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.

Dear Scossers

What a time to be thinking of sunny Rome and future heady debates among colleagues about meat and symbolism when faced with the wet bare branches of spring (or autumn if you’re in the antipodes) and the equally dreich global news updates every day! That said, the cherry trees are just coming into blossom here and promise joy to come. For those looking for some more joy in their academic pursuits there are a number of lovely items in today’s newsletter. I am a little sad, however, that I have not heard from many of our colleagues outside of the UK for items this month. If SCOSsers have any events or activities they would like to promote, in all parts of the world, please get in touch with details!

Best

Laura ?

Item 1: CfP What’s new in Visual Ethnography @ 12th Annual International Ethnography Symposium Deadline: 31st March

Item 2: Critical discriminations, critical oppressions … Critical MANagement Studies? VIDA event, Sunday 2nd July 2017

Item 3: Democratic Renewal in Civil Society Organisations Seminar at Nottingham Trent University 29th March 2017

Item 4: One day workshop “The Radical Rural: ‘peripheral’ geographies of migrant activism Exeter 5th July

Item 5: One Day Workshop “Organizing for the common good: revisiting performativity” 2st April, London

Item 6: Riding the Waves’ Future directions for feminism in management and business schools, 30th March 2017, Anglia Ruskin University, UK

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Item 1: What’s new in Visual Ethnography @ 12th Annual International Ethnography Symposium Manchester 29th August-1st Sept 2017

Conference Website: http://www.confercare.manchester.ac.uk/events/ethnography/

Full stream details: http://www.confercare.manchester.ac.uk/events/ethnography/streams/stream7/#d.en.513744

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Item 2

Critical discriminations, critical oppressions … Critical MANagement Studies?

An event organized by VIDA, the Critical Management Studies Women’s Association

FACT, 88 Wood Street, Liverpool L1 4DQ, UK

Sunday 2^nd July 2017, 3–6 pm

“[U]niversities are particularly hard institutions to do diversity and equality work [in] because academics tend to think of themselves as “critical subjects,” and thus tend not to see themselves as part of a problem” (Ahmed, 2013).

This event is being organized at a time when we know that many CMS academics from all over the world will be in Liverpool, but it is not a CMS2017 conference event and you do not need to be a CMS2017 delegate to attend. It is inspired by our experiences as a group of CMS academics – VIDA – who identify as women, non-binary or gender non-conforming.

On our Facebook page[1] we have been discussing many of these experiences. One collection of issues that keeps recurring includes:

• how cismen[2]who consider themselves CMS researchers all too often treat colleagues who are not cismen;
• the kinds of academic labour that are valued within CMS – and, more significantly, those that are not;
• manels[3]at CMS conferences and workshops; and
• gender-exclusive curricula, reading lists and citation practices in critical management pedagogy and research.

These behaviours, practices and processes take many guises and happen in many places and spaces. They are enacted and reproduced by CMS academics (including ciswomen) whose writing – even activism – critiques precisely such behaviours, practices and processes. For us, Sara Ahmed’s term ‘critical sexism’ captures this collection of things perfectly. She defines it as follows: “the sexism reproduced by those who think of themselves as too critical to reproduce sexism. Critical sexism is not that different to uncritical sexism, then.” (Ahmed, 2015: 11). An alternative, used elsewhere, is the notion of ‘brocialism’, which refers to men who are “so in love with [their] own progressiveness or radicalness [they are] convinced [they] can do no wrong. This extends to being a sexist jerk”.

Importantly, Ahmed (2012: 212) has also written on critical racism, which she describes as the “racism produced by critical subjects who do not see the reproduction because of their self-assumed criticality”. Similar sorts of oppressive and discriminatory reproductions seem to us to be at work in CMS around ageism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and colonialism, at minimum. And these discriminations and oppressions of course also intersect with and exacerbate each other.

We want to use the event as a space in which we can discuss experiences of these critical discriminations and oppressions in CMS. The format will be confirmed as we draw nearer to the event itself, but the preliminary format is as follows:

1. A short welcome and introduction to the event, including contributions from VIDAmembers about their own experiences of critical discriminations and oppressions in CMS.

2. Break-out discussions in small groups for more consideration.

3. No one will be asked to share the names of the people they are talking about (or indeed to share their experiences at all if they feel uncomfortable in doing so).

4. In the last part of the event we will come back together to discuss how we can tackle critical discriminations and oppressions in CMS as a collective.

5. We will offer everyone the opportunity to contribute an anonymized record of their experiences afterwards, but this is entirely voluntary. As Sara Ahmed suggests,

“To name something as sexist is already to begin building an archive: we are gathering different events, situations, incidents together through using this word. We are picking things up. What are we gathering? An archive of sexism might be an ‘archive of feelings’ to borrow Ann Cvetkovich’s expression, we are building an archive from how we are affected by something.” (2015: 10)

6. The discussion element of the event will take a maximum of two hours, followed by a social. Refreshments will be provided.

