Item 1:


Dear SCOSSERS,

I hope you are all back from your Catalan adventures in one piece, and that you are finding it easier than me to get back down to work. Hugo and all his team of helpers gave us a wonderful conference which worked like clockwork despite being full of academics possessing varying degrees of what I believe young people call ‘competencies’ for getting through life. It gave a whole new meaning to Talent Management.

I have been musing since I got back about what it is about SCOS that I love so much. You can get a lot out of other conferences and symposia and workshops, but I don’t think any of them are as well loved as SCOS. I think what it comes down to is eccentricity. I love the fact that in these times of high seriousness and rightmindedness SCOS will still put on a picnic in a park with a pop-up Gospel Choir and sing to a massive just about representational dragon. And that the following evening the young folk hiked to the beach. And in the middle of Catalonia we had lunch in a pan-Asian restaurant. Plus on my own account, I can say to the organiser that three of us, including a medieval historian, thought it would be a good idea to get together and run a mini colloquium about death, and he said, ‘Yep, sounds fair enough.’ I love the fact that you never know what you will get at SCOS, and that it is one of the few places that you really do get kudos for style. I also love the fact that I can count on stimulating stuff from long-term SCOSSERS, but there is also whole new generation coming into the organization who ‘get it’ and continue the noble tradition of papers that are ‘serious fun’. A standing conference allows us to do this. Year after year people can do excellent conventional work or completely bonkers stuff and we all rub along.

So, Barcelona was a great triumph, and now, along the lines of the King is dead. Long live the King, we have to start thinking about next year in Warsaw. It is a beautiful city, with a wonderful climate and a rich heritage and history. The venue is elegant, interesting, full of stimulating art pieces, and spacious. Beata, Eva and Prem are lovely people with a real sense of style (I saw them going out for a night at the opera). The welcome is going to be very warm. So please, when you are thinking about spending your conference dollar next year, think of us first!

Looking forward to seeing you all in Warsaw next year.

Best wishes, Ann Rippin


Item 2:

Two new keynotes confirmed for the CMS conference in Manchester, 2013.
1) Professor Silvia Gherardi of the University of Trento: http://www.unitn.it/en/rucola/18371/silvia-gherardi
2) Professor Karel Williams of the Centre for Research into Socio-Cultural Change at the University of Manchester: http://www.cresc.ac.uk/people/karel-williams

We are delighted that Silvia and Karel are able to address the conference - they are both are highly distinguished academics and need no introductions. But for further
details please see the new conference website:

https://www.meeting.co.uk/confercare/cms2013/introduction.html

Best wishes, Damian O'Doherty...& on behalf of the Organizing Committee
Mike Bresnen
Irena Grugulis
John Hassard
Damian Hodgson
Paula Hyde


Item 3:

EGOS 2013 track: Sub-theme 29: Unmasking Corruption: Critical Perspectives on Corruption and Anti-Corruption

Convenors:
Thomas Taro Lennerfors, Uppsala University, Sweden, thomas.lennerfors@angstrom.uu.se
Eric Breit, Work Research Institute, Norway, eric.breit@afi.no
Alf Rehn, Åbo Akademi University, Finland, alf@mac.com

Call for Papers
The phenomenon of corruption is often described as a "cancer", "virus", or an "evil" that is haunting contemporary private and public organizations. Corruption, it is claimed, has to be combated using a ‘"wide range of strategies, networked in an integrated fashion over a long period of time" (Ajayi, 2005). Some call this a global war on corruption.

Despite the massive impact that corrupt practices and the various measures taken to mitigate or eradicate it have on governments, organizations and their management, only scarce efforts have taken a critical, unmasking perspective on corruption and anti-corruption. Similarly, although scholars, documentarists, and essayists have sought to demonstrate and untangle the 'dark sides' of organizations and the seemingly omnipresent phenomena surrounding them (e.g., global warming) corruption is often taken for granted as a global "problem" and "threat". One may thus ask, is the evil of corruption (or the good of anti-corruption) beyond debate? Can't corruption be good (a question raised by Noonan, 2004)?

Hence, the overarching aims of this sub-theme are embedded in the dual meaning of the title "unmasking corruption". First, to revisit and problematize the phenomenon of corruption and its impact on organizations and contemporary society. Second, to critically assess the "unmasking" business, that is, the industry and practices of contemporary anti-corruption.

