Item 1:

The inaugural issue of Organizational Aesthetics has just been published at:

http://ojs.wpi.edu/index.php/orgaesthetics/issue/view/2/showToc


Item 2:

Call for papers on Understanding the complexities of nomadic identities
Special Issue of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion - an international journal
guest editors: Prof Jasmin Mahadevan; Prof Mustafa Oezbilgin
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/products/journals/call_for_papers.htm?id=3741

Editors:
Prof Jasmin Mahadevan, Pforzheim University, jasmin.mahadevan@pforzheim-university.de
Prof Mustafa Özbilgin, Brunel University, mustafa.ozbilgin@brunel.ac.uk

Outline:
In a globalized world, transnational and transcultural research on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) is on the rise. However, the mere terms ‘transnational’ and ‘transcultural’ imply a perspective that takes the concepts of nationality and culture/ethnicity as starting point of analysis. This stream attempts to reconfigure these concepts from their borders and to interrogate the complexities of nomadic identities.

With nomadic identities we mean the identities of those who are not in a temporary and liminal state of ‘transnationality’ and ‘transculturality’ but who inhabit the in-between permanently and might not even conceive themselves in majority-perspective dichotomies such as ‘bi-national’ or ‘bi-cultural’. We use the term broadly: With nomadic, we do not only refer to the chronic expatriate manager but to all who are born, placed or place themselves into a state of expatriation, migration or transculturality. With this special issue, we would like to explore the shifting modes of interplay between individual identity and place in the context of work.

We are interested in multi-disciplinary exchange and in stimulating discussions on the nature of nomadic identities. Therefore, we welcome papers from all disciplines and all methodological perspectives. We encourage both junior and more senior scholars to submit; both empirical and theoretical papers are welcome.

We are particularly interested in empirical and conceptual research that examines the complexities of nomadic identities from multilevel perspective, e.g. micro-individual, meso-organizational and macro-societal. The micro-individual level is linked to subjective concepts of self and identity as held by nomadic individuals. The meso-organizational level acknowledges the influence of intermediate forms of social organization, such as workplaces and career paths. The macro-societal level refers to all boundary conditions that influence and might change micro- and meso-level interaction, such as diversity or immigration policies. We are particularly interested in research which reflects on the way macro, meso and micro levels interact to form unique configurations of nomadic identity. We are looking for research that acknowledges the complexities of identities across more than one level or more than one context. Papers that are based on multi-methodological approaches and/or interdisciplinary perspectives are welcome.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):
• How can nomadic identities be studied and conceptualized? Which methods and theoretical perspectives are suitable for studying nomadic identities? How to incorporate the study of nomadic identities into career and management studies?
• Does the researcher have to be a nomadic individual to study nomadic identities? What are the requirements with regard to researcher identity in order to study nomadic identities?
• Who are nomadic individuals in the modern world? What are the different types of nomadic identities and how are they related to each other and to the national and cultural/ethnic majority?
• How is the concept of nomadic identities linked to broader themes of equality, diversity and inclusion? How can the concepts of transnationality and transculturality be broadened to also include nomadic identities?
• Are there similarities and differences with regard to the career choices of nomadic individuals? How do organizational policies and state policy intervention influence the career paths of nomadic individuals? Are there any contextual differences?
• What explains the difference between those individuals who explore and live their nomadic identities successfully and those who fail in the process? Are there similarities and difference with regard to ethnicity, culture, country of origin or other factors? Are there privileged and underprivileged nomadic identities?
• How is the concept of the nomadic self as held by nomadic individuals linked to ascription by others? Do the inside (emic) and outside (etic) perspective clash? Does power or inequality of power influence the negotiation and reconfiguration of nomadic identities? Do nomadic individuals suffer exclusion and inequality?
• Are nomadic individual an asset or a liability to societies and/or organizations? How are organizational concepts of human capital related to the concept of nomadic identity and is this relation an uncontested or a critical one?

This call is open and competitive, and the submitted papers will be blind reviewed in the normal way. Submission will be taken to imply that a paper contains original work that has not previously been published and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Authors should follow the journal's regular guidelines, as published in every issue of the journal. Papers should be no longer than 7,000 words.

January 01, 2012 Call for papers issued
September 01, 2012 Deadline for submission of papers
December 15, 2012 Authors notified of outcome of peer review
February 15, 2013 Authors to submit final papers to Editors
April 2013 Editorial decision
2013 Expected publication of the special issue

Prospective contributors can also liaise with the Guest Editors before the submission date to discuss the suitability of their work for this publication. All submissions for the special issue will be subject to full peer review.

For further information about the journal, and link to author guidelines and submission, please visit the EDI web pages via: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/products/journals/journals.htm?id=edi

Please note that the submissions should be made through Manuscript Central. Papers to be considered for this special issue should be submitted online via: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/edi (selecting "Special Issue Paper" (Nomadic Identities) as the Manuscript Type).