The event is free to attend, but you will need to pre-register as we have an upper limit of 40 people and we need to book refreshments in advance. Please contact Jo Brewis (j.brewis@le.ac.uk) and Sarah Gilmore (S.Gilmore2@exeter.ac.uk) to register or with any queries. Attendance is limited to those who identify as women and non-binary or gender non-conforming. The venue is a short walk from the Adelphi Hotel where CMS2017 is being held, and is easily accessible on foot from both Liverpool Central and Liverpool Lime Street train stations.

“Because after all to name something as sexist is not only to name something that happens as part of a wider system (to refuse to give what happens the status of an exceptional event), but it is also to give an account of that something as being wrong and unjustifiable. To name something as sexist is not only to modify a relation by modifying our understanding of that relation; it is also to insist that further modification is required. When we say ‘that’s sexist,’ we are saying ‘no’ to that, as well as ‘no’ to the world that renders such speech or behaviour permissible …” (Ahmed, 2015: 9)

Sponsored by the University of Leicester School of Business

.

[1] Send a join request to https://www.facebook.com/groups/1727793390777869/

[2] People who were assigned a male sex at birth and define their gender as male.

[3] Panels consisting only of men.

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Item 3

Democratic Renewal in Civil Society Organizations

ESRC Seminar Four – Nottingham Trent University

‘Democracy at Work: Organizing democratically’

Wednesday 29^th March, 2017, 10:30-5, Newton Building, Nottingham Trent University.

The event is free – please book here

Civil society organisations are often considered a good thing in and of themselves, contributing to making a more healthy and democratic society. Yet whilst attention is often focused on their external role, how they contribute to changing society, less attention is placed on their internal ways of organising. Indeed many civil society organisations are shaped by increase forms of business-like practices as they have to become more professional and managerial which can often result in them replicated many of the hierarchical practices that can leave them, at times, indistinguishable from their for-profit counter-parts.

This seminar will explore the possibilities of internal processes and practices through which civil society organisations arrange themselves in order to become more democratic. In particular it will look at different models and processes, which draw inspiration from anarchism and the alter-globalization movement through to political theory to examine not only why civil society organizations should consider working more democratically but also how to go about it.

Our confirmed speakers are:

Janet Dalziell, International People and Culture Director at Greenpeace International

Greenpeace International are one of the most innovative Civil Society Organizations combining activism with its public campaigning role. Over the last few years they have been through a fascinating restructuring programme designed to give more autonomy to local national and regional offices to be more responsive to their particular circumstances. Janet is a key architect of a major re-design of Greenpeace’s global operating model, focusing on the development of human capacity within the organization and aimed at making Greenpeace more effective in achieving just and sustainable global change to protect the environment.

Professor Ruth Kinna, and Dr Thomas Swann Loughborough University, will be discussing anarchism as a constitutional principle

Dr Ruth Yeoman, Research Fellow at the Saïd Business School and Kellogg College, University of Oxford, is an expert on mutuality and meaningfulness of work. Her book Meaningful Work and Workplace Democracy: a philosophy of work and a politics of meaningfulness, is published by Palgrave Macmillan

Dr Matt Wilson, Activist and anarchist and the author of Rules without rulers: The possibilities and limits of anarchism

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Item 4:

The Radical Rural: ‘peripheral’ geographies of migrant activism

A one-day workshop to explore rural migrant activism

Organisers: Emma Marshall, Amanda Schmid-Scott, Jen Bagelman and Nick Gill

University of Exeter

Summary

There is a tendency for academics working across areas of migration, global justice and refugee activism to conduct fieldwork in ‘centralised’ geographical zones such as major cities and towns. Within academic debate, there is an overwhelming focus on migration hubs: prime dispersal sites for asylum seekers and refugees, or large cities where activist networks are well developed and include significant numbers of people. Thinking of our own position as scholar-activists based in Exeter, we hope to bring together a collective of academics and activists who see their work as taking place on the ‘margins’ and yet such spaces have gained political significance as “welcoming centres” (Mountz 2012; Coombs 2006). In this one day workshop we will examine what it means to be politically active in peripheral zones, how academic research might add to our understanding of the significance of seemingly ‘provincial’ (Chakrabarty, 2000) sites of study, and what it might mean to ‘activise’ – to energise towards activism – through the power of the provincial.

We welcome contributions in the form of 15 minute presentations that aim to explore how and why rural spaces are significant as sites from where state practices of border control can be contested, or where the politics of migration can be reshaped and reframed against negative mainstream discourse and anti-immigration rhetoric. We invite contributions from academics, activists or members of social movements that can help to identify what it means to work in marginal or peripheral spaces, or sites that may be referred to with terms such as ‘rural’, ‘provincial’ or ‘isolated’. We invite community groups, services or individuals to present on what they do and the significance of their work in these spaces. We also welcome academic contributions that draw on postcolonial, decolonial or feminist thought to reimagine what we think of as political spaces. We welcome contributions that take various forms: written papers, art, poetry, performance or film.

