Dear Scossers,

A note to try to lighten the weight of your day today with dragon-like fantasies may be somewhat tarnished by the bureaucratic requirement of organisational compliance in item 1. Nonetheless, please make sure you get in touch to keep receiving the newsletter. Our other items should fit more closely with your aesthetic, symbolic and future imaginaries. Take a look!

Item 1 –  GDPR and SCOS – get in touch to stay in or opt out of the newsletter!

Item 2 – Call For Papers –  the 9th Making Projects Critical Workshop

Item 3 – Call for Sub-theme proposals CMS 2019

Item 4 – Still accepting submissions to C&O Special Issue on ‘Carne’

Item 5 – Senior Lecturer vacancy at UWE

Best

Laura

Item 1: GDPR and SCOS

Dear SCOS members

as many of you will know, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a new legal requirement coming into effect in the UK next month based on EU law to protect citizen’s information. As an unincorporated association without paid employees, SCOS doesn’t fall into the majority of the categories affected by the most substantial audit and record-keeping requirements. However, as many of the board members are employees of university systems and these are the systems we use to store information and communicate with each other we are beholden to university practices. As member secretary it also seems to me a timely opportunity to communicate with you about the way in which we collect and manage members information.

What personal data do we have on members?

We hold information on member’s names, e-mail addresses, institutional affiliation or company, and (where provided) job title, country of residence and joining date. Conference organisers also collect information specific to participants and attendees of the conference such as postal addresses, contact details, payment information and dietary requirements.

Who can access this information?

Member information is accessible to the board members. A full list of board members and positions is available on our website http://www.scos.org/scos-board/ where you can also find our constitution which outlines the roles and electoral process in more detail. Members can request to find out what information is held about them (and request corrections!) by getting in touch with the membership secretary or relevant conference organisers.

What is this data used for?

Membership information is used to promote communications and connections between SCOS members on the interlinked issues of organizational symbolism, culture and change, and interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary understandings of organisation and management. Communications are sent (approximately) monthly through the newsletter and are duplicated on social media platforms. Data collected by conference organisers is passed to the SCOS board annually so we can add new members to the newsletter mailing list and also passed on to the publishers of the journal Culture & Organisation in order to manage paper subscriptions and e-subscriptions to the journal. 

Changes in practice

In line with the GDPR changes, I need to have a record of opted-in consent from members to hold and process your data. As membership secretary I will review these records following the conference and will be making it easier for you to opt-out of further communications and withdraw from membership by adding a clear unsubscribe link to the newsletter.

What do I need to do?

• If you still want to receive the regular newsletter and be registered as a SCOS member, send an email reply to the membership secretary with the clear subject ‘remain a member’ 
• If you definitely want to be removed from our list of members and would like to unsubscribe from the newsletter send an email reply to the membership secretary with the clear subject ‘unsubscribe‘.

Reminders will be sent to members from whom I have not had a response until late May after which time those members on the list who have not responded will be removed from the current membership list.

Item 2 Call For Papers –  the 9th Making Projects Critical Workshop

We are pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the 9th Making Projects Critical Workshop, to be held at Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden, on Jan 17-18, 2019.

“Making Projects Critical” is the title of series of international workshops intended to provide a forum for research from a wide range of critical perspectives relating to all aspects of projects, including project management, project based organising and the ‘projectification’ of society. Such critique finds inspiration in the writings of a range of authors, drawing, among others, on Labour Process Theory, Critical Theory, Actor Network Theory (and post-ANT), STS, sociomateriality, critical environmentalism, feminism, postmodernism, moral-philosophical pedagogy and other traditions broadly related to Critical Management Studies.

Through the workshop, we hope to highlight and, where possible, remedy the theoretical and methodological limitations of traditional conceptions of projects and project management. In particular, the intention is to draw upon wider intellectual resources than the instrumental rationality, quantitative and positivist methodologies and technicist solutions, which have been used traditionally to understand, implement and control organisational projects, and to reflect on the implications of alternative perspectives for project management practice.

For the MPC9 we especially invite papers that address one or several of the following themes:

• Projects in non-traditional project settings: Which tensions occur when projects are implemented and carried out in settings where projects are deployed as support activities rather than constituting the core business? How is resistance manifested and how does power shift in such organisations when projects are deployed? Which discursive strategies are employed to deal with dysfunctionalities?

• Projects and digitalisation: How are projects, project work and project management digitalised and how may this be understood from a critical theoretical perspective? What happens to project members as possibilities of monitoring them increase? Which are the new “digital divides” that digital project work creates? How do project workers collaborate with digital co-workers? Are digitalization efforts carried out through projects and with which consequences?

• Projects and space: How is project work spatially situated and which are the consequences of this for the distribution of power? What does the emergence of collaborative spaces of various kinds (coworking spaces, fablabs, activity-based offices, etc) mean for project work? does the projectification of society enable the emergence of new workplaces? How does project work affect the relation to the “workplace”, whatever this may be (for instance in the case of nomadic workers)?

• Critical projects: How are subversive, norm critical/creative and revolutionary projects managed? How do projects with objectives relating to gender, ethnicity, equality, sustainability and social innovation unfold? Which barriers and pitfalls do they encounter and how may this be related to their form, the role of stakeholders or the practices that develop in and through them?

We also invite papers that broadly address the themes typical of the critical project management tradition, for example: power, domination, resistance and emancipation in project work; dysfunctional project rationalities; projectification and de-projectification; dialectics, disruption, revolution and reformation in and through projects; tensions between standardization and creativity in project organisations; and ethics and moral responsibility within projects.

Papers may draw on ethnographies, case studies or the study of discourses but may also be in the form of conceptualisations or theoretical discussions.

Extended abstracts (2-3 pages including references) required by September 1st 2018. Please send all submissions via e-mail to MPC9@mdh.se with “MPC9 abstract” in the subject header.

For more information and the Call For Papers, please see the workshop webpage: http://www.mdh.se/forskning/event/2.5058

Item 3 – CMS 2019 Call for sub-theme proposals

The 11^th International Conference in Critical Management Studies

PRECARIOUS PRESENTS, OPEN FUTURES

Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, UK

27^th – 29th June 2019

CALL FOR SUB-THEME PROPOSALS

The Department for People and Organisations, in collaboration with VIDA, the Critical Management Studies Association, will host the International CMS conference in 2019 around the theme of ‘Precarious Presents, Open Futures’. This theme invites theoretical and empirical analysis of what it means for societies and organizations to be ‘open’ in the 21^st century, what currently constitutes radical political, economic, historical and ethical openness, and how this openness is under attack from renewed discourses of individualized privilege and closure.

