Item 1:

Message from Outgoing SCOSSBOSS Ann Rippin, Chair Extraordinare

This year’s SCOS was a brilliant success, even more so now that we have seen the safe return of Scossie the dragon. It was all a bit poignant for me because it was my last SCOS as chair. I have taken up a role on the editorial board of Culture and Organization and so will continue my formal, as well as informal association with SCOS.

I have said on many occasions that I owe a great deal to SCOS. It has been a sounding board for my academic work, has given me a robust academic network and enhanced name awareness (even if one person did come up to me at another conference and say, ‘Oh, so you’re Ann Rippin. I thought you were an Australian man.’), and it has enabled me to see all sorts of bits of the world I would not otherwise have seen. More than all of this it has given me life-long friends, and a beautiful, brilliant, wonderful godson, Noel, who is an unexpected blessing later on in my life.

I love SCOS because it is open to anyone with something interesting to say. It revels in being provocative and innovative and interesting. It does not play safe. I have worked very hard with the SCOS board to make it inclusive, accessible and comfortable. I think from the positive feedback we have had that this has worked and I hope it will continue to be an academic home for many people.

I am handing over to the wonderful Thomas Lennerfors. He is a gentleman and a scholar and I can think of very few higher expressions of praise. It is time that SCOS was run again by someone other than a Brit, and someone with lots of great ideas for how SCOS can develop at a time when conference budgets are so squeezed and we are all forced to justify everything we do. At the last board meeting there was lots of conversation about doing new things or doing things differently and that will make SCOS better and stronger. I could not be more delighted to hand my beloved SCOS over to Thomas and his board, and I cannot wait to see what he will do with it.

So thanks very much for all the wonderful support I have received. I was really touched when people expressed concern that I would not be at next year’s conference. It is the last one that I saw through, as it were, and I would not miss it for the world. I will see you there, and hope that you will join with me until then with keeping the managerialist philistines from our gates.

Ann

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Item 2:

Message from Incoming SCOSSBOSS Tomas Lennerfors, Gentleman Scholar

Dear all,

As Ann said, this year's SCOS in Nottingham was indeed a great success. The theme of Home was interesting and challenging, and I think all delegates developed and refined their understanding of the concept of home and how it might help them understand their own particular research topics.

But I also think that the theme of Home says something about SCOS as a whole, and not only the 2015 conference. At least for me SCOS has been a place where I can feel at home. After my first SCOS in Stockholm (2005), I have kept returning to SCOS, and I can't say I missed many. And it is not because I have ever felt that I have to be at SCOS for instrumental or strategic reasons (as is sometimes the feeling with other conferences). Rather, I have wanted to return.

During the years, I have received very good feedback on my papers, sincere and constructive feedback, that has been aimed to develop my research, rather than promoting the work of the person giving the feedback. Some of the papers I have presented have been developed into articles in the SCOS journal Culture & Organization, and other high quality academic journals. At least for me, and I sincerely hope that this is a widespread sentiment, SCOS has made a lot to my academic career. As Ann said, SCOS is a place where academic titles and number of stars are less relevant than the ideas of the delegates.

And, then of course, I believe that every SCOS is serious in trying to create a place where all delegates interact and discuss, before, between, and after sessions. And, here again, I get the feeling that people talk to each other not because they feel that they should, but because they want to. For me, not only good academic work has been born out of these discussions. I have gotten many wonderful friends through SCOS. Maybe SCOS as a whole bears the theme of Home.

This place of serious academic activity in a supportive environment, is what characterizes SCOS. Ann has done an excellent job in creating this atmosphere during her years as SCOS Boss. I think that a more suitable Chair of SCOS is hard to find, and on behalf of the SCOS board and all SCOSsers I would like to thank Ann for her excellent work, and incessant enthusiasm for SCOS. I wish Ann good luck in her new position as editor of Culture & Organization.

SCOS, this home of serious fun, is what I would like to continue building now that I am the chair of SCOS. In the coming years, I look forward to a number of conferences with innovative and challenging topics, first starting off with the Animal next year. I hope that we will see many SCOS newcomers, and many SCOS returnees explore this topic in the beautiful city of Uppsala, in Sweden. I also look forward to working together with the lovely SCOS board, who spend a lot of time and effort to make sure that SCOS does not only exist during the conference four days per year, but also has a presence in between. For example, we have just created a new facebook page, and I would encourage all SCOSsers to join and interact. SCOS will never be more than what we make of it, so I hope you will all join and support the work to constantly create and re-create SCOS as this home of serious fun.

All the best,

Thomas Taro Lennerfors, aka SCOS Boss
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Item 3:

Facebook Group Details

We've made a new Facebook group for the Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism - it's a place where everybody can keep in touch and active with conversations they were having at the conference. It's also a place where we'd like to invite you to post anything you feel might be a bit scossy and get talking!

Here's the link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1648286865418616/

Please do also share the group with people you think might want to join or invite them directly from the group!

