Join us via Microsoft Teams from 2-4pm on Thursday 23 Sept 2021, for this online lecture with guest speakers Christof Brandtner, Martin Kornberger and Renate E. Meyer.

'THE EMERGENCE OF A SOCIAL ACTOR: THE CASE OF THE VIENNA CITY ADMINISTRATION AT THE FIN THE SIÈCLE'

(authors: Christof Brandtner, Martin Kornberger & Renate Meyer)

Abstract:

This manuscript reports results of a preliminary inquiry into the formation of the City of Vienna as collective social actor at the turn of the 20th century. We use computational text analysis of administrative reports from 1867 to 1913 and an archival case-study to explain drastic increases in administrative capacity and autonomy during the Fin de Siècle. In its most formative period, the city was recovering from an economic crash and bureaucratic rationality was challenged by intellectuals and illiberal politicians alike. These conditions are inconsistent with legal-rational and institutional theories that explain the formation of organizational actorhood in the contemporary era; our analysis shows that the city’s formation reflected neither expansionist ideology nor the ambitions of a political machine nor delegation from a crumbling Empire. Instead, we observe the formation of the city as a collective social actor as a process in which (1) the capacity to act of the city’s administrative apparatus develops hand in hand with (2) the city’s increasingly differentiated and complex vision of its environment. Our analysis of this feedback loop contributes to sociological theories of actorhood and the understanding of the progressive welfare model as driven by categorical differentiation.

Short bios:

Christof Brandtner, Assistant Professor at Emlyon Business School, is an organizational and economic sociologist who studies how institutions, organizations, and urban environments shape the emergence and diffusion of social innovations. He is completing a book about cities' efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change and conducts research on civil society organisations, corporate social responsibility, and urban resilience. He received a PhD in Sociology from Stanford University and a BSc from the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

Martin Kornberger received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Vienna in 2002. Currently he holds a Chair in Strategy at the University of Edinburgh and is a visiting fellow at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. His research focuses on strategies for and organization of new forms of distributed and collective action. He can be reached at martin.kornberger@ed.ac.uk.

Renate E. Meyer is Chair of Organization Studies and Co-Director of the Research Institute for Urban Management & Governance at WU Vienna. Renate is also Part Time Professor in Institutional Theory Copenhagen Business School and holds visiting positions at Saïd Business School, Oxford University and University of Alberta. She is current Editor of Organization Studies. Renate’s current research interests include the institutionalisation of new management ideas and their translation into new cultural contexts, institutional renewal, multimodality, novel organisational forms, collective action in crises, as well as governance structures and governance gaps mostly in urban contexts. She can be reached at renate.meyer@wu.ac.at

To attend the lecture, you will simply need to accept the Microsoft Teams meeting invite. To receive it, please email elena.giovannoni@rhul.ac.uk