New organizational forms: Reviewing traditions, themes, and trends

Other conference contribution, 2024

Organization scholars across traditions seem fascinated by so-called 'new organizational forms'. Despite an abundance of both conceptual and empirical research, decades-old calls for conceptual clarity and central questions about organizational form newness remain unanswered. This paper presents insights from a review of 160 articles on new organizational forms, outlining different traditions, themes, and trends across more than 30 years of new forms research. By proposing a common definition of new organizational forms as unique identity-forming arrangements of organizational elements as well as presenting a heatmap of organizational form changes across different domains and operators, this paper aims to clarify what researchers mean when they talk about new organizational forms.