5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Over the last decades, universities have been subject to constant change and transformation. They are no longer part of society as custodians and multipliers of knowledge, but rather as organising, distributing, managing, monetising or producing organisations of knowledge. And in doing so, they no longer fulfil purely scientific and educational tasks, but are firmly anchored in those of the economy, politics and civil society. On the one hand, these aren’t new demands and expectations placed on universities. On the other hand, however, in recent decades they have been placed at the centre of political, economic and civil transformations.

This has had epistemic effects within organisational sociology, not only from a theoretical perspective, i.e. questions about what form of organisation universities are. The associated organisational structures and the members of the organisation are also at the centre of multi-layered attempts at definition and discourse interpretations in organisational sociology. For example questions about the mechanisms and discursive practices of subject formation are discussed? What epistemic shifts, ruptures, realignments and mergers in the understanding of knowledge can be observed? And what effects can be described for the organisations of knowledge, the universities?

The proposed session calls for contributions that address these and other questions. We welcome conceptual papers comparing different concepts of universities or other organisations of knowledge, knowledge itself and its subjectivative impacts as well as empirical contributions or papers on methodological challenges.