IOA Research Forum #5

Societal and Organizational Perspectives on Planning

Date September 10, 2025 from.12.00 -13.15

Location Copenhagen Business School, Solbjerg Plads, 2000 Frederiksberg in Room SP108 

Program:
12:00 – 12:25: "Planning: a resurgent research agenda" by Christoph Sorg
12:25 – 12:50: "Planning as a temporal concept: impossibility vs. performativity" by Jonathan Feddersen
12:50 – 13:15: Plenary discussion

Talk abstracts:
Planning: a resurgent research agenda
By Christoph Sorg 

Economic planning has made a turbulent comeback in the age of digitalization and climate crisis. Against the background of the edited volume “Creative Construction” (Bristol University Press) and the special issue “Rethinking Economic Planning” (Competition&Change), both co-edited with Jan Groos, I will first situate the new body of literature on planning in the context of the historical socialist calculation debate. I will then provide an overview of the current literature and focus on three themes: planning in contemporary capitalism, digital planning and ecological planning. 

Planning as a temporal concept: impossibility vs. performativity 
By Jonathan Feddersen 

In a strict temporal sense, planning is impossible because it projects futures that do not yet exist and rarely unfold as imagined. At the same time, planning is performative, shaping present actions and thereby creating conditions that make certain futures more likely. This talk explores this tension through the cases of Denmark’s handling of a mink-related disease risk during the COVID-19 pandemic, the construction of the world’s first offshore wind farm, and the deployment of artificial reefs to enhance biodiversity around offshore wind turbines. 

Short bios:
Christoph Sorg is a social scientist at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In his PhD, he researched resistance to debt, combining political economy and social movement research. Since then, he has focused less on the action repertories of social movements and more on their utopias. In particular, he researches theories of capitalism and post-capitalism and the new debate on economic planning in times of digitalization and the climate crisis. In a DFG project on this topic, he is theorizing the possibilities of economic planning in marketing economies. 

Jonathan Feddersen is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Organization and the Centre for Organization and Time (COT). Jonathan’s research focuses on the interplay between the temporal, spatial, and material dimensions of organizing, focusing on empirical cases of (sustainable) innovation. In addition, he engages in the development of event-based methods for organizational process studies. In his current research, Jonathan works with Ørsted, a Danish renewable energy company, investigating the role of marine nature-based solutions in working towards Ørsted’s goal of becoming biodiversity net positive by 2030.