Item 1:

Note from the SCOSBOSS!

Well, colleagues, I hope that those of you who came to the 2013 conference in Warsaw are all back safe and sound and reintegrated into your daily routines. For those of you who weren’t there, we missed you and you missed a classic SCOS conference, and I think I should start this note off with very heartfelt thanks and congratulations to the Warsaw team. The leading lights, Beata, Eva and Prem, did a fantastic job of organising us and making the event run smoothly, but they were ably helped by Agnieszka (x2), Magdalena, Urszula, Julita and Pawel, plus a whole group of very helpful and charming post-grads. When I say this conference was well-organised I mean down to the level of serving aspirin with morning coffee - now that is attention to detail. I’d like to thank all the keynotes, and all the people who chaired individual sessions. I’d also like to thank the Faculty of Management at the University of Warsaw for being our hosts, and the Polish National Opera for supporting the gala dinner. And Heather Hopfl for being the eminence grise behind it in the first place.
It’s unfair to single people out for individual praise, but I would like to share an experience which really struck me throughout the conference, which was the number of young Polish scholars who had been influenced very directly by Monika Kostera. She is clearly very much loved by that community and has done a great deal to influence a whole generation of creative and committed organization theorists in Poland. It takes a gathering like ours sometimes to bring these things to light.
So, a few personal highlights, and I stress these are personal. The heating levels were right, and there were ample w.c.s for everyone. This is a bit of an in-joke on the board. Wherever we go, based on previous experience including an esteemed British-based professor getting locked in the loos at a past conference, we always check air conditioning and lavatories. Both passed with flying colours. That aside, the social programme was wonderful. We had, at one point, talked about a trip to a disused vodka factory, which seemed distinctly un-SCOSSy, but in the event, our visit to the converted railway station with its exquisite film of Warsaw in the 1930s was excellent. Not only was the film beautifully done, it was also poignant in the light of what happened to the city shortly afterwards during World War II. Warsaw, though, is a city of remarkable resilience, and set about restoring its former glories, including rebuilding much of the city centre. The gala dinner was beautifully staged in the palatial National Opera House. The setting was elegant, and some genius had negotiated a free vodka bar at the end of the evening, and in addition the backstage tour was engrossing, and our meetings secretary, Thomas Lennerfors’, impromptu piano playing was delightful.
We had some excellent papers, and, it was good to see so many in the fine SCOS tradition of being just this side of totally bonkers. I found a whole new line of inquiry for my own research. Again, it is invidious to name individuals, but Janet Sayers might find herself gratefully acknowledged in some of my future work. And I seldom come away from any conference with a whole new slant on my own thinking.
But I think a major highlight was the atmosphere at the conference. As a board, we agreed to work hard on making everyone feel welcome, and not leaving people on their own who didn’t want to be. Beata organised a new to SCOS welcome session which was a bit awkward for buttoned-up Brits like me, but which paid dividends later on because it really did break the ice for people. SCOS is a friendly conference, lifelong friendships are formed, and, of course, this can leave us open to charges of cliquey-ness, but it is an open conference where as long as you have something to say, we are very happy to hear it.
Which leads me to thank the board who labour hard in the vineyards all year round to organise the conference, the journal, Notework, the website, the Facebook page and keep the community as a whole together. Some people fund themselves in this work. I am very grateful to all of them.
So we had a fantastic time in Warsaw, unexpectedly grappling with the role of the activist scholar through our keynotes and several of the papers I attended. The city was a great location and the Faculty was a great venue. But, as the official conference theme of creative destruction teaches us, we can’t stand still, and so now we have to think about next year’s conference, SCOS 2014, in Utrecht.
The call for papers is on the website, and included in this mailing. Utrecht is a great place for a conference, small enough to be walkable, dripping with history, funky, and easy to get to from Amsterdam. If you plan carefully you can do EGOS in Rotterdam and SCOS in Utrecht and maybe the Discourse conference in Amsterdam. I love Utecht because it has a great art shop, quilt shop and a lively commitment to yarn bombing, but it is a lovely place with a very relaxed atmosphere. The university building is also very SCOSy with its Alice in Wonderland theme.
The conference theme is sport, play and games. This is a really rich theme, open to all sorts of interpretations from Sam Taylor Wood’s film of a sleeping David Beckham, to the economics of professional sport, to playground bullying, to sports metaphors in business, to Barbie, and Star Wars lego. I’d love to see some ethnographies of model railway makers or historical re-enactors or steampunk. There is something for everyone in this theme.
Personally I have a strange attitude to sport, I love like test match cricket which can go on for five days with neither side winning, or a snooker match which can last three. Otherwise I am not that keen. If you share my limited interest in sport, please consider the options around play and playfulness, games and rules, serious leisure, distraction and diversion, relaxation and time off mentioned in the call. And there is provision for a well-stocked open theme. I know that Jeroen and Jeroen, Martijn and Michel will give us a brilliant conference and I look forward to seeing a great many of you there.
I hope you enjoy what remains of the summer and find time to write up those papers for Culture and Organization. And possibly even to have a bit of a break.
Ann

Chair of SCOS, Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism


Item 2:

Dear SCOSers,

Hope you are having a good Summer! Now that the 2013 SCOS is over but still fresh in our minds, we'd like to invite contributions to the 2014 Notework issue (the 2013 issue is on our website and on the Conference usb sticks for your reference). As you know, Notework is our informal SCOS publication where we share ideas, comments and experiences.
Inspired by some of the issues raised in the great presentations attended this year, the theme for the next Notework issue will be 'Puzzles? Puzzled? Puzzling?'. We'd like to hear from you, whether this refers to organisational or academic puzzles, evokes puzzling issues and concerns, inspires artistic deconstruction, or simply prompts you to leave us puzzled.
Please send your contributions (no word limit, style or format restrictions) to iboncori@essex.ac.uk to contribute to our SCOS community.