It was once claimed that the new millennium would mark the ‘end of history’, characterized by the permanent victory of the free market and liberal democracy. Yet these triumphant visions have been profoundly challenged by the global financial crisis and the growing populist demand for radical change across the ideological spectrum. Rising inequality and the growth of the precarious economy, marked by zero hour contracts and other unstable and insecure working arrangements, have meant that, for many, modern working life is tainted by material insecurity and psychological anxiety. Faith in democracy is being upturned by the spread of oligarchy and the troubling return of nativism, racism and nationalism. Our very identities are threatened in a present where personal data are routinely harvested and exploited, as exemplified by many recent scandals. And all of these concerns are exacerbated by fear of a hi-tech, automated, dystopian future of mass unemployment.

Still, these uncertainties may also prove to be the catalyst for creating new opportunities to profoundly reshape and reorganize our economies, politics and societies. Once sacred neoliberalist assumptions are now threatened by new ideas, like a universal basic income, while seemingly entrenched elites may be at risk. ‘Industry 4.0’ – a potentially unholy mix of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and cyber-physical systems, which is predicted to revolutionize manufacturing – is a very daunting possibility. However, it might be supplemented, dramatically transformed, even supplanted by ideas of ‘democracy 4.0’ and ‘development 4.0’. Perhaps we can completely reimagine contemporary management thinking and organizations so that they are as radically ‘empowering’ as they are ‘smart’, challenging dominant paradigms based on patriarchy, racism and ethnic discrimination, ageism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and colonialism.

For these reasons, it is more urgent than ever to ask: who is influencing these new histories? How can they be further democratized and owned by the many rather than the elite few, the 99% and not the 1%? Such concerns are especially significant as developments like Brexit and the election of Donald Trump reveal a distinct politics of closure and exclusion in regard to geographic borders, ‘facts’ and hard-won progress around expanding social inclusion. At the same time, open source creation, collaboration and information are recalibrating the potential for personal and collective interactions and knowledge sharing across the globe. At stake, therefore, is a resurgent need to radically reconceive the meanings and practices associated with openness. It is also vital that we critically assess how and in what ways they might actually be(come) open, rather than simply giving the appearance of openness.   In short, then, how can CMS contribute to transforming our precarious presents into possibilities for genuinely open futures?

For the 2019 conference, we therefore invite stream and workshop proposals which critically unpack new concepts including – but not limited to – digital inclusion, decolonizing data management, trans-human management, alternative human-animal relations, open source organizations, virtual progress, glocal solidarity and mobile organizing. These concepts (and many others) allow for an exploration of how technologies and emerging forms of organization can subvert established identities, and open the space for new and marginalized voices to shape our presents and futures. We are also interested in proposals that engage with the contemporary production and organization of knowledge – specifically its openness to alternative perspectives and traditionally marginalized voices – as well as how emerging techniques and technologies associated with ‘open information’ are reinforcing old or fostering new forms of ideological and social closure.  Proposals which engage with the broader sociopolitical, economic and technological changes outlined above and how CMS can respond to them in order to help shape more open societies are equally welcome. These would require reflection on our own role as researchers, educators and ‘intellectual activists’, as well as the (changing) role of universities in producing both closures and openness in the contemporary context. Just as importantly, we are committed to ‘opening up’ how a conference is organized and managed, creating collaborative spaces for constructive knowledge sharing between academics, activists, practitioners, artists and policy makers, inter alia. These could include activist led ‘unstreams’ or ‘noworkshops’, performances, art sharing sessions and interactive installations involving virtual technology and mobile games.

Proposals should include an outline of the proposed sub-theme (500-750 words), as well as a short description of the team of convenors, including their backgrounds and experience. We expect most of the submissions to be linked with the overall conference theme, but other submissions are welcome as long as they are likely to appeal to the wider CMS community. We particularly seek proposals from convenor teams that are international in their composition; and are keen to encourage proposals from the range of management studies disciplines (accounting and finance, human resource management, industrial relations, marketing and consumption, organization studies, international business, etc.) and related disciplines including – but not limited to – sociology, human geography, cultural studies, anthropology and psychology. Cross-,multi-/ interdisciplinary proposals are also very much encouraged.

Please note that we will apply the principle of progressive stacking in the event that  we receive more proposals than we can accommodate for the conference. This approach means that convenor teams including members of non-dominant gender, racial, ethnic, sexual, age, ability and regional groupings will be given priority over other teams whose proposals are deemed to be of an equally high standard.

The deadline for submission of sub-theme proposals is 1st September 2018. Please send these to the local organizing committee at OUBS-CMS2019@open.ac.uk. Convenors will be notified by 29^th  September 2018 of the outcome of their submissions. Any questions can be directed to the same email address.

Item 4 – C&O CfP ‘Carne’ – it’s meaty business!

CARNE – Flesh and Organization

Call for papers for a special issue of culture and organization

volume 25, issue 4, 2019

“Flesh, we believe – more than bodies – is at stake in our posthuman times, in the sense that it is flesh that is subject to increased control either in the laboratory or the marketplace and is caught up in processes of modification that seek to master and profit from it.” (Diamanti et al., 2009, 4)

This call for papers takes off from the longstanding use of the notion of flesh in academic investigations of the more or less porous boundaries between the self, others and the world around us. Flesh, these works suggest, is ontologically slippery and definitionally elusive. For Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964), flesh reconnects the viewing and the visible, the touching and the touched, the body and the world. Perception itself is a fleshly – auditory, visual, gustatory, haptic, olfactory – activity. Moreover, as Antonio Strati (2007) points out in his discussion of the connections between practice-based learning and ‘sensible knowledge’ in organizations, when we perceive others, we always perceive them as fundamentally corporeal. Equally, the world acts upon our flesh, so that what or whom we touch, see, smell, taste and hear may touch, see, smell, taste and hear us. Elsewhere, Michel Foucault locates modern western scientia sexualis as having its origins in the earliest years of Christianity and its confessional regime which seeks to unearth “the important secrets of the flesh” (1977, 154) as the deepest truths of the human subject. In this reading, flesh is the natural body, always and irrevocably bound to sin and to death.

Cherríe Moraga (2015, 19), on the other hand, identifies a theory in the flesh as “one where the physical realities of our lives – our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings – all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity”. In a very different feminist analysis, Judith Butler (1990, 96, 33) defines gender as the “styles of the flesh” which “congeal over time”; whereas Vicki Kirby (1997) takes her and other feminist poststructuralists to task in Telling Flesh for their overstatement of the cultural inscription of the body, and argues that “once you are seriously displacing the nature/language opposition, you have to be arguing that nature, far from being written on, and insofar as it cannot be said to ‘lack language’, ‘must be articulate’ (page 90).

