Item 1:

Workshop on 'Organizational Death, Memory and Loss’
Hosted by the Culture, Organizations and Markets Group, Keele University, UK, 4-5 October 2012

Organised by
Emma Bell, Keele University, UK, e.bell@mngt.keele.ac.uk
Magnus Hansson, Örebro University, Sweden, magnus.hansson@oru.se
Janne Tienari, Aalto University, Finland, janne.tienari@aalto.fi

Aims and description:
The fact of human mortality and the need to live with constant awareness of it helps to account for many aspects of social and cultural organization (Bauman, 1992). The reluctance of modern societies to engage with the idea of death is suggested to be symptomatic of the sequestration of death from everyday life (Mellor and Schilling, 1993). However, more recently, there has been a shift away from a narrow, individualistic and Freudian framing of dying and bereavement, towards an understanding of cultures as based on the maintenance of continuing bonds between the dead and the living (Walter, 1999). While sociologists, philosophers, anthropologists and psychologists have long studied death, including its cultural effects, representations, societal functions and meanings, organizational death and loss has not been widely explored and theorising remains limited (Hazen, 2008).

In organization studies a few scholars have sought to understand the role of death in organizational life. Sievers (1994), suggests the fragmentation and meaninglessness of modern work can only be understood relative to the Western separation of life from death and the consequent denial of the latter within contemporary work organizations. Hence it is only by coming to terms with the inescapable nature of death as a universal parameter and a constituent part of life that we can discard mechanistic, reductionist theories in favour of a more meaningful working life. Willmott (2000) argues that death is an inevitable part of life and an essential feature of the human condition; therefore our ability to deal with it is significant in determining the fundamental structures of meaning. For Reedy and Learmonth (2011), death raises questions about the ethics of organization, forcing us to consider how we collectively construct organizations that support, rather than undermine meaning.

Issues of organizational mortality, discontinuity and decline are particularly prescient in the wake of the global financial crisis. Corporate failure, organizational downsizing, plant closure, industrial and economic downturn, have material, social and psychological effects on societies and individuals. Although we know why organizations die, we know less about how death processes unfold (Sutton, 1987; Hansson, 2008). Organizational death can constitute a profound source of loss and suffering (Driver, 2007) through the removal of fundamental structures of work-related meaning (Marris, 1974). Its significance is derived from the relationship between the past and the present and the role of the deceased in the ongoing lives of the living. The ritual practices that surround death, including mourning and memorialisation, provide a symbolic focus through which historical connections, including collective memories and shared histories, are constructed and maintained.

There is thus a need for new perspectives that take account of theoretical and societal shifts that have fundamentally reshaped lived experience of death and loss in late modern society (Bell and Taylor, 2011). Workshop contributors are invited to explore how death is managed in contemporary societies, both within organizations (Charles-Edwards, 2005; Thompson, 2009), and in the death care industry (Barley, 1983). We also welcome submissions that consider the ethics of death, by building on the idea that modernity enables murderous atrocities (Bauman, 1999) or that capitalism depends on death in order to flourish (Banerjee, 2008). Papers may also focus on the death of organizational leaders in shaping organizational cultures (Hyde and Thomas, 2003). Alternatively, they may contribute towards understandings of the role of death in constructing consumer identities (O'Donohoe and Turley, 2006). Papers could encompass analysis of the bodily and spiritual aspects of organizational death, such as rebirth or reincarnation. Finally, contributors might consider how death processes unfold and the practices that surround this.

Other topics of potential interest include:
- Responses to organizational downsizing, site closure, business failure, mergers and acquisitions, redundancy and unemployment;
- Death at work, including employee suicides, organizational accidents and disasters;
- Material cultures of organizational death and memorialisation in the construction of collective memory and history;
- Storytelling and sensemaking in relation to organizational death and loss;
- Emotional responses to organizational loss, including grief, mourning and resilience;
- Discourses of death and loss in organizations.

Papers presented at the workshop will be considered for a forthcoming Special Issue of the journal Culture & Organization, to be guest edited by the workshop organizers and published in 2014 (first end of 2013).

Timescale and process:

Abstracts (750 words including references) should be submitted electronically to all three organizers: Emma Bell e.bell@mngt.keele.ac.uk, Magnus Hansson magnus.hansson@oru.se and Janne Tienari janne.tienari@aalto.fi by 30th July 2012. Contributors will be notified of acceptance by 31st August 2012. All submissions to the Special Issue will go through a double-blind review process.

