the Doctoral Consortium
14:30–15:30	Doctoral keynote
15:30–16:00	Coffee break
16:00–19:00	Doctoral Consortium
19:00	Doctoral Consortium – light dinner

Time	Session
09:00–11:00	Doctoral Consortium
11:00–11:30	Coffee break
11:30–13:00	Doctoral Consortium
13:00–14:00	Welcome lunch / coffee
14:00–14:30	Institutional welcome and introduction WoA 2026
14:30–15:30	Keynote
15:30–16:30	Parallel session & Poster sessions
16:30–17:00	Coffee break
17:00–18:00	Parallel sessions II & Poster session II
20:30	WOA Dinner

Time	Session
09:00–10:30	Parallel sessions III & Poster session III
10:30–11:30	ASSIOA Assembly
11:30–12:00	Coffee break
12:00–13:30	Parallel sessions IV & Poster session IV
13:30–14:30	Lunch
14:30–16:00	Parallel sessions V & Poster session V
16:00–17:00	Wrap-up, best paper and farewell session