Elspeth Probyn (2001), on the other hand, provides a dazzling array of ways to understand skin both materially, metonymically and metaphorically – it protects and is vulnerable, it can be bruised and breached, it is porous, it expands and retracts, it devours and is devoured, it has colour, texture and sensation.

Organization studies scholars have, nonetheless, perhaps been somewhat neglectful of flesh in our various endeavours; whilst for the last three decades or so we have paid a great deal of attention to the body, we have largely overlooked flesh. Yet, as our opening epigraph implies, flesh can be connected to organization/s and organizing in manifold different ways. Possible contributions to this special issue could therefore include but are certainly not limited to:

• The pleasures of the flesh: carnality, sensuality, excess and indulgence in, of and as provided by organizations (and their opposites).
• ‘Fleshworkers’ – cosmetic surgeons, masseuses, cosmetic surgeons, tattooists, make-up artists, slaughterhouse workers, morticians, laboratory scientists etc. – and the markets for their services.
• The resurging significance of the provenance of meat and fish in western eating habits and its cultural, symbolic and economic implications.
• Vegetarianism, veganism, ‘clean’ and raw food diets, the markets around and commodification of these practices.
• Researching the flesh, bodily, sensory, fleshly, aesthetic or sensible knowing and/ or methods, the ethics of fleshly research.  Organizing (and researching) in meatspace and virtual space, ‘in the flesh’ and online.
• Bodily changes, wounding, scarring and dysmorphia in organizations.
• Flesh-eaters and the undead: cannibals, vampires and zombies as organizational metaphors.
• The organization of organ donation and the global black market in body parts.
• The global meat industry and its manifold discontents: eg, the certification and marketing of halal meat, the UK horse meat scandal.
• (Re)incarnation and incorporation in and of organizations.
• Pro-ana, pro-mia and fat acceptance organizations.
• Organizational metaphors of the flesh: eg, the ‘lean organization’, a ‘meaty question’, ‘fleshing out an argument’, a ‘meat market’, ‘dead meat’ etc.
• The use of animal skin for clothing and furnishings and the complex global differences of necessity versus excess.
• The ethics and politics of organizing as understood through Agamben’s zoë (bare life) and bios (qualified life) … and so on.

This list is intended to be indicative only.  Innovative interpretations of the call are encouraged.  With its long tradition of inter-disciplinary approaches, C&O invites papers that draw insights and approaches from across a range of social sciences and humanities.  In addition to scholars working in management and organization studies we welcome contributions from anthropology, sociology, philosophy, politics, art history, communication, film, gender and cultural studies. We also welcome papers from any disciplinary, paradigmatic or methodological perspective as long as they directly address the theme of flesh and organization.  

Editorial team, submission and informal enquiries

The editorial team for this special issue are: Ilaria Boncori (University of Essex), Jo Brewis (University of Leicester), Luigi Maria Sicca (University of Naples) and Charlie Smith (University of Leicester).

Please ensure that all submissions to the special issue are made via the ScholarOne Culture and Organization site at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/gsco. You will have to sign up for an account before you are able to submit a manuscript. Please ensure when you do submit that you select the relevant special issue (Volume 25, Issue 4) to direct your submission appropriately. If you experience any problems, please contact the editors of this issue.

Style and other instructions on manuscript preparation can be found at the journal’s website: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/gsco20/current. Manuscript length should not exceed 8000 words, including appendices and supporting materials. Please also be aware that any images used in your submission must be your own, or where they are not, you must already have permission to reproduce them in an academic journal. You should make this explicit in the submitted manuscript.

Manuscripts must be submitted by 31st May 2018.

Prospective authors are invited to discuss manuscript ideas for the special issue with the guest editors before the deadline for submissions.  They can be reached via e-mail at: scosxxxv@gmail.com.

References

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall.

Foucault, Michel. 1977. “Power and Sex.” Telos 32: 152-161.

Hart, Lynda. 1998. Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism. Columbia University Press: New York.

Kirby, Vicki. 1997. Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. New York: Routledge.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Moraga, Cherríe. 2015. “Introduction. Entering the Lives of Others: Theory in the Flesh.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, fourth edition, 19. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Probyn, Elspeth. 2001. “Eating Skin.” In Thinking Through the Skin, edited by Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey, 87-103. London: Routledge.

Strati, Antonio. 2007. “Sensible Knowledge and Practice-Based Learning.” Management Learning 38 (1): 61-77.

Item 5 – Vacancy at UWE

Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies (Leadership and Change)

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/BJA464/senior-lecturer-in-organisation-studies-leadership-and-change/

The Department of Business and Management, based in UWE’s Bristol Business School, comprises four subject clusters. The Organisation Studies (OS) cluster is currently looking to recruit a Senior Lecturer in the areas of Leadership and Change.

The OS subject cluster has 34 permanent members of academic staff, including 3 professors, 4 associate professors and a number of Associate Lecturers. In addition to Leadership and Change, the cluster also covers Organisational Behaviour, Coaching and Mentoring at PG/UG and ILM 5 and ILM 7.

The OS cluster includes coaching and most academic input into innovative UG Team Entrepreneurship and the PG Applied Entrepreneurship programme.

Colleagues in OS also contribute to teaching across the range of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in the Faculty of Business and Law alongside a range of practice-based programmes and bespoke offerings.

We are looking for a candidate to increase our capacity in the areas of Leadership and Change. Successful applicants will join a thriving community of academics engaged in a broad range of research and scholarly activities across these areas with many colleagues actively participating in The Bristol Centre for Leadership and Change.

At senior lecturer level, you will actively lead and participate in the design, development and assessment of module(s), and take overall responsibility for the academic health and currency of the module(s)/programme and perform a visible leadership role in relation to the teaching team.

Anyone interested in this Bristol Business School vacancy please get in touch with Peter Case, email: Peter.Case@uwe.ac.uk and mobile: +44 (0)7896 281408

Dear SCOSsers

February is here and today tiny drifting snowflakes are still passing my window. Is it the long freeze and the start of a new ice age? Likely not, as the snowdrops that I seem to only ever see planted on roundabouts and in old ladies’ gardens are happily enjoying the odd spot of sunshine in between. It seems that while I have been doing my best impersonation of a (hardworking) hibernating hermit hedgehog, however…SCOSsers around the globe have been busy! Today’s email newsletter is bursting with items to excite and affect.

Don’t forget, if you know anyone who might be interested in SCOS and wants to join the membership they just need to get in touch, so do mention us to colleagues and research students.