References:
Banerjee, S.B. (2008). Necrocapitalism. Organization Studies, 29(12): 1541-1563.
Barley, S. (1983) Semiotics and the study of occupational and organizational cultures. Administrative Science Quarterly, 28: 393-413.
Bauman, Z. (1992). Mortality, Immortality and other Life Strategies. Cambridge: Polity.
Bell, E. and Taylor, S. (2011). Beyond letting go and moving on: New perspectives on organizational death, loss and grief. Scandinavian Journal of Management. 27(1): 1-10.
Charles-Edwards, D. (2005) Handling Death and Bereavement at Work, London: Routledge.
Thompson, N. (2009) Loss, Grief and Trauma in the Workplace, Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Co,. Inc.
Driver, M. (2007). Meaning and suffering in organizations. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 20(5): 611-632.
Hansson, M and Wigblad, R. (2006) Pyrrhic Victories - Anticipating the Closedown Effect. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 17(5), 938-959.
Harris, S.E. & Sutton, R.I. (1986). Functions of parting ceremonies in dying organizations. Academy of Management Journal, 29(1), 5-30.
Hazen, M.A. (2008). Grief and the workplace. Academy of Management Perspectives, August, 78-86.
Hyde, P. and Thomas, A. (2003). When a leader dies. Human Relations, 56(8), 1005-1024.
Marris, P. (1974). Loss and change. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Mellor, P.A. and Shilling, C. (1993). Modernity, self-identity and the sequestration of death. Sociology, 27(3): 411-431.
O'Donohoe, S. and Turley, D. (2006) 'Compassion at the Counter: Service Encounters and Bereaved Consumers', Human Relations, 59: 1429-1448.
Reedy, P. and Learmonth, M. (2011) 'Death and organization: Heidegger's thought on death and life in organization', Organization Studies. 32(1): 117-131
Sievers, B. (1994). Work, Death and Life Itself. Berlin: DeGruyter.
Sutton, R.I. (1987). The process of organizational death: Disbanding and reconnecting. Administrative Science Quarterly, 32, 542-69.
Walter, T. (1999) On bereavement: The Culture of Grief. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Willmott, H. (2000) Death. So what? Sociology, sequestration and emancipation. Sociological Review, 48(4): 649-665.


Item 2:

Call for Papers – Special Issue of Marketing Theory: ‘Psychoanalysis and marketing theory: retail therapies, marketing repressions and oedipal consumption'

Guest Editors: Robert Cluley (University of Leicester) and John Desmond (University of St Andrews)

Psychoanalysis has been instrumental in developing marketing practice and marketing thought (Samuel, 2010; Schwartzkopf and Gries, 2010; Tadajewski, 2006a; Justman, 1994; Packard, 1957). Yet, psychoanalysis has long since been cast out of marketing research by more sanitized but well-funded consumer psychologies, with their black boxes and reactive synapses marginalising the ambivalent, violent and sexual subject of psychoanalysis (Tadajewski, 2006b). As Patterson, Bradshaw and Brown (2008: 454) suggest while ‘marketing in its rawest, instinctual, most potent form is like the inner child, the savage, the id of Freudian theory’ it has been ‘sadly civilised by its own aspirations for scientific status’. It would be a shame, though, if the only story told about psychoanalysis within marketing theory was a mythical tale of its manipulative powers and defeat to more scientific psychologies. Recent contributions from sociologists (Bauman, 2007; Billig, 1999b), organisation theorists (Böhm and Batta, 2010; Gabriel and Lang, 2006), literature and cultural theorists (Bennett, 2005; Bowlby, 1993) as well as social psychologists (Lyth, 1989) show us that psychoanalysis offers a powerful theory to make sense of marketing practices, consumer behaviours and the vicissitudes of marketing theory.

Indeed, while marketing and consumer issues are increasingly discussed outside of marketing academia through the lens of psychoanalytic theory, it is the fundamental premise of this special issue that it is about time that the opposite happens (see Fullerton, 2007). The purpose of this special issue is, then, to mark the return of the repressed within marketing theory (Tadajewski and Saren, 2008). An intervention that is especially prescient in regards of the recent re-translation of Freud’s writings and the growing interest in psychoanalytic theory as a way of studying the economy and organisation (Contu, Driver and Jones, 2010). Thus, we invite submissions that approach psychoanalysis as a marketing theory capable of offering more than practical toolkit for propaganda or a historical oddity providing humorous anecdotes about our infantile early days. Bearing in mind that psychoanalysis has always concerned itself with observation, we are open to empirical investigations but we are especially supportive of analyses which use marketing and consumption to make a contribution to psychoanalytic theory or, alternatively, use psychoanalysis to develop marketing and consumer theory. We encourage submissions that deal with the full range of psychoanalytic theories covering not only Freud’s work but the potentially rich literatures of object relations and Lacanian theory (Desmond, 1993).

