76th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management

The 76th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management will be held August 5-9, in Anaheim, California, USA. The program theme is "Making Organizations Meaningful". 

The Academy of Management Annual Meeting is the premier conference for more than 10,000 students, academics, scholars, and professionals in the scholarly  management and organization space.  

The theme of the present year invites, in particular, a wide-ranging spectrum of theoretical perspectives, methods, and applications, both classic and contemporary, which investigate those processes and outcomes that are associated with making organizations meaningful or perhaps even meaningless.

The meaningfulness of an organization is its expression of purpose, values or worth.  It involves a sense of significance that goes beyond material success or profitability; rather, it highlights how organizations can play a larger and more positive role in the world.  It is an approach embraced by the next generation of workers, the millennials (in their mid-to-late 30s), who often focus on making a positive difference in the world and a contribution to society -- with organizations, not in spite of them.

Making organizations meaningful matters, and it matters in a multitude of ways that are both immediate and far-reaching, ranging from environmental sustainability to social equality, and extending across multiple levels of analysis.  Meaningfulness at micro levels alerts us to engaging employees in work so as to maximize human potential and, at macro levels, it turns attention to organizational identity, culture, reputation, legitimacy and character.  By looking across levels, we can discover mechanisms that potentially amplify or even mute meaningfulness, as well as the contrast of meaninglessness.  We might ask:  What are the mechanisms – political, economic, social, cultural or institutional – which situate and produce organizational meaningfulness (or the lack thereof)?  What mechanisms are particularly salient for reaching different constituencies?  How might this vary across a range of social, cultural or economic settings?   This is fertile ground for researchers, given that organizational expressions of meaningfulness can be:  communicated through different mediums, including practices, language, strategic behavior, leadership, ethics or culture; directed towards a varied set of stakeholders; and signaled strategically or symbolically, implicitly or explicitly.

More information on the conference, its theme and the program is available on the website of the event.