Hope to see you there!

Daniel Hartley

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Item 4:

Deadline for ACSCOS 22nd August 2015 – The 6th Australasian Caucus of the Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism

ANXIETY AND ORGANIZATION

30 November to 2 December 2015
Macquarie University
Sydney, Australia

Full details at: www.acscos.org
Draft Programme Summary at: acscos.org/programme

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom” Søren Kierkegaard once remarked. With the liberty afforded by neo-liberalism, a new anxiety has been born. Ours is a globalized economic anxiety where our freedoms are directed towards clambering over the line that separates winners from losers, rich from poor, those ahead and those left behind. Organizations are not innocent. Audits, performance measures, short term targets, and the rest of the plethora of metrics and measurements weigh heavily as liberty is reduced to the freedom to compete in a less than zero sum game. The rules of this restless game are that the future is uncertain and the present is insecure. The agitation is heightened by uneasy managers enlisted to engender and foment anxiety in others.

On a geo-political scale there is the freedom to enter into the circuits of capital that whizz around the globe without care of consequence of what is left in their wake. This is not W.H. Auden’s age of anxiety that heralded the alienation of an industrialized world. Our anxiety is that of a world which we identify with all too much. A world where organization and management hold centre stage in people’s lives – for better or for worse, like it or not. The anxiety is one with which we must identify; to belong; to hope for the spoils; to abate the fear of nothing; to live; to survive.

As Susan Bordo assesses, this anxiety manifests too in the obsessions of unobtainable idealised bodies and lives that are little more that the logical product of the dominant cultural fantasies. Anxiety is written on the bodies of people in organizations whose eyes are never far from the mirror that is given to them as a sad gift from on high. Authenticity as a once hopeful purpose is replaced with the desire to be that which the hierarchy approves, whatever it takes – hard hours at the gym, late hours in the office, 24×7 email demands, painful diets, the surgeon’s knife, the discipline of the personal coach, or the handy advice of the management guru.

In the ruthless mire of neo-liberal performativity, our conference has as its theme ‘anxiety and organizations’. We are calling for papers that examine organizationally related phenomena from the perspective of anxiety and the related and often ambivalent feelings of fear, freedom, desire, choice, dread, responsibility, worry and uncertainty. In one direction this could mean expounding the organizational structures, cultures, pressures and effects that that lead to and are caused by anxiety. In another, the focus might be on the productive possibilities of confronting anxiety and the paths of freedom away from the anxiety of organizations.

Papers addressing the theme might consider the following subjects, although this list is far from exhaustive:

• Identity, organizations and anxiety
• Anxiety and desire
• Humanity, anxiety and relationships
• Fetishes and anxiety
• Cultural constructions of anxieties on bodies
• Financial anxiety after the crisis
• The anxiety of insecure and precarious work
• The productive possibilities of anxiety
• Worker resistance as a response to and/or harbinger of anxiety
• Work and anxiety in popular culture
• Discrimination and the production of anxiety
• The anxiety of leadership
• Organization as a mechanism of repression
• Management and control as an attempt to appease anxiety
• Gender as constitutive of anxiety in organizations
• Anti-organizational protest as a response to anxiety
• Possibilities for productive anxiety and a return to humanism
• The anxiety of change and its management
• The anxiety of consumerism
• The institutionalization of anxiety
• Anxiety and the compression of organizational time and space
• Bureaucracy, post-bureaucracy and anxiety
• Income inequality and anxiety
• Cultures of anxiety
• The anxiety of ageing/the anxiety of youth
• Anxiety and the freedom of expression
• Anxiety, transparency and surveillance
• Organizational and business ethics as conditions of anxiety
• The normalisation of anxiety and the medicalisation of calm
• Theoretical approaches to anxiety and related phenomena
• Performance anxiety
• Anxiety and contemporary academic life
• Flesh and anxiety and its management such as cosmetic surgery
• LGBTI and the anxiety of sexuality and sexual identity

Papers and abstracts are invited that directly address the conference theme, or address other open issues. Two alternative forms of submission are invited: abstracts of up to 800 words or full papers of up to 7,000 words.

We also encourage and welcome the submission of proposals for workshops and symposia. We will consider proposals for events in any format including, but not limited to, interactive sessions, themed paper presentations, arts based presentations, performances, and anything your imagination can stretch to! Time slots of 90 minutes are available.

Papers, abstracts and proposals should be submitted by 22 August 2015. Notification of acceptance will be given prior to 4 September 2015.

Submit your paper at http://acscos.org/submissions/

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Item 5:

Postcard from Scossy

After a fun and exciting time in Nottingham, including developing a close association with some lovely facilities staff, I encountered a strange doppelganger! Is either of us the authentic Scossy, or should I now pursue a double existence? Your own philosophical scrawls on the subject of multiple mystical animal selves would be much appreciated. Please reply to SCOSBOSS, Uppsala

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Keep it creative scossers!