fabrizio ferraro: dialogue on economics and society (etc)

We’re thrilled to have Fabrizio Ferraro as our next guest blogger here at orgtheory.  Fabrizio is an associate professor at IESE and he does interesting research on open source organizing and performativity (he’s also involved with organizing this upcoming workshop on the politics of markets).  To get a flavor for some of his work, here’s a recent AMJ article, with Siobhan O’Mahony, on “the emergence of governance in an open source community.”

Fabrizio’s guest stint coincides with a dialogue and set of articles that are published in the most recent issue of Organization Science:

• Here’s the introduction to this discussion by Linda Argote, the editor of Organization Science.
• Felin, T. & Foss, N.J. (2009). Social reality, the boundaries of self-fulfilling prophecy, and economics.
• Ferraro, F., Pfeffer, J., & Sutton, R. (2009). How and why theories matter: A comment on Felin and Foss.
• Felin, T. & Foss, N.J. (2009). Performativity of theory, arbitrary conventions, and possible worlds.

It’s a thrill to see that there are forums (beyond blogs) and journals that allow for meaningful conversation, disagreement and a vetting of both sides of an issue.  Fabrizio and I disagree on some issues related to economics and society, performativity, the role of theory, etc — but, that’s what makes discussion and interaction engaging.  Fabrizio and I talked about this orgtheory guest stint last year and undoubtedly some of his posts will relate to the above discussion (and/or whatever else he’d like to post about).

OK, enough promotion.  Fabrizio — great to have you here at orgtheory!