Back to search

INTPART-International Partnerships for Excellent Education and Research

SCANCOR - Towards a new era of organizational studies in Norway

Alternative title: SCANCOR - Til en ny æra av organisasjonsstudier i Norge

Awarded: NOK 10.0 mill.

The multi-disciplinary field of organizational research focuses on the study of both private and public organizations. It asks questions such as: How and why are organizations structured the way they are? How do individuals shape organizational processes and practices and how are they in turn shaped by the organizations in which they act? Moreover, organizational research investigates processes of organizational change and reform. The SCANCOR-NEWORG project builds on a long-lasting partnership between Norwegian, Nordic and the two world-leading U.S. universities Harvard and Stanford, to bring teaching and research in organizational research in Norway into the next era and train the next generations of researchers. With the help of funding from INTPART and the knowledge and expertise at our nine Norwegian partner institutions as well as our international partners we organize yearly summer courses as well as yearly research workshops in Norway. We enable research visits and residencies for researchers and PhDs to Stanford and Harvard, organize guest lectures by leading U.S. academics in Norway, work on curriculum development for teaching organizational research following the latest developments in the field, and host SCANCOR's PhD workshop on Institutional Analysis in Europe. So far, the project has enabled more than 25 research residencies at Stanford and Harvard for academics from Norwegian universities. Moreover, we organized four PhD courses or workshops with a total of approximately 75 participants and three research workshops with approximately 45 participants in total. Finally, we organized several guest lectures at Norwegian universities and provided online access to weekly SCANCOR lectures at Stanford. Organizational research has a huge impact on governments as well as business life. Understanding how public and private organizations function, change, and interact with their environment is a central component for tackling societal challenges. In addition, the links between SCANCOR Stanford and the (Nordic) Silicon Valley business community provide an opportunity for scholars to interact with companies and have additional impact. Finally, strengthening the link between organizational research and education improves teaching in Norway and exposes students to the latest developments in research and world-leading scholars.

The SCANCOR-NEWORG project will solidify and expand the long-term international partnership between nine Norwegian, two world-leading U.S. and numerous Nordic higher education environments in organizational studies. The project will build on existing cooperation and widen as well as deepen the activities including a much stronger emphasis on the link between research and education with the aim to improve teaching of organizational studies and train the next generation of organizational researchers. The SCANCOR partnership – Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research - was established in 1988 and cuts across disciplinary, institutional and national borders, connecting Ph.D. students as well as researchers at different stages of their careers in the field of organizational studies from Nordic countries and the US, from disciplines such as business management, political science, economics, sociology, educational sciences and the humanities. A main aim of SCANCOR-NEWORG is to bring teaching and research in organizational studies in Norway into the next era and train the next generations of students & researchers. With the help of INTPART we want to solidify this work and expand it to include more educational activities including, among others, summer schools, co-supervision and the development of a model curriculum. The collaboration that is the basis for this application is deeper & broader than a single externally funded research project. SCANCOR represents a long-lasting network that helped to train world-leading Norwegian organizational researchers and produce groundbreaking research projects and publications, which in turn improved teaching in Norway and the US. Organizational research is interdisciplinary and entails conceptual perspectives used in many different research environments. Thus, SCANCOR-NEWORG is a setting that provides unique benefits for different types of projects and meeting points for scholars and students from different disciplines.

Funding scheme:

INTPART-International Partnerships for Excellent Education and Research