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
• Desire
• Freedom-repression
• Hysteria, contagion
• Applied object relations
• Commodity fetishism and sexuality in consumption
• Projection and repression
• Narcissism, envy and greed
• Archetypes
• Idolatry and religious consumption
• Hypnosis, mastery, freedom and ethics
• Death
• Critical appropriations of psychoanalysis such as Marxism and feminism
• Psychoanalytic methods in marketing research
• Theorising marketing history through psychoanalysis

All papers will be double-blind peer review process. Papers should be sent electronically to Robert Cluley at r.cluley@le.ac.uk. The deadline for submission of papers is Friday, 31 August 2012. Accepted papers are scheduled for publication in Volume 14, September 2014.

References:
Bauman, Z. (2007) Consuming Life, Cambridge: Polity
Bennett, D. (2005) ‘Getting the Id to Go Shopping: Psychoanalysis, Advertising, Barbie Dolls, and the Invention of the Consumer Unconscious’, Public Culture, 17(1): 1-25
Bernays, E. L. (1928) Propaganda, New York: Liveright
Billig, M. (1999a) Freudian Repression: Conversation Creating the Unconscious, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Billig, M. (1999b) ‘Commodity Fetishism and Repression: Reflections on Marx, Freud and the Psychology of Consumer Capitalism’, Theory & Psychology 9(3): 313-329
Böhm, S. and Batta, A. (2010) ‘Just doing it: enjoying commodity fetishism with Lacan’, Organization 17(3): 345-361
Bowlby, R. (1993) Shopping with Freud, London: Routledge
Contu, A., Driver, M. and Jones, C. (2010) ‘Editorial: Jacques Lacan with organization studies’, Organization 17: 307-317
Desmond J. (1993) ‘Marketing: The Split Subject’: In, Proceedings of the Rethinking Marketing Symposium, University of Warwick, July.
Dichter, E. (2002) The Strategy of Desire, London: Transaction Publishers
Fromm, E. (1955/2001) The Sane Society, London: Routledge
Fullerton, R. A. (2007) ‘Psychoanalyzing kleptomania’, Marketing Theory 7(4): 335-352
Gabriel, Y. and Lang, T. (2006) The Unmanageable Consumer - Second Edition, London: Sage
Justman, S. (1994) ‘Freud and his nephew’, Social Research 61: 457–476.
Lyth, I. M. (1989) ‘Pleasure foods’ in The Dynamics of the Social: Selected Essays, London: Free Association Books, pp 61-123
Packard, V. (1957) The Hidden Persuaders, London: Longmans, Green
Pattern, A., Bradshaw, A and Brown, S. (2008) ‘“Don’t forget the fruit gums, chum”: marketing under erasure and renewal’, Marketing Theory, 8(4): 449
Samuel, L. R. (2010) Freud on Madison Avenue: Motivation Research and Subliminal Advertising in America, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press
Schwartzkopf, S. and Gries, R. (ed) (2010) Ernest Dichter and Motivation Research: New Perspectives on the Making of Post-War Consumer Culture, London: Palgrave MacMillan
Tadajewski, M. (2006a) ‘The ordering of marketing theory: the influence of McCarthyism and the Cold War’, Marketing Theory 6(2): 163-199
Tadajewski, M. (2006b) ‘Remembering motivation research: toward an alternative genealogy of interpretive consumer research’, Marketing Theory 6(4): 429-466
Tadajewski, M. and Saren, M. (2008) ‘The past is a foreign country: amnesia and marketing theory’, Marketing Theory 8(4): 323-338


Item 3:

AHRC ‘Connecting Communities’ Workshop
Keele Management School, Keele University

You are invited to attend a one day workshop on “Community and Volunteering” on September 25th 2012 at Keele University, Moser Building. The event is organised by The Culture, Organization and Markets Research Group and sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

