Professor Gazi Islam gave an invited seminar entitled “Ritual, Communitas and Institution: Theorizing Events as Moments of Organizing” to the Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at the University of Milan, on the 22nd of January, 2020. Here is the abstract taken from the event page:

Organized events such as rituals, conferences, summits, and festivals have become an increasingly examined topic in organizational scholarship. At the same time as scholarship has noted the fragmentation and fluidity of organizational life, attention has shifted to forms of “partial” organization, of which events form an important example. Such events can be singular or repeated, turned toward social reproduction or change, and emphasized socio-affective aspects of community or the structuration of formal institutions and rules. This heterogeneity has provided a challenge for organizational scholars, especially when aspects of change and transformation, uniqueness and history, informality and formality, alternate as moments within such events, making it difficult to theorize both events’ external diversity and internal heterogeneity. In this talk, I will outline an emergent research agenda around organizational events. I will draw upon my own theoretical and empirical work, while couching this work in the broader literature, to argue that attention to events reveals tensions occurring in organizational life more generally. On this basis, I venture some potential pathways for scholars to build upon in understanding events in terms of their psychological, relational, and social implications.