We will consider applications which focus on themes of rurality and migration and/or rurality and activism, and will endeavour to keep an equal balance between community-activist and academic-activist contributions. Out of the workshop, one of our aims is to produce a handbook offering information and practical support which might enable local activism to flourish in different rural communities and contexts.

Possible themes for contributions:

• experiences of research with activist groups in peripheral zones (and the sites of study this might include e.g. rural spaces, immigration detention, remote/provincial/isolated places)

• activist movements in the South West of England or other peripheral zones, and their future(s)

• what it means to be politically active in peripheral zones/on the margins

• what research in peripheral zones can contribute to scholar-activism and activist philosophies

• how or why do peripheral zones of activism offer distinctive opportunities for broader social change

• what can academics do to recognise the significance of activist movements in rural/peripheral zones

• what might geographies of ‘radical rurality’ contribute to activist movements

• what does it mean to mobilise the clandestine of the rural?

Date: Wednesday 5th July 2017, 10:00 – 16:30

Location: Exeter (exact venue to be confirmed)

To register interest please email a short proposal for your contribution (approx. 200 words) to Amanda and Emma: radicalruralgeographies@gmail.com by 3rd April 2017.

Organisers:

Amanda Schmid-Scott (University of Exeter)

Emma Marshall (University of Exeter)

Professor Nick Gill (University of Exeter)

Dr. Jen Bagelman (University of Exeter)

With kind regards,

Amanda and Emma

Amanda Schmid-Scott | PhD Researcher Human Geography

Amory Building | University of Exeter | EX4 4RJ |  Profile

Twitter: @amandargscott

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Item 5:

“Organizing for the common good: revisiting performativity”

We would like to invite you to submit a long abstract to our event at Cass Business School, City, University of London, on critical performativity.
Following the recent debate on Human relations and beyond, on April the 21st we are organizing a one-day workshop to foster the comprehension of the topic. The deadline for the event, called “Organizing for the common good: revisiting performativity”, is April the 1st.

The details of the event are available here: http://bit.ly/Cass21stApril

Following this link you can register at the event: https://cass.campusgroups.com/faculty/rsvp?club=faculty&id=300006365

Among the confirmed speakers, so far, there are Jean-Pascal Gond, Christopher Wickert and Hugh Willmott.
The event is free, and will cover the full afternoon.

I stay at your disposal for any further inquire.

—
Alessandro Niccolò TIRAPANI
MSc International management
MA International relations

PhD Candidate
Cass Business School
City, University of London

+447521092878

My work can be accessed on Academia.edu<https://city.academia.edu/AlessandroNTirapani>

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Item 6:

Riding the waves? Future directions for feminism in management and business schools 

Jointly presented Anglia Ruskin University and Essex Business School’s Centre for Work, Organization and Society, with Prof Nancy Harding, University of Bradford

Anglia Ruskin University Rivermead Campus, PMI

CHELMSFORD, Essex, CM1 1SQ

Thursday 30 March 2017, 10.00am – 4.00pm

The aim of this event is to open up discussion about the future prospects and possibilities associated with feminism in management and business schools.

Building upon the success of the workshop held at Bradford University School of Management in September 2016*, which explored differences and continuities between generations of feminists or ‘waves’ of feminism, this workshop seeks to continue the discussion, underpinned by a commitment to think through what we can learn from each other, and how we can better support each other in the environments in which we work, think and act.

In an era in which feminist thinking seems, on the one hand, to be becoming more popular (through for instance, the publicity attached to the UN HeforShe movement, or the recent protest marches across the world), at the same time, world leaders are being elected on the back of sexist campaigns and speeches that demean women and their bodies, and discrimination against women in the workplace remains widespread.

– What are the prospects of feminism within these changing contexts and challenging circumstances?

– What are our priorities as we respond, collectively and individually, to the many challenges associated with being a feminist in a management or business environment?

– Finally, what are the risks attached to feminist thinking and activism being co-opted by instrumental, organizational agendas? And how might we work to raise awareness of, and respond to, the rhetorical gap that exists between what organizations espouse, and what we experience in our everyday working lives?

Through paper presentations, open discussions, and a theatre workshop, this one-day event will aim to provide a supportive, inspirational and vibrant forum in which participants with diverse interests and from a wide range of backgrounds can explore these pressing questions.

* While anyone who attended the seminar at Bradford will be very welcome, participation in the earlier event will not be assumed or expected.

This is a free workshop but participants need to register as numbers will be limited.

Please use Eventbrite to book a place: https://riding-the-waves.eventbrite.co.uk

Item 1 – SCOS Rome Conference ‘Carne’ – Final call for abstracts!