Organizational Innovation and Interactive Technology among NGOs in Postsocialist Eastern Europe

Columbia University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

This ambitious proposal by a researcher experienced at Eastern Bloc investigation seeks to examine organizational innovation and interactive technology use among Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in Postsocialist Eastern Europe, with the collaborative assistance of local on-site associates and foreign counterpart investigators and hosts. Drawing upon recent developments in organization theory, especially work at the Santa Fe institute on self-organizing, non-hierarchical systems as organizational forms that have the requisite flexibility for continuing adaptability in rapidly changing environments, the researchers propose to study the coevolution of organizational forms and interactive technologies by focusing on NGOs in four East Central European Societies, gathering data from 100 NGOs in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. Data collection will include field surveys augmented by in-depth, ethnographic studies of 20 of these organizations to provide more nuanced accounts of the lines of causation among critical variables in the study. NGOs are particularly appropriate for study because they are increasingly being pushed to move beyond their existing roles to facilitate economic and social dynamism, assisting their societies in developing sources of innovation and the capacity to generate it. Such capacity depends on both a rich associational life (badly atrophied under communism) and a requisite variety of organizational forms (which did not exist under communism). Information technology can play an important role in facilitating both aspects of generative capability. By examining variation across types of organizations among countries in the region, the researchers will chart how innovation in the adoption and use of interactive technologies is shaped by organizational form and, in turn, how new technologies facilitate organizational innovation. This study's robust and contemporary theoretical grounding and its multidisciplinary, multicultural setting promise especially interesting insights, especially as so much of prior organizational theory has been colored by a North American bias and the assumption of universality in findings.