75th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management (AOM)

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 75th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management will be held August 7-11, 2015, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; sessions will take place at the Vancouver Convention Centre and additional surrounding properties. The program theme is "Opening Governance".

The theme of the 2015 conference, Opening Governance, invites members to consider opportunities to improve the effectiveness and creativity of organizations by restructuring systems at the highest organizational levels. The term 'governance' refers to leadership systems, managerial control protocols, property rights, decision rights, and other practices that give organizations their authority and mandates for action. Opening governance involves revisiting these practices especially in light of big data, crowdsourcing, and other emerging digital technologies that expand the information and expertise available to organizational leaders. How and when should managers open governance practices to involvement by engaged stakeholders? What advances and problems arise from transparency in decision making? The Opening Governance theme also points to fundamental questions about how various types of organization forms compete to govern valuable resources. What are the tradeoffs associated with pursuing a specific value-creation opportunity under the governance structure of an investor-owned corporation as opposed to a privately held corporation, a B Corporation, or even a licensing arrangement or non-profit organization? How can organizations work more effectively with governmental agencies and foundations to create value?

Organizations operating under all kinds of governance structures - including companies, non-governmental organizations, hospitals, schools, and governments -- will be pressed over the next generation to make better decisions; respond more quickly to information; coordinate better; disseminate important information faster; waste less; operate more cleanly and fairly; cultivate trust through transparency; and mobilize expertise more efficiently. Digital analytics are already generating new types of insights about personal and organizational behavior. As a result, questions about the control and ownership of behavioral data will become acute. Innovation in systems of governance over massive amounts of this machine-enabled data will be central to taking up the opportunity for innovating at the levels required to address the biggest problems of our time - such as climate change and the fragility of financial systems. Organizations will be compelled to confront the interests of stakeholders in their most important information assets and, at the same time, only be able to develop and use these assets through collaboration and partnership.

The opportunities for new approaches to value creation are also extensive. Important new resources are available at scale for managing more effectively in the face of large problems: digitized information, data (big and small), communication technologies, new analytical techniques, extensive networks of relationships, and knowledge of all sorts. We know relatively less about effective mechanisms for deploying these resources effectively, and we know little about management techniques for conceptualizing and designing resources to address such problems as the informal economy or massive migrations of people into the world's cities.

Information on the important dates and the program is available on the website of the event.