Item 1 ACSCOS/SCOS Conference  “Wabi-sabi (侘寂): Imperfection, incompleteness and impermanence in Organisational Life” Deadline for abstracts is 28th February

Item 2 CMS 2019 to be hosted by the Open University in collaboration with VIDA

Item 3  Job Opening at Université Saint-Paul, Canada.

Item 4 Job Opening at Essex Business School, UK

Item 5 Culture and Organization SI Carne deadline is coming up in May 2018 so get those pens working if you plan to submit!

Item 6 Free one-day Conference “Witches WAGS and Wideboys” at Essex Business School

Item 7 CfP ‘Affects & Collective Practices of the Undercommons’

Best wishes

Laura

Item 1: ACSCOS/SCOS Conference  “Wabi-sabi (侘寂): Imperfection, incompleteness and impermanence in Organisational Life”

Deadline for abstracts is 28th February and please note that there are a variety of PhD and ECR scholarships and bursaries available, including some specifically for Australasian delegates so applications are encouraged.

You can find further information on the conference website at http://scos2018.org/ or contact the organisers directly on scosacscos2018@gmail.com

Item 2: CMS 2019 to be hosted by the Open University in collaboration with VIDA

ICMS is excited to announce that the Open University led by the Department of People and Organisations and in collaboration with VIDA has been selected, from a shortlist of excellent proposals, to host the 11th International Critical Management Studies conference around the theme of “Precarious Presents, Open Futures”.

In a statement, Peter Bloom, Head of Department for ‘People and Organizations’ at the Open University said:

‘We are enthusiastic in our desire to foster discussions, papers and installations/interventions regarding what it means for societies and organisations to be “open” in the 21st century.  This includes, but it is not limited to how being open  is under attack by renewed discourses of individualized privilege and “closure”, as well as exploring what currently constitutes a radical or even revolutionary form of political, economic, historical, and ethical openness in organisations and management, and the possibilities of what this could look like in the future.

We are thus interested in critical interventions that explore timely and new concepts such as “digital inclusion”, “decolonizing data management”, “trans-human management”, “open sourced organisations”, “virtual progress”, “glocal solidarity”, and “mobile organizing”. These themes all critically interrogate the ways that technologies and emerging forms of organization can subvert established identities,  processes and practices, values/ ideals and open eup space for new and marginalised voices to shape the present and future. Just as importantly, we are committed to “opening up” how a conference is organized and managed – inviting collaborative and creative spaces for constructing knowledge sharing between academics, activists, practitioners, artists, and policy makers.’

CMS 2019 will take place at the Milton Keynes main campus of the Open University. Details including finalised dates and a conference email address and a call for streams, workshops, installations, interventions and other events will follow. In the meantime, please contact peter.bloom@open.ac.uk if you would like any further information on the CMS 2019 conference.

Item 3 : Job Opening at Université Saint-Paul, Canada.

I am a the director of Saint-Paul University’s new school of social innovation in Ottawa, Canada. We are opening a new position in management of social organization, you can find the description here. Someone with a critical management studies background would fit very well for this position, so I thought it might interest people involved in SCOS.

Simon Tremblay-Pepin

Professeur, Université Saint-Paul

Directeur de l’École d’Innovation sociale

Item 4: Job Opening at Essex Business School, UK

SL/R in HRM at Essex Business School

This is an exciting opportunity to join the newly established Organisation Studies and Human Resource Management (HRM) Group at Essex Business School in the field of Human Resource Management as either a Senior Lecturer or Reader.

If successful, you will be part of a team of more than 14 research active members, consisting of early and established researchers with a global reputation for their work in critical organisation studies, HRM, and equality and diversity.

We are keen to appoint a talented scholar with experience in any area of HRM. We would, however, especially welcome applications from those with expertise in:

International HRM
Strategic HRM
Human Resource Development

For further details please follow the link 

Item 5: CfP Culture and Organization Special Issue “Carne”

CARNE – Flesh and Organization

Call for papers for a special issue of culture and organization

volume 25, issue 4, 2019

“Flesh, we believe – more than bodies – is at stake in our posthuman times, in the sense that it is flesh that is subject to increased control either in the laboratory or the marketplace and is caught up in processes of modification that seek to master and profit from it.” (Diamanti et al., 2009, 4)

This call for papers takes off from the longstanding use of the notion of flesh in academic investigations of the more or less porous boundaries between the self, others and the world around us. Flesh, these works suggest, is ontologically slippery and definitionally elusive. For Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964), flesh reconnects the viewing and the visible, the touching and the touched, the body and the world. Perception itself is a fleshly – auditory, visual, gustatory, haptic, olfactory – activity. Moreover, as Antonio Strati (2007) points out in his discussion of the connections between practice-based learning and ‘sensible knowledge’ in organizations, when we perceive others, we always perceive them as fundamentally corporeal. Equally, the world acts upon our flesh, so that what or whom we touch, see, smell, taste and hear may touch, see, smell, taste and hear us. Elsewhere, Michel Foucault locates modern western scientia sexualis as having its origins in the earliest years of Christianity and its confessional regime which seeks to unearth “the important secrets of the flesh” (1977, 154) as the deepest truths of the human subject. In this reading, flesh is the natural body, always and irrevocably bound to sin and to death.

Cherríe Moraga (2015, 19), on the other hand, identifies a theory in the flesh as “one where the physical realities of our lives – our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings – all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity”. In a very different feminist analysis, Judith Butler (1990, 96, 33) defines gender as the “styles of the flesh” which “congeal over time”; whereas Vicki Kirby (1997) takes her and other feminist poststructuralists to task in Telling Flesh for their overstatement of the cultural inscription of the body, and argues that “once you are seriously displacing the nature/language opposition, you have to be arguing that nature, far from being written on, and insofar as it cannot be said to ‘lack language’, ‘must be articulate’ (page 90). Elspeth Probyn (2001), on the other hand, provides a dazzling array of ways to understand skin both materially, metonymically and metaphorically – it protects and is vulnerable, it can be bruised and breached, it is porous, it expands and retracts, it devours and is devoured, it has colour, texture and sensation.