11-11.40 Mihaela Kelemen and Anita Mangan (Keele University): Exploring personal communities: volunteering, friendship and compassion
11.40-12.20 Heather Hopfl (Essex University): Entering the Site of Performance: A Scenographic Perspective
12.20-1.30 Lunch
1.30-2.10 John Blenkinsopp and Jennifer Hagan (Teesside University): Volunteering, diversity management and personal communities: exploring an unspoken tension
2.10 - 2.50 Nick Rumens (Bristol University): Gay Men’s Workplace Friendships: Invincible Communities?
2.50-3.10 Coffee break
3.10 - 3.50 Zofia Dworakowska (Warsaw University): Volunteering as a tradition – A Polish perspective
3.50-4.20 Discussion and Final Remarks (Mihaela Kelemen and Anita Mangan): Organizers: Mihaela Kelemen and Anita Mangan, Keele Management School

RSVP: Tracey Wood on t.wood@ippm.keele.ac.uk


Item 3:

University of Leicester School of Management, October 2012 Studentships

1. SME growth in a recession: market mapping and development, in partnership with Headlands/ KLM
2. The Green Deal: sustainable housing and the role of the builder’s merchant, in partnership with the National Merchant Buying Society

The University of Leicester School of Management is delighted to be able to offer two new three year PhD studentships. The scope of each studentship project has been partly established in advance and each involves concerted work with an external partner organization.

The studentships are for full-time study only and will commence in October 2012. They will cover tuition fees (at the UK/EU rate only) and include a stipend of £13,590 each year. The successful candidates will also receive a Research Training Support Grant worth £750 each year.

The entry requirements for these studentships are identical to those for any other entrant on to the School’s PhD programme, but the process requires a focused research proposal and an additional personal statement. Applicants who do not provide an appropriate proposal and/ or a statement will not be shortlisted.

The closing date is 20th July 2012 by 4.30 pm. No late applications will be considered. We expect to interview for these awards in August.

The scope of each studentship project has been partly established in advance, and applicants may only apply for ONE studentship, not both.

Contact for informal enquiries: Mrs Teresa Bowdrey, PhD Administrator, ulsmphdinfo@le.ac.uk
For details of how to apply and further guidance on the application and selection process, please visit: http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/management/postgraduate/research/fees


Item 4:

The Art of Caring: dwelling, affective relationality and the organization of hospital work – A colloquium

Hosted by the People, Organizations and Work Research Group, Swansea University Business School
Thursday 12th of July, 2012, Swansea University
Sponsored by the Older People & Ageing Research & Development Network & Swansea University Business School.

This inter-disciplinary colloquium brings together scholars from across the social sciences, management and health care to pay attention to fundamentally re-think what has become a set of seemingly intractable problems of caring for elderly populations in acute hospital settings. Recent years have seen a growing emphasis on the humanization of care provision to older people in acute hospitals, for example through agendas that institute dignity as a core value (Patterson et al., 2011). Despite this, the care of older people remains deeply problematic (e.g. NCEPOD, 2010; Tadd, et al., 2011,) as they have frequently been seen to receive substandard or undignified care as evidenced through increased media attention, particularly of neglect. In this colloquium we will explore the relationship between the treatment of older people and the ‘moral universe’ or ethos instituted through everyday organizational and professional practice in acute hospitals. Such an approach to thinking about health and care will focus less on the technical or individual reasons associated with the care of older people, and more on the entrenched institutional conditions that serve to propagate poor care.

Crucially, what remains unstated in current research and practice are the cultural effects of these forms of organising health care practice. This is so despite existing preliminary evidence that the regard held for patients is affected by contemporary forms of organising health care systems (Hillman et al., 2010; Rudge, 2009). This lack of attention has tremendous implications for patients in as much as they are becoming viewed as an obstacle which interferes with the smooth running of the system, bringing into question who and what the organisation is servicing; the market, the system, or the public (Weber, 1978; cf. Du Gay, 2000). This problematisation of the individual portends a shift from the organization of care based on pathologising (e.g. Berg, 1997; Parsons; 1975) as a means of organising the sick body and towards the homogenizing of bodies into managerial processes of auditability. Yet, it is within such organizations that affect is commercialized through the ‘managed heart’ (Hochschild, 2003) and reduced in value to emotional capital. The result is that the sick become reduced to countable units of cost. At the same time as sites of human interaction would not health care organizations be a prime location that one might expect people to come in contact ethically and with embodied affect? Or are there organizational reasons for legitimating only those affective displays which would benefit the organization instrumentally (Bauman, 1989)? Ultimately we ask are there strong moral reasons to think through the effects of modes of organising upon vulnerable individuals?

