Social Interaction & Organizing at Northwestern
Organizations are ubiquitous in our professional and personal lives. We spend the bulk of our childhood and adolescence in organizations from families and schools, to sports teams. Most Americans work in an organization of some sort, and organizations such as families consume much of our out-of work-time. The ubiquity of organizations is such that we rarely stop to consider how organizations influence our lives, and we forget that, everyday, we take some action that produces, perpetuates, or changes them.Processes of organizing and social interaction, in general, have garnered considerable attention from academics in diverse fields including management, communication, education, engineering psychology, and sociology. While some scholars focus on organizing and social interaction in the for-profit sector, others focus more on the non-profit and governmental sectors. Though scattered across different disciplines and university departments and schools, these scholars share a common interest and draw on similar, if not identical, conceptual tools.
Our group – Social Interaction and Organizing at Northwestern (SION)--brings together faculty and students (both graduate and undergraduate) from across the Northwestern campus that have an interest in how organizations shape and are shaped by the way people, firms, communities, and markets interact. SION provides a regular forum for people interested in organizing and social interaction to come together to share and discuss ideas. The SION speaker series brings prominent scholars in the field to Northwestern University to talk about their work.
Please click on the links on the left of this page to learn more about the Northwestern faculty and graduate students participating in SION. Additionally, check out the syllabi and course descriptions for the many courses offered at Northwestern on these topics. You’ll find that we have a rich community of scholars who study organizations. Moreover, the interdisciplinary nature of our community creates opportunities for rich dialogue across disciplinary, methodological, and empirical boundaries.
