25th Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism
1-4 July 2007, Ljubljana, Slovenia

SIGNS OF THE FUTURE: MANAGEMENT, MESSIANISM, CATASTROPHE


Today the future seems both more promising and more perilous than ever before. What will the future look like, and by what signs will we know it? How are we organizing for the future, and how might we plan for different futures of culture and organization? After various attempts to bring history to an end, today we again sense a mood of possibility. There is, it would seem, a future for the future. What will that future hold?

Victor Hugo writes: ‘For what tomorrow will be, no one knows’. This kind of remark might seem a poetic extravagance when faced with the need to plan and to organise for the future. Any practical person knows that in order to bring about our plans we must organise gradually and methodically, paying due care and attention to the demands of time. But at the same time, we sense that the more routinized our planning for the future, the less likely that the future will be particularly surprising. In this way, maybe the last thing that any manager wants is to come face to face with the future.

The future often appears today in the popular imagination as complete system failure or global ecological catastrophe. The end of the world is now no longer a religious problem, but something of immediate concern to policymakers and newspaper readers. If the future involves increasingly unmanageable waves of risk, out of this crisis emerges the possibility of a different future, the promise of a future as radically different.

If we learned from the twentieth century the dangers of eschatological promises of a perfect future, today we sense both the peril of those promises and at the same time the catastrophe that the future will bring if we remain on our current course. The theme of the future therefore asks profound questions about alternative futures. If these no longer appear in the form of Utopia, they do however imply the impossibility of refusing messianism and hope. Hence the prospect of speaking, following Jacques Derrida, of a ‘messianicity without messianism’ and a future that is forever to-come.

Writing in the spring of 1940, Walter Benjamin offered the image of Angelus Novus, which looks back at the past and sees ‘one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage’ (‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’). But what if the angel looked over its shoulder to glimpse the signs of the future? If the angel could read those signs of the future, would it stop, would it shudder, would it take flight?

Contributions are invited that consider any aspects of the future of work, culture and organization, and some indicative topics follow:

-- Visions of the future: utopias, dystopias, brave new worlds
-- The future of the economy: prospects for capitalism and the state
-- Trading on the future: futures market and their philosophical grounds
-- Spectacle and speculation
-- Prediction, anticipation, planning
-- Interruption and discontinuity
-- Attempts to create new worlds: ‘Another world is possible’ (The World Social Forum)
-- Mourning, loss, trauma
-- Memory, nostalgia and the relation to the past: the ‘future within the present’ and the celebration of the past in the name of the future
-- Responsibility, promise, justice
-- Mastering the future: chaos and control
-- Managing risk and event
-- Planetary futures: the rise of new economic and cultural superpowers
-- Pensions funds, saving for the future
-- The end of work, the endlessness of work
-- The future of nature: ecological sustainability, environmental catastrophe
-- Responsibilities for not yet born others
-- The future of diversity, gender and difference
-- The future of communication: new media technologies, the end of the book
-- The future of the academy: the business school of tomorrow
-- Cyborgs and other hybrid bodies
-- Fictions of the future: science and fantasy
-- Accessing the future: futurology, divination, sacrifice
-- Concepts of time past, present and future
-- The ‘now’, the out of joint and the untimely
-- The future of the sign: asignifying practices and the war against the signifier

This list is intended to be indicative only. We actively encourage innovative takes on the conference theme, as well as those that focus on more than one of the above areas. With its long tradition of inter-disciplinary reflections, SCOS encourages papers that draw insights and approaches from across a range of disciplines. In addition to scholars working in management and organization studies we welcome contributions from anthropology, sociology, philosophy, politics, art history, communication, film and gender studies. Contributions can be theoretical, empirical or methodological, but should address their subject matter in a critical and rigorous fashion.

Open stream
An open stream at SCOS XXV will facilitate interesting presentations of recent developments in research on organizational culture and symbolism that do not connect directly to the conference theme. Papers are therefore invited on any aspect of theory, methodology, fieldwork or practice that is of continuing interest to the SCOS community.