Organization studies scholars have, nonetheless, perhaps been somewhat neglectful of flesh in our various endeavours; whilst for the last three decades or so we have paid a great deal of attention to the body, we have largely overlooked flesh. Yet, as our opening epigraph implies, flesh can be connected to organization/s and organizing in manifold different ways. Possible contributions to this special issue could therefore include but are certainly not limited to:

• The pleasures of the flesh: carnality, sensuality, excess and indulgence in, of and as provided by organizations (and their opposites).
• ‘Fleshworkers’ – cosmetic surgeons, masseuses, cosmetic surgeons, tattooists, make-up artists, slaughterhouse workers, morticians, laboratory scientists etc. – and the markets for their services.
• The resurging significance of the provenance of meat and fish in western eating habits and its cultural, symbolic and economic implications.
• Vegetarianism, veganism, ‘clean’ and raw food diets, the markets around and commodification of these practices.
• Researching the flesh, bodily, sensory, fleshly, aesthetic or sensible knowing and/ or methods, the ethics of fleshly research.  Organizing (and researching) in meatspace and virtual space, ‘in the flesh’ and online.
• Bodily changes, wounding, scarring and dysmorphia in organizations.
• Flesh-eaters and the undead: cannibals, vampires and zombies as organizational metaphors.
• The organization of organ donation and the global black market in body parts.
• The global meat industry and its manifold discontents: eg, the certification and marketing of halal meat, the UK horse meat scandal.
• (Re)incarnation and incorporation in and of organizations.
• Pro-ana, pro-mia and fat acceptance organizations.
• Organizational metaphors of the flesh: eg, the ‘lean organization’, a ‘meaty question’, ‘fleshing out an argument’, a ‘meat market’, ‘dead meat’ etc.
• The use of animal skin for clothing and furnishings and the complex global differences of necessity versus excess.
• The ethics and politics of organizing as understood through Agamben’s zoë (bare life) and bios (qualified life) …and so on.

This list is intended to be indicative only.  Innovative interpretations of the call are encouraged.  With its long tradition of inter-disciplinary approaches, C&O invites papers that draw insights and approaches from across a range of social sciences and humanities.  In addition to scholars working in management and organization studies we welcome contributions from anthropology, sociology, philosophy, politics, art history, communication, film, gender and cultural studies. We also welcome papers from any disciplinary, paradigmatic or methodological perspective as long as they directly address the theme of flesh and organization.  

Editorial team, submission and informal enquiries

The editorial team for this special issue are: Ilaria Boncori (University of Essex), Jo Brewis (University of Leicester), Luigi Maria Sicca (University of Naples) and Charlie Smith (University of Leicester).

Please ensure that all submissions to the special issue are made via the ScholarOne Culture and Organization site at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/gsco. You will have to sign up for an account before you are able to submit a manuscript. Please ensure when you do submit that you select the relevant special issue (Volume 25, Issue 4) to direct your submission appropriately. If you experience any problems, please contact the editors of this issue.

Style and other instructions on manuscript preparation can be found at the journal’s website: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/gsco20/current. Manuscript length should not exceed 8000 words, including appendices and supporting materials. Please also be aware that any images used in your submission must be your own, or where they are not, you must already have permission to reproduce them in an academic journal. You should make this explicit in the submitted manuscript.

Manuscripts must be submitted by 31^st May 2018.

Prospective authors are invited to discuss manuscript ideas for the special issue with the guest editors before the deadline for submissions.  They can be reached via e-mail at: scosxxxv@gmail.com.

References

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall.

Foucault, Michel. 1977. “Power and Sex.” Telos 32: 152-161.

Hart, Lynda. 1998. Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism. Columbia University Press: New York.

Kirby, Vicki. 1997. Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. New York: Routledge.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Moraga, Cherríe. 2015. “Introduction. Entering the Lives of Others: Theory in the Flesh.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, fourth edition, 19. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Probyn, Elspeth. 2001. “Eating Skin.” In Thinking Through the Skin, edited by Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey, 87-103. London: Routledge.

Strati, Antonio. 2007. “Sensible Knowledge and Practice-Based Learning.” Management Learning 38 (1): 61-77

Item 6: Free one-day Conference “Witches WAGS and Wideboys” at Essex Business School

Dear all,

With usual apologies for cross-posting, please see below details of a one-day conference hosted by Anglia Ruskin University and University of Essex that we hope may be of interest. The focus is on the origins and implications of regional cultural stereotypes, and is being organised in association with Essex County Council and the Essex Book Festival. Places are limited so please use the link to register if you would like to join us. And please do feel free to forward the details to anyone you think might be interested.

Best wishes,

Melissa

REGISTER HERE

Item 7 : CfP Affects & Collective Practices of the Undercommons

For the affect inquiry / making space conference
August 8-11, 2018 Millersville University’s Ware Center, Lancaster, Pennsylvania
http://capaciousjournal.com/conference/

Stream Organizers: Jack Z. Bratich & Stevphen Shukaitis

What affects circulate within the undercommons today (Harney & Moten 2013)?

This stream proposes to inquire into the relation between affective spaces and aesthetics in the construction of forms of collective intelligence and subjectivities, particularly in the ways this relation is worked with to expand the commonly understood realm of political action. It will explore processes of affective composition through which fleeting and ephemeral relations and performance are involved in what George Katsiaficas describes as “engaging aesthetic rationality in the process of political transformation, of turning politics into art, everyday life into an aesthetically governed domain.” (2001: 310) This is what Nick Thoburn terms a “minor politics” (2003): one that is not based upon calling forth an already existing identity or position, but rather a politics based on a continual intensive and affective engagement of constant self-institution.

“Affects & Collective Practices of the Undercommons” proposes to explore the relation of affective relations and aesthetics in the construction and operation of formations of collective intelligence and subjectivity, particularly when these forms are brought about in a way intended to expand and modulate understood spaces for political action. These relations and their affectivity embody and express the movement of the social imaginary, or the constant process of becoming: what Raoul Vaneigem referred to as the revolution of everyday life. Everyday life and forms of political action residing in it, whether unseen or encoded in a hidden transcript, exists as a privileged location for political analysis and action precisely because it is where forms of collective intelligence, creativity, and social wealth are manifested.

The everyday manifestations and embodiments of collective imagination and intelligence through collective practices take part in the movement of this transformation of subjectivities. Forms of self-determining community and sociality, which have been understood and theorized as creating the possibility for exodus from relations of domination and the creation of other relations within the present, is premised upon working through, and extending these relations, intensities, and experiences.

“Affects & Aesthetics of the Undercommons” will explore the multiple fields and paths where these relations, intensities, and modulations of collective subjectivities are expressed and transformed through aesthetic expression and movement. This fleeting and ephemeral realm, one of both improvisation and ritual that Amendant Hardiker and Miekal And characterize as the space of the anartistic (1995) provides a unique and valuable entrance point for understanding and theorization of the relation of mind, culture, and collective imagination in constant movement.