Best,

Ilaria and Tom


Item 3:

Dear SCOS members

I have some news about the editorship of Culture and Organization. Damian O'Doherty, who has been an absolute delight to work with, is stepping down in the not too distant future after three years at the co-helm of the journal. I know you will all want to join me in a huge vote of thanks for all his hard work and enthusiasm in keeping the Good Ship C and O afloat. We've gone through a fair bit during his tenure, including the successful transition to ScholarOne, and we all owe him an awful lot. The good news is that Annette Risberg, who works at Copenhagen Business School and who got involved in SCOS at about the same time as I did (longer ago than either of us care to remember!), co-organized the fantastic two-site conference in 2009 and has also served as a Board member in the past for a number of years, has been nominated as Damian's replacement and – thankfully! – has agreed. Annette will be taking over from Damian at the start of January. This won't cause any disruption in what us managerialist types :) like to call 'service', but we are also very grateful to Annette for agreeing to come on board.

Sadly you're stuck with me for a little while to come. Ahem.

Cheers everyone from Jo Brewis xxxx


Item 4:

You will recently have received a request from us encouraging proposal submissions for special issues for C and O. We are delighted to say that we have now received several concrete proposals which we are carefully considering. As such, and although we are always very pleased to receive proposals on this basis and would like to say a sincere thank you for all the interest the original mail generated, we think we are going to be able to fill several of the vacant slots now and so may not have any coming up now for some considerable time.

All the very best

Damian O’Doherty, Jo Brewis, Sarah Dempsey and Janet Sayers, Co-editors, Culture and Organization


Item 5:

CREATIVE DECONSTRUCTION

Call for papers – Special issue of Culture and Organization

Volume 21, issue 4, 2015

Inspired by the 31st SCOS conference on the same theme, this special issue of Culture and Organization invites contributions which bridge creativity, entrepreneurship, management and change. At the beginning of the 20th century, Joseph Schumpeter used the Bakhuninian idea of ‘creative destruction’ to characterize the behaviour of the entrepreneur (or, we could say, entrepreneurialism). The destruction of rules and ideas and the building of something new on the ruins is also the modus operandi of the contemporary liquid world of organizing. Organization studies - for so many years preoccupied with how to understand and instill order - has, with entrepreneurship as an emerging field of interest, as well as with the study of cultures and of other areas that have become more and more widespread in recent decades, changed its focus. It is now equally about disorder as about order, about chaos as about structures.
Following Schumpeter, it can be argued that creativity is a transgressive act since “every act of creation is first an act of destruction” as Picasso famously suggested. Creation is always accompanied by destruction which leads to re-construction, innovation and the new beginning, as in legends and myths of ancient heroes and gods - Shiva, Kali Dionysos of the Dionysian Mysteries, or Odin, who all personify both creativity and destruction at the same time. This idea has been used for many purposes and in a variety of different contexts: in songs (as in ‘Symphony Of Destruction’ by Megadeth), theatre (as in ‘Danton's Death’ by Georg Büchner), film (e.g. Woody Allen’s ‘Small Time Crooks’), and philosophy, for example. However, the very notions of destruction and re-construction are socially created and therefore might themselves be explored by application of the Derridean notion of deconstruction as originally presented in On Grammatology. Alternatively, analytical use could be made of the many subsequent developments of - or indeed departures from - this approach to reading, interpretation and writing in organization studies and elsewhere.
We would like to bring some of these ideas together and invite new ones. The intention is to see what happens when these ideas are put into conjunction with each other. Will it result in a ‘big bang’ or something more akin to a conceptual recycling process: innovation and becoming-obsolete in one continuous movement? Or, in terms of organization studies, will something new emerge, a new idea of how organizations organize themselves?
Articles are invited which connect with questions of deconstruction in relation to creativity, entrepreneurship and organizing. We welcome especially articles that offer innovative insights and are based on ethnographic, critical and interpretive approaches. Possible themes of ‘creative deconstruction’ may include but are not limited to:
• Organizing as creative deconstruction
• Architecture and space in organization – construction, deconstruction or destruction?
• Entrepreneurs, destruction and deconstruction
• Entrepreneurs and managers as creative heroes of pop-culture
• Deconstructing creativity: critical approaches to the creative process
• Transitions, hybridity and metamorphosis in organizations: between being and becoming
• Deconstructing dramas of organizing
• The spirit and culture of deconstruction in organizations
• Art, subversion and organization
• Cities destroyed by reconstruction: un-creative recreating of the past
• Destruction and construction: the spiralling movement of the organizational life cycle

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 studies, cultural studies etcetera. In short, we welcome papers from any disciplinary, paradigmatic or methodological perspective as long as they directly address the theme of deconstruction in relation to creativity, entrepreneurship and organizing.

Guest editors
The guest editors are Beata Glinka, Przemysław Hensel and Agnieszka Postuła, all of the Faculty of Management, University of Warsaw.

Submission and informal enquiries
Papers should be submitted through the Culture and Organization ScholarOne site at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/gsco. Please ensure when you do submit that you select the relevant special issue (volume 21, issue 4) to direct your submission appropriately. If you experience any problems please contact Beata Glinka at the e-mail address shown below.

The deadline for manuscript submission is May 30th 2014.

Style and other instructions on manuscript preparation can be found on 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.

Please direct informal enquiries to Beata Glinka (bglinka@gmail.com)