Drawing on recent research in the humanities and social sciences concerning affect, this colloquium will see affective human relations as vital within the health care sector as indicative of the human and emotional component of care work in health care. Frequently it is affective processes that enable a particular form of ‘care’ practice to be conducted (Latimer, 2000; Schillmeier & Domènech, 2010) making affective patient relationships crucial to health care work. Drawing together management principles and effects, we are keen to understand the extent to which a lack of care impacts upon the lives of the sick and in turn the relative moral worth of the individual as considered by health care staff. That is, within broader systems of auditability as practiced in European health systems (Power, 2000; Ceci, et al., 2011; Mesman, 2012), the extent to which health care staff labour to ensure the integrity of multiple systems of accountability, rather than care for patients themselves. As multiple systems of accountability are in play through processes of audit (for example ‘care pathways’, patient safety monitoring, risk assessment, care standards monitoring, clinical protocols), the focus of labour and the visible product of care work, relations are altered. Here we examine such forms of work in relation to the elderly who (within acute settings) are felt institutionally to be in the wrong place (Latimer, 2000; White et al., 2012) and already suffer with forms of stigmatisation within health care (Latimer, 2011). We aim to make visible the human costs of rationalising older persons within broader frameworks of organisation and its effects on the affective dimensions of health care.

Speakers:
Dr Elena Bendien, University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht
Dr Miquel Domènech, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Dr Alexandra Hillman, Cardiff School of Social Sciences
Professor Joanna Latimer, Cardiff School of Social Sciences
Dr Michael Schillmeier, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München
Dr Paul White, Swansea University Business School

Organised by: People Organisations & Work research group, Swansea University Business School

Spaces are extremely limited, to book a place or for further details please contact Paul White at p.j.white@swansea.ac.uk

References
Bauman, Z. (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity.
Berg, M. (1997). Rationalizing Medical Work: Decision-Support Techniques and Medical Practices. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.
Ceci, C., Björnsdóttir, K., Purkis, M.E. (eds.). (2011). Perspectives on Care at Home for Older People. London: Routledge.
Du Gay, P. (2000) In Praise of Bureaucracy: Weber-Organization-Ethics. London: Sage.
Hillman, A., Latimer, J., White, P. (2009). Accessing Care: Technology and the Management of the Clinic. In: Schillmeier, M., Domènech, M. (eds.). New Technologies and Emerging Spaces of Care. Surrey: Ashgate.
Hochschild, A.R. (2003) The Managed Heart. 2nd Ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Latimer, J. (2000). The Conduct of Care: Understanding Nursing Practice. Oxford: Blackwell Science.
Latimer, J. (2011). Home, Care and Frail Older People: Relational extension & the art of dwelling. In: Ceci, C., Purkis, M.E., Björnsdóttir, K. (eds.). Homecare: International and Comparative Perspectives. London: Routledge .
Mesman, J. (2012). Moving in With Care: About Patient Safety as a Spatial Achievement. Space and Culture. 15(1): 31-43.
National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death. (2010). An Age Old Problem: A review of the care received by elderly patients undergoing surgery. London: NCEPOD.
Parsons, T. (1975). The Sick Role and the Role of the Physician Reconsidered. The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly. Health and Society. 53(3): 257-278.
Patterson, M., Nolan, M., Rick, J., Brown, J. Adams, R., Musson, G. (2011). From Metrics to Meaning: Culture Change and Quality of Acute Hospital Care for Older People. NIHR, SDO Project (08/1501/93). London: HMSO.
Power, M. (2000). The evolution of the audit society, its politics of control and the advent of CHI’. In:Miles, A.Hampton, J., Hurwitz, B. (eds.). NICE, CHI and the NHS Reforms: Enabling Excellence or Imposing Control? London: Aesculapius Medical Press.
Rudge, T. (2009). Beyond caring? discounting the differently known body. In: Latimer, J., Schillmeier, M. (eds.). Un/Knowing Bodies. London: Sociological Review.
Schillmeier, M., Domènech M. (2009). Care and the Art of Dwelling. Space and Culture. 12(3): 288-291.
Tadd, W., Hillman, A., Calnan, S., Calnan, M., Bayer, A., Read, S. (2011). Right place - wrong person: dignity in the acute care of older people. Quality in Ageing and Older Adults. 12(1): 33- 43.
Weber, M. (1978[1956]). Economy & Society: an outline of interpretive sociology. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
White, P., Hillman, A., Latimer, J. (2012). Ordering, Enrolling, and Dismissing: moments of access across hospital spaces. Space and Culture. 15(1): 68-87.