Potential topics/possible intersections including but not limited to:
– Infrapolitics & creative subversion
– Black radicalism and genealogies
– Experimental education & nomadic pedagogy
– Creating spaces within and against institutions
– Autonomous spaces & protocols
– Study & Sociality, Convivial Research
– Infrastructure & Logisticality
– Performativy of/in the Commons

250-word paper abstracts can now be submitted to capacious@millersville.edu. The final deadline for submissions is Thursday, March 15, 2018.

Dear Scossers

as we approach another turning point in the year, it’s also a key turning point for deadlines! So here are a few to think about…

Item 1 – Remember Rome? Deadline for the accompanying Culture and Organization SI Carne is May 2018 so get those pens working if you plan to submit! All CfPs for C&O are available here.

Item 2 – The SCOS/ACSCOS Conference 2018 on Wabi-Sabi to be held in Tokyo has extended the deadline for abstracts to February 28th 2018. More information below!

Item 3 –  EGOS 2018 stream on  Object-oriented Ontologies and Organizations Studies, deadline January 8th 2018.

Best

Laura

Item 1

The editorial team are still accepting submissions for the special issue of C&O following the Rome conference via the ScholarOne Culture and Organization site. The deadline for manuscripts is 31^st May 2018. Topics include (but are not limited to):

•  The pleasures of the flesh: carnality, sensuality, excess and indulgence in, of and as provided by organizations (and their opposites).
• ‘Fleshworkers’ – cosmetic surgeons, masseuses, cosmetic surgeons, tattooists, make-up artists, slaughterhouse workers, morticians, laboratory scientists etc. – and the markets for their services.
• The resurging significance of the provenance of meat and fish in western eating habits and its cultural, symbolic and economic implications.
• Vegetarianism, veganism, ‘clean’ and raw food diets, the markets around and commodification of these practices.
• Researching the flesh, bodily, sensory, fleshly, aesthetic or sensible knowing and/ or methods, the ethics of fleshly research.  Organizing (and researching) in meatspace and virtual space, ‘in the flesh’ and online.
• Bodily changes, wounding, scarring and dysmorphia in organizations.
• Flesh-eaters and the undead: cannibals, vampires and zombies as organizational metaphors.
• The organization of organ donation and the global black market in body parts.
• The global meat industry and its manifold discontents: eg, the certification and marketing of halal meat, the UK horse meat scandal.
• (Re)incarnation and incorporation in and of organizations.
• Pro-ana, pro-mia and fat acceptance organizations.
• Organizational metaphors of the flesh: eg, the ‘lean organization’, a ‘meaty question’, ‘fleshing out an argument’, a ‘meat market’, ‘dead meat’ etc.
• The use of animal skin for clothing and furnishings and the complex global differences of necessity versus excess.
• The ethics and politics of organizing as understood through Agamben’s zoë (bare life) and bios (qualified life) … and so on.

You can find the full call for papers here.

Item 2 SCOS/ACSCOS 2018 “Wabi-Sabi” at Meiji University Tokyo

The deadline for abstracts to SCOS/ACSCOS 2018 has been extended to 8th February 2018!  The venue for the conference is the Academy Common Building, Surugadai Campus, Meiji University. This is in the Chiyoda district of Tokyo.

Conference Website

The conference website for SCOS/ACSCOS Japan in 2018 “Wabi-sabi” is available at http://scos2018.org with the link to registration. The deadline for submissions has been extended, and you can find the original call for papers here along with instructions for submission of abstracts: http://scos2018.org/index.php/call-for-papers/

Venue and Travel Schedule

The venue for the conference is the Academy Common Building, Surugadai Campus, Meiji University. This is in the Chiyoda district of Tokyo.

The nearest stations are Ochanomizu Station, Shin-Ochanomizu Station and Jimbochu Station. Travel to the university from Narita Airport takes approximately one hour by public transport via the Skyliner (http://www.keisei.co.jp/keisei/tetudou/skyliner/us/ae_outline/index.php), while from Haneda Airport the journey is slightly shorter on the Tokyo monorail (http://www.tokyo-monorail.co.jp/english/).

A full timetable will be made available in due course but expect conference events to kick off on the 17th August 2018 at 5pm. The board will be convening for the board meeting slightly earlier at 2pm.

The organisers have very helpful maps available here: http://scos2018.org/index.php/travel-and-accommodation/

Accommodation in Japan

Accommodation near to the campus includes a wide range of hotels, or there are also a range of apartments available through AirBnB. Some of the below have been highlighted by the organisers as conveniently located for the venue, and are suitable on a range of budgets.

Hotel Niwa Tokyo ✩✩✩✩

Official Website Tripadvisor page

This hotel was selected as one of Top 25 Hotels in Japan by TripAdvisor’s Travelers’ Choice Award 2016.

Hotel Grand Palace ✩✩✩✩

Official Website Tripadvisor Page

Hotel Metropolitan Edmont ✩✩✩✩

Official Website Tripadvisor Page

Hilltop Hotel ✩✩✩✩

Booking.com Tripadvisor Page

Hotel Villa Fontaine Jimbocho Tokyo ✩✩✩

Official Website Tripadvisor Page

Ochanomizu Hotel Shoryukan ✩✩✩

Official Website Tripadvisor Page

This hotel offers Japanese-style rooms with tatami mats and futon or conventional bedrooms.

APA Hotel Kanda Jimbocho Station East ✩✩✩

Official Website Tripadvisor Page

Tokyo Green Hotel Korakuen ✩✩✩

Tripadvisor Page Booking.com

This hotel is located near to the Tokyo Dome.

Hotel Wing International Korakuen ✩✩✩

Booking.com Tripadvisor Page

KKR Hotel Tokyo ✩✩✩

Hotels.com Tripadvisor Page

New Central Hotel ✩✩

Booking.com  Tripadvisor Page

Item 3 – EGOS Sub-theme 57: Object-oriented Ontologies and Organizations Studies

Convenors:
Hugo Letiche
LESI, Utrecht, The Netherlands
h.letiche@uvh.nl
Jean-Luc Moriceau
Institut Mines-Telecom/TEM, Paris, France
jean-luc.moriceau@telecom-em.eu
Geoffrey M. Lightfoot
University of Leicester, United Kingdom
g.lightfoot@le.ac.uk

Call for Papers

Surprise is causation that we did not expect or anticipate and/or could not control. In a world ever more ordered by the diktats of an increasingly imperial risk management (Martin 2007; 2015), we seem less and less able to value the unexpected. A classic example from the organization studies canon that has recently become enjoined in controversy turns around how one should best make sense of the Mann Gulch disaster that formed a key exemplar for Weick of the powers of sensemaking and the costs of its breakdown (Weick, 1993, 1996; Basbøll, 2010; Holt & Cornelissen, 2014). For recent forays back into the sources from which Weick draws reveal the potential to situate the source of the disaster not so much in any failure of ‘leadership’ on the part of the “smokejumpers’ in the face of surprising turns in the fire’s development but rather in a ‘conflagration of forces” (Maclean, 1992, cited in Basbøll, 2010), that was “neither material nor social but, simply, infernal” (Basbøll, 2010, p. 89).

