A Conversation from the CASBS Summer Institute on Organizations and Their Effectiveness at Stanford University, California
With Woody Powell and Bob Gibbons
This is a special episode in which we reflect on the question of how to build interdisciplinary spaces and dialogues across disciplines for the study of organizations. We sit down with Woody Powell and Bob Gibbons who, since 2016, have been organizing the Summer Institute on Organizations and Their Effectiveness at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) in Stanford, California. We ask them to reflect on the history of CASBS and the summer institute, the value of fostering interdisciplinary conversations on the study of organizations, and the way in which they design and conduct the summer institute to allow young scholars across economics, sociology, management, public policy, political science, information and communication studies, and other fields, to learn from one another.
Woody and Bob have been developing a “method” for the summer institute that consists on a large body of pre-required readings (across disciplines) that challenge participants to think broadly about organizations. There are seminar-style sessions and also “guest chefs”—like Nobel Prize economist Jean Tirole and former Justice of the Supreme Court of California Tino Cuellar—that detonate and structure discussions among participants. Woody and Bob encourage participants to engage with new or “strange” ideas in terms of Picaso (borrowing and using across fields); Pound (translating and adapting to mean a slightly different thing); ICU (the immediate impulse to throw across the room); Oyster (working on an initially annoying thought that turns into a pearl); or simply enjoying a walk through a garden of weird flowers that one might not encounter again nor wish to take home. We are joined by participants of the 2023 summer institute as well as alumni from past years.
*We thank CASBS for granting permission to use their logo; and thanks to Woody Powell for the featured image.
Theme: How (and why) to foster dialogue and productive exchanges across disciplines?
You may also download the audio file here
Click here to view the announcement for the 2024 Summer Institute — application deadline is 13 December 2023!
Here are some additional resources about the 2023 Summer Institute graciously provided by Woody and Bob. These include the Week 1 syllabus for the 2023 program and the Week 1 schedule.