References:
Mahadevan, J. (2012), Are engineers religious? An interpretative approach to cross-cultural conflict and collective identities. International Journal of Cross-Cultural Management, 12 (1), forthcoming January 2012.
Mahadevan, J. (2011), Reflexive guidelines for writing organizational culture.
Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, 6(2), pp. 150-170.
Özbilgin, M. and Tatli, A. (2011) Mapping out the field of equality and diversity: rise of individualism and voluntarism, Human Relations, 64(2), pp. 1229-1253
Özbilgin M. (ed.) (2009) Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at Work, Cheltenham and New York: Edward Elgar Press. ISBN: 1847203353
Özbilgin, M and Tatli, A. (2008) Global Diversity Management: An Evidence Based Approach, London and New York: Palgrave. ISBN: 1403996105


Item 3:

Call for Papers: Embodying Leadership with Ethics in Mind

In both theory and practice there is a long held view that leadership differs from management. In contrast to the administrative and bureaucratic connotations associated with management, leadership is positioned as being more dynamic and transformative, depending on communicative and inspirational skills, and of crucial importance in comparatively unstable and fast changing environments (Grint, 2000; 2005). What remains largely unquestioned, however, is the embodied character of both leadership and its distinction from management. Whilst the embodied nature of organization has received attention, few studies recognize the embodied nature of leadership or question leaders’ disembodied character (Ropo and Parviainen, 2001; Ropo and Sauer, 2008). Whether it is transformational leadership, charismatic leadership, or situational leadership, the common assumption is that good leadership emanates from the mind or personality. If the body is considered, it is done so superficially, for example by associating leadership effectiveness with physical characteristics and/or assuming that the leader is able bodied and ostensibly Western. The bodily and affective labour of leadership and its relationship with ethical practice have been largely overlooked (with notable exceptions such as Calás and Smircich, 1991; Sinclair, 2005 on embodied leadership)[1]. More over leadership’s engagement with corporeal ethics (Pullen and Rhodes, 2010; cf. Diprose,2002), an ethics of the body is worthy of academic engagement.

Considering leadership as an embodied and affective practice offers an alternative reading to management as being distant, technical, functional, rational and masculine and white. This calls for an understanding of the affective and embodied dimensions of leadership so as to recognize that leading requires large elements of empathy, insight into others’ normative and moral frameworks, considerable persuasive skills as well as embodied interactions and responses. Some have characterized these alternative qualities as feminine leadership (e.g. Peters, 1990). It has been argued that such characteristics are gendered such that men more closely conform to disembodied leadership and women to affective/embodied leadership (cf. Adler, 1997). Others argue that such attempts to typecast the sexes is itself gendered and that this reproduces rather than challenges taken for granted gender and sexual binary divisions and dichotomies (Calás and Smircich,1993; Knights and Kerfoot, 2004). Moreover, such binary divisions serve to reinforce inequalities and disadvantages. There is a contemporary irony at play here as well. In the context of recent economic crises—which could be at least partly attributed to dominantly masculine leadership strategies (Knights and Tullberg, 2011)—there is a space for a new privileging of feminine leadership. However, while women leaders might benefit from this in subscribing to gendered leadership practices, these gendered dualisms may simply reproduce the systems of social relations that have undermined gender equality in the past (Linstead and Brewis, 2004; Fletcher, 2005)

While gender and its embodied manifestation has received some attention in leadership studies ‘race’ and ethnicity has been neglected. Race has received attention in leadership studies in other fields, and there is an important stream of work by leadership scholars in critical management and organization (see, Bell & Nkomo 2001; Parker, 2004; Chin, 2009; Mumby, 2011). Much of the existing work approaches the themes from the particular perspective of American social dynamics and racial and ethnic constructs (see, Omi & Winant, 1994). Importantly, studies of embodiment and leadership appear to date to have neglected race and racialisation, and ethnicity and ethnicization, notwithstanding important exceptions (e.g. bell hooks, 2004).

Given the need to operationalise effective leadership in fast changing organizational times and often within states of economic, political and social crisis, the practical as well as epistemic challenges that leaders face require serious academic scrutiny. In this stream we perform such analysis by contesting the continued theorization and research of leadership as disembodied, and instead paying critical attention to the corporeal nature of leadership itself. In this way we offer this stream as a place to think about the ways in which leadership is an affective and embodied practice.

We invite conceptual and empirical papers on the matter of leadership that may include but are not limited to:
– The tensions between embodied leadership and exercising rationality in the pursuit of organizational goals (Calás and Smircich, 1991).
– Affective leadership as related to inter-corporeal relations between working bodies.
– The inseparability of mind/body and subject/object as a means to consider processual ways in which to read leadership (Ladkin, 2008; Collinson, 2005).
– The relationship between leadership aesthetics (see Hansen et al., 2007) as exterior and its corporeal interior.
– The image and identity of the leader and its impact and effect on leadership practice.
– Linkages between autonomy- or self-preoccupied identity work within masculine leader models on one hand and ethical practice on the other. (Knights, 2006).
– Critical assessments of assumptions about the nature of leaders’ bodies in relation to gender, sexuality, race, able-bodiedness, weight and age.
– Gendered and sexed bodies and leadership.
– Racialisation, bodies and leadership.
– The intersectionality of material differences, including the relationship between difference and skin.
– Leadership ‘effectiveness’ as it relates to embodiment.
– The relationship between embodied leadership practice and reflexivity.