Recently object-oriented-ontology (O-O-O) has proposed that objects change, assert attraction on one another, generate time and space around themselves, but never cease to exist. Graham Harman’s example is putting a match to cotton (2005). There is cotton and there is a match, then there is smoldering and smoke, and thereafter there is ash; at all moments there are objects. Objects change and retreat, are transformed and reappear as something else. There is never NO object and there is never an object that is totally given to an observer. For social constructivism, the object is in the eye of the perceiver and ‘surprise’ is a subjective quality. For O-O-O the object is only partially visible or present and always ‘strange’, uncertain and somewhat indeterminate. Weick tries to control or even banish ‘surprise’; O-O-O asserts that objects are always and can only be ‘surprising’.

Graham Harman and his co-conspirators work within a field that has come to be known as ‘speculative realism’ which has garnered increasing attention in recent years, although, as of yet, there has been little direct incursion into the administrative and organizational sciences. We hope to begin to rectify this situation with this sub-theme. Speculative realism offers potential to encounter surprise anew through a different conceptualisation of the ‘objects’ that make up our world. In Harman’s particular version of speculative realism – ‘object oriented ontology’ –, objects are always pregnant with potential to surprise for they are essentially ‘cryptic’ in their being, with much of their reality in retreat from any attempt to fully comprehend them. Objects, in this view, are made of parts and can themselves be parts of other objects. Yet despite being made up of other objects, despite unleashing surprising effects on other objects, an object has a realness that exceeds any under- or over-pinnings. The habits of thought that Harman breaks with either undermine or overmine the object qua object when they respectively seek to reduce the object to its components or see it merely as a part and nothing more than a part, of some greater whole.

The agency of objects has been typified and described by Harman as entailing multiple processes. New objects are combines of the “notes” (Harman, 2005, p. 211) or “sensual qualities” (Harman, 2011, p. 128) of their progenitors, formed when one object “allures” (Harman, 2005, p. 211) another into interaction. Interaction, which includes the intervention of the perceived ‘sensual objects’ between the limitless ‘real objects’ that are their cousins. We can only know the events of ‘vicarious causation’ (Harman, 2007) through which objects interact; the real objects themselves are too much in retreat to interact directly.

What happens if we take objects seriously, and not just as the products of enactments, in cases like Mann Gulch? What surprising landscapes and eventful circumstances would we discover? What existing organization studies concepts might be set afire?

Papers of interest to the sub-theme could consider addressing the following themes (although we in no sense see this as an exclusive or exhaustive list of the possibilities):
What are the implications for risk management of taking objects seriously (in the Harmanian sense)? How, for example, are the objects of (high) finance and more pedestrian concerns such as human shelter, related?
If organizations (seen as objects) mutate and change, but never end, should they be seen as without telos but only as processes?
How do accounts and accountability (really) relate to the objects that they claim to survey? What can we say of the objects of strategy, policy, plans and operations if all objects are partially seen and incompletely perceived?
If all perception is tentative and limited is surprise still surprising? Does event differ from surprise?
W(h)ither ethics in an object oriented world whose ‘flat ontology’ significantly problematizes an easy attribution of agency? How do we orient to ethics when we struggle with constant surprise?

References

Basbøll, T. (2010): “Multiple failures of scholarship: Karl Weick and the Mann Gulch disaster.” In: P. Armstrong & G. Lightfoot (eds.): The Leading Journal in the Field: Destabilising Authority in the Social Sciences of Management. London: Mayfly, 85–102.
Harman, G. (2005): Guerilla Metaphysics. Chicago: Open Court Books.
Harman, G. (2007): “On Vicarious Causation.” In: R. Mackay (ed.): Collapse II: Speculative Realism. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 187–221.
Harman, G. (2011): The Quadruple Object. Winchester: Zero Books.
Holt, R., & Cornelissen, J. (2014): “Sensemaking revisited.” Management Learning, 45 (5), 525–539.
Maclean, N. (1992): Young Men and Fires. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Martin, R. (2007): An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management. London: Duke University Press.
Martin, R. (2015): Knowledge LTD. Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Weick, K. (1993): “The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 38 (4), 628–652.
Weick, K. (1996): “Drop your tools: an allegory for organization studies.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 41 (2), 301–313.

Dear Scossers,

I’m a mobile-in-transit academic today but there are a few items that have come through recently which might pique your curiosity.

Item 1:Have you seen this SI from Management Learning on sensory knowledge? Antonio recommends it!

Item 2:You can’t have missed that GWO will be in Sydney in the coming year. Write differently!

Item 3:Don’t forget the upcoming deadlines for C&O Special Issues including ‘Carne’ from Rome 2017 in May 2018!

Arrivederci

Laura 

Item 1. Have you seen this SI from Management Learning on sensory knowledge? Antonio recommends it!

Dear Scos folks

still interested in Aesthetics, flesh and sensible knowledge? Well, there is a Virtual Special Issue of the journal “Management Learning”, edited by Alexia Panayiotou, that will be available online – open access 30 days.

a Virtual Special Issue of the journal on sensory knowledge. The Virtual Special Issue contains six other articles that we believe illustrate the finest work on sensory knowledge that has been published in the journal in the least ten years. All of the articles in the Virtual Special Issue are open access for the next 30 days.

The Virtual Special Issue is available here:

http://journals.sagepub.com/page/mlq/collections/virtual-special-issues/sensory_knowledge

I must warn you that this Virtual SI has a bias: one of my writing is included.

But apart from that …

all the best

Antonio Strati

Item 2: You can’t have missed that GWO will be in Sydney in the coming year. Write differently! (see attachment)

Dear SCOSers and (feminist) writers,

Jenny Helin, Carl Rhodes, Benedikte Borgstrom and I are convening a stream at GWO on Changing Writing/Writing for Change. We have had some wonderful submissions and the deadline has been extended to November 15th. If you are thinking of coming to GWO, consider picking up your pen and writing an abstract to trouble the masculine hegemonic way of writing in our academy. We aim to create an insurgent, unstoppable (feminine) flowing in Darling Harbour, come and join us…

best

Katie
katiebeavan1@gmail.com
+ 1 203 400 3167

Item 3: Don’t forget the upcoming deadlines for C&O Special Issues including ‘Carne’ from Rome 2017 in May 2018!

