Did you mean to be sarcastic when you offered a distinction between incentive and choices vs. behavioral patterns, or between outcomes vs. environmental selection?

No. I put them in quotation marks because they are PowerPoint bullets and somewhat crude generalizations, but the main point is that the disciplines are interested in different things.

I get that Joe G. intended to highlight these distinctions as meaningful, but I wasn't sure that you would think so.

Maybe I'm too immersed in the "law and economics" view to see it, but what is left in a useful discussion of "behavioral patterns" in organizations when we are done delineating "incentives and choices"? Also, I'm not sure what is meant by "environmental selection" in this context, but I can't think of organizational outcomes as anything other than emergent from some sort of 'selection' process, i.e., a process that is independent, or at least outside, of the intent of any of the individuals within the organization.

I get the feeling that I wouldn't have fit in this conference about organizations, even though what I do for a living is enhance organizational effectiveness (and teach it, in the context of corporate governance). Of course, I focus on business organizations, where the objective function is relatively easy to identify from a legal and financial perspective--what I would cite as an obvious difference versus organizations that lack such clarity in their governance.

During the small group breakout sessions, a lot of time was spent trying to cross the disciplinary divide. We had long discussions of question like, "what is an organization?" and "why would life stages matter?" Or, in the most recent session, "what do you mean by comparative?" and "what is context?" Very fundamental questions that left me with the strong impression that we are interested in different things, but without a firm handle on exactly how that plays out. I would like to explore this further because my hunch is that something important lies at the core.

I am a sociologist and I too was surprised that there was so much debate about this very question. I think one of the problems is that organizational scholars, including some who were there, don't actually study organizations, as discrete units, anymore and so the question of "what is an organization" is mostly moot. Instead of studying organizational units, many org. scholars now focus on other units like teams or projects or networks. And the reason we tend to focus more on these units is because they are much more manageable units of analysis when your motivating questions revolve around behavioral (rather than organizational outcomes) patterns. Organizational theory, in this sense, has become more about organizing and less about organizations. I should point out that this was one intention of the conference was to question whether this is a good thing at all.