Convenors
Alison Pullen is Professor of Organization Studies at Swansea University, UK. Alison has published extensively in the broad areas of identity, gender, ethics and the body. She is currently engaged in numerous writing projects around embodiment, ethics and leadership including, ‘The Materiality of Leadership’ and ‘The Ethico-Political Organization’.
Suzanne Gagnon is Assistant Professor in the Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, Canada. Suzanne studies discursive and material constructions of identity, diversity and inequality and their effects, including for leadership and situated leadership actors. Amongst other projects, she is a co-lead for a five-year Community University Research Alliance (CURA) examining leadership diversity in large organizations, supported by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
Pasi Ahonen is Lecturer in Organization Studies at Swansea University, UK. His current work focuses on organizations and the media, politics of history in organizational change and analytics of power in the practice and theory of organisations. Within the field of leadership studies, Pasi's focus is on the relationship between leadership and modalities of power.

[1] Within organization studies more generally, the neglect has been less palpable (see for example, Dale, 2001; Morgan et al., 2003; Linstead and Brewis, 2004).

References:
Bell, E.L. J. Edmondson and Nkomo, S. (2001) Our separate ways: Black and white women and the struggle for professional identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
hooks, b. (2004) We Real Cool. Black Men and Masculinity. New York: Routledge.
Calás, Marta B., & Smircich, Linda M. (1991) Voicing seduction to silence leadership. Organization Studies, 12, 567-602.
Calás, M. and Smircich, L. (1993) Dangerous liaisons: the "feminine-in-management" meets "globalization, Business Horizons, March/ April.
Chin, J.L. (2009) Gender, race and leadership. In Leadership in a changing world: Dynamic perspectives on groups and their leaders, Robert H. Klein, Cecil A. Rice and Victor L. Schermer (Eds). Plymouth: Lexington Books, pp. 73-92.
Collinson, D. (2005) Dialectics of Leadership, Human Relations, 58(11): 1419-1442.
Dale, K. (2001) Anatomising Embodiment and Organisation Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Diprose, R. (2002) Corporeal Generosity: on giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas.State University of New York: Albany.
Fletcher, J. (2005) The paradox of postheroic leadership: An essay on gender, power, and transformational change, Leadership Quarterly, 15: 647-661.
Grint, K (2000) The Arts of Leadership. Oxford University Press.
Grint, K. (2005) Leadership: Limits and Possibilities. London: Palgrave.
hooks, bell (2004) We Real Cool. Black Men and Masculinity. New York: Routledge.
Knights, D. and Kerfoot, (2004) ‘Between Representations and Subjectivity: Gender Binaries and the Politics of Organizational Transformation’, Gender, Work and Organization, 11/4, July, pp. 430-454.
Knights, D. (2006) Authority at work: Reflections and Recollections, Organization Studies, 27(5): 699-720.
Knights, D. and M. Tullberg, Managing Masculinity/Mismanaging the Corporation, Organization, first published online June 6, 2011, Forthcoming, 2012.
Linstead, (Pullen) A. and Brewis,J. (2004) Special Issue on Beyond Boundaries: towards fluidity in theorising and practice, Gender, Work and Organization, 11/4, July, pp. 430-454.
Morgan D., B. Brandth and E. Kvande, (Eds.) (2003) Gender, Bodies and Work, pp. 31-43, Aldershot: Ashgate.
Mumby, D.K. (2011). Reframing difference in organizational communication studies: Research, pedagogy, practice. Thousand Oaks, CA and London: SAGE.
Omi, M. & Winant, H. (1994). Racial formation in the United States: from the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge.
Parker, P. S. (2004). Race, gender, and leadership: re-envisioning organizational leadership from the perspectives of African-American women executives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Peters, T. (1990) The Best New Managers Will Listen, Motivate, Support - Isn't That Just Like a Woman?, Working Woman, September 1990, pp. 216-217.
Pullen, A. and Rhodes, C. (2010) Gender, Ethics and The Face, in P. Lewis and R. Simpson (Eds.) Concealing and Revealing Gender, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Ropo, A. and Parvianen, J.(2001) Leadership and bodily knowledge in expert organizations: epistemological rethinking, Scandanavian Journal of Management, 17(1): 1-18.
Ropo, A. and Sauer, E. (2008) Dances of leadership: Bridging theory and practice through an aesthetic approach, Journal of Management and Organization, 14(5): 560-572.
Sinclair, A. (2005) Body and Management Pedagogy, Gender, Work and Organization, 12(1): 89-104.