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About. 

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This Professional Development Workshop (PDW) brings together institutional and innovation scholars to discuss the interpretive dynamics of form emergence through the lens of (online) crowds and their collective minds. The theoretical and practical relevance of studying crowd dynamics has never been stronger, as the expansion of digital technologies and crowdsourcing is increasingly giving rise to new forms of organizing, namely the "crowd-forms." Can we build systematic theories linking shifting meaning patterns of a collective mind to the political process of new form emergence?  How should we study the role of institutional entrepreneurs in the context of the crowd's meaning inter-connectedness?

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Enabled by the Web, virtual crowds and their shifting minds are shifting the locus of change from a few central actors to massively decentralized social interactions. How we ought to understand novelty emergence is thus changing as well, and we need new mechanisms that can better explain how the next big thing comes about in the absence of coordination.

 

This PDW is dedicated to tackling these issues and discussing promising areas of research going forward.

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