All Special Issue Calls here: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=specialIssues&journalCode=gsco20

A reminder of this call, with the standard apologies for cross-postings, everyone

CARNE – Flesh and Organization

Call for papers for a special issue of culture and organization

volume 25, issue 4, 2019

“Flesh, we believe – more than bodies – is at stake in our posthuman times, in the sense that it is flesh that is subject to increased control either in the laboratory or the marketplace and is caught up in processes of modification that seek to master and profit from it.” (Diamanti et al., 2009, 4)

This call for papers takes off from the longstanding use of the notion of flesh in academic investigations of the more or less porous boundaries between the self, others and the world around us. Flesh, these works suggest, is ontologically slippery and definitionally elusive. For Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964), flesh reconnects the viewing and the visible, the touching and the touched, the body and the world. Perception itself is a fleshly – auditory, visual, gustatory, haptic, olfactory – activity. Moreover, as Antonio Strati (2007) points out in his discussion of the connections between practice-based learning and ‘sensible knowledge’ in organizations, when we perceive others, we always perceive them as fundamentally corporeal. Equally, the world acts upon our flesh, so that what or whom we touch, see, smell, taste and hear may touch, see, smell, taste and hear us. Elsewhere, Michel Foucault locates modern western scientia sexualis as having its origins in the earliest years of Christianity and its confessional regime which seeks to unearth “the important secrets of the flesh” (1977, 154) as the deepest truths of the human subject. In this reading, flesh is the natural body, always and irrevocably bound to sin and to death.

Cherríe Moraga (2015, 19), on the other hand, identifies a theory in the flesh as “one where the physical realities of our lives – our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings – all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity”. In a very different feminist analysis, Judith Butler (1990, 96, 33) defines gender as the “styles of the flesh” which “congeal over time”; whereas Vicki Kirby (1997) takes her and other feminist poststructuralists to task in Telling Flesh for their overstatement of the cultural inscription of the body, and argues that “once you are seriously displacing the nature/language opposition, you have to be arguing that nature, far from being written on, and insofar as it cannot be said to ‘lack language’, ‘must be articulate’ (page 90).

Elspeth Probyn (2001), on the other hand, provides a dazzling array of ways to understand skin both materially, metonymically and metaphorically – it protects and is vulnerable, it can be bruised and breached, it is porous, it expands and retracts, it devours and is devoured, it has colour, texture and sensation.

Organization studies scholars have, nonetheless, perhaps been somewhat neglectful of flesh in our various endeavours; whilst for the last three decades or so we have paid a great deal of attention to the body, we have largely overlooked flesh. Yet, as our opening epigraph implies, flesh can be connected to organization/s and organizing in manifold different ways. Possible contributions to this special issue could therefore include but are certainly not limited to:

• The pleasures of the flesh: carnality, sensuality, excess and indulgence in, of and as provided by organizations (and their opposites).
• ‘Fleshworkers’ – cosmetic surgeons, masseuses, cosmetic surgeons, tattooists, make-up artists, slaughterhouse workers, morticians, laboratory scientists etc. – and the markets for their services.
• The resurging significance of the provenance of meat and fish in western eating habits and its cultural, symbolic and economic implications.
• Vegetarianism, veganism, ‘clean’ and raw food diets, the markets around and commodification of these practices.
• Researching the flesh, bodily, sensory, fleshly, aesthetic or sensible knowing and/ or methods, the ethics of fleshly research.  Organizing (and researching) in meatspace and virtual space, ‘in the flesh’ and online.
• Bodily changes, wounding, scarring and dysmorphia in organizations.
• Flesh-eaters and the undead: cannibals, vampires and zombies as organizational metaphors.
• The organization of organ donation and the global black market in body parts.
• The global meat industry and its manifold discontents: eg, the certification and marketing of halal meat, the UK horse meat scandal.
• (Re)incarnation and incorporation in and of organizations.
• Pro-ana, pro-mia and fat acceptance organizations.
• Organizational metaphors of the flesh: eg, the ‘lean organization’, a ‘meaty question’, ‘fleshing out an argument’, a ‘meat market’, ‘dead meat’ etc.
• The use of animal skin for clothing and furnishings and the complex global differences of necessity versus excess.
• The ethics and politics of organizing as understood through Agamben’s zoë (bare life) and bios (qualified life) …and so on.

This list is intended to be indicative only.  Innovative interpretations of the call are encouraged.  With its long tradition of inter-disciplinary approaches, C&O invites papers that draw insights and approaches from across a range of social sciences and humanities.  In addition to scholars working in management and organization studies we welcome contributions from anthropology, sociology, philosophy, politics, art history, communication, film, gender and cultural studies. We also welcome papers from any disciplinary, paradigmatic or methodological perspective as long as they directly address the theme of flesh and organization.  

Editorial team, submission and informal enquiries

The editorial team for this special issue are: Ilaria Boncori (University of Essex), Jo Brewis (University of Leicester), Luigi Maria Sicca (University of Naples) and Charlie Smith (University of Leicester).

Please ensure that all submissions to the special issue are made via the ScholarOne Culture and Organization site at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/gsco. You will have to sign up for an account before you are able to submit a manuscript. Please ensure when you do submit that you select the relevant special issue (Volume 25, Issue 4) to direct your submission appropriately. If you experience any problems, please contact the editors of this issue.

Style and other instructions on manuscript preparation can be found at the journal’s website: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/gsco20/current. Manuscript length should not exceed 8000 words, including appendices and supporting materials. Please also be aware that any images used in your submission must be your own, or where they are not, you must already have permission to reproduce them in an academic journal. You should make this explicit in the submitted manuscript.

Manuscripts must be submitted by 31^st May 2018.

Prospective authors are invited to discuss manuscript ideas for the special issue with the guest editors before the deadline for submissions.  They can be reached via e-mail at: scosxxxv@gmail.com.

References

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall.

Foucault, Michel. 1977. “Power and Sex.” Telos 32: 152-161.

Hart, Lynda. 1998. Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism. Columbia University Press: New York.

Kirby, Vicki. 1997. Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. New York: Routledge.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Moraga, Cherríe. 2015. “Introduction. Entering the Lives of Others: Theory in the Flesh.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, fourth edition, 19. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Probyn, Elspeth. 2001. “Eating Skin.” In Thinking Through the Skin, edited by Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey, 87-103. London: Routledge.

Strati, Antonio. 2007. “Sensible Knowledge and Practice-Based Learning.” Management Learning 38 (1): 61-77.