Exploring the potential of the Colloquium theme, we suggest that there are three crucial ways of unmasking corruption. One is by bridging continents. Ledeneva (1998, 2006), for example, discusses the necessity and importance of blat, or informal/illegal exchange, in the Soviet Union (the second, Other, world). Graham Hancock (1989) shows how (white) middlemen conspicuously live off the aid resources in third world countries, while distributing unnecessary resources to the locals – thereby problematizing the image of the Other as inherently corrupt.

While cross-national and indeed cross-civilizational culture differences are covered by bridging continents, the idea of bridging cultures is the inclusion of various marginal voices. Anti-corruption is often implemented from above, where the voices of those in lower tiers who must pay the bribes are often neglected. Moreover, accusations of corruption are often directed towards a particular Other, be it another professional group, another industry, a competing company, or indeed the private in the eyes of the public and vice versa.

By bridging worldviews, we can unmask dominant anti-corruption measures, embedded in "economic" principal-agent understandings of corruption, which suggests governance, surveillance, enforcement, and reporting as key ingredients in the fight against corruption. We can construct new understandings of corruption with a base in sociology, history, anthropology, organization theory, philosophy, political science, psychoanalysis, or indeed resource dependence theory, natural sciences, and ecology.

We invite papers addressing this "unmasking" of corruption or anti-corruption from different perspectives. We particularly invite papers that engage with one of the three types of bridging suggested above, but papers that go beyond that scope are certainly invited:
– Good forms of corruption and/or bad (evil?) forms of anti-corruption
– The "cultural argument" – Western vs. non-Western constructions of corruption
– Discourses of corruption and anti-corruption
– Corruption, anti-corruption and the world economic crisis
– Anti-corruption organizations and their practices
– Institutional and longitudinal analyses of anti-corruption
– Theorizing corruption
– Corruption scandals and their impact
– The continued lives of the corrupt: radical change or business as usual?
– Relationship between anti-corruption and CSR
– Gender perspectives on corruption and anti-corruption
– The brands and images of anti-corruption

Participants of this sub-theme are encouraged to submit their papers to the special issue "Corruption, Anti-Corruption, Critique" of ephemera – theory & politics in organization (ephemeraweb.org), edited by members of the convening group.

References
Ajayi, R. (2005): The House of Reps Crusade Against Corruption: Can the War Against Corruption Succeed? Vanguard, Nigeria, 18 January 2005, http:// www.vanguardngr.com/articles/2002/politics/p1180 12005-2.html
Hancock, G. (1989): Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.
Ledeneva, A.V. (1998): Russia's Economy of favour: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ledeneva, A.V. (2006): How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices that Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Noonan, J.T. Jr. (2004): 'Struggling Against Corruption.' In: W.C. Heffernan & J. Kleinig (eds.): Private and Public Corruption. Oxford, Rowman & Littlefield, 227–238.


Item 4:

Special issue of Organization – Sexuality and Organizational Analysis: 30 years on

Call for papers:

‘Sexuality is nothing if not complicated – but that is no excuse for ignoring it’ (Burrell, 1984: 113).

Gibson Burrell’s ‘Sex and Organizational Analysis’, published in Organization Studies in 1984, represented an important contribution to the then emergent field of critical management and organization studies, based upon a welcome application of insights from sociology, philosophy and social history to the study of sexuality at work. Thirty years on, while sexuality remains a relatively marginal topic in mainstream organizational analysis, a burgeoning body of ideas has emerged in more critical quarters representing a flourishing dialogue that has stretched across disciplinary boundaries. This has been inspired and influenced particularly by the impact of feminist theory and politics, as well as insights from queer theory, poststructuralism and postcolonialism. Alongside these important theoretical developments, the lived experiences of sexuality within organizations have changed considerably within the last three decades. Sexuality has arguably never been so controlled, commodified and commercialized. At the same time, protective legislation combined with changing social attitudes and political capacities mean that in some contexts, and for some groups, organizations have become more diverse, tolerant places than a generation or so ago. In many ways, and reflecting a ‘historical convergence of empirical, policy, political, theoretical, technological, spatial and indeed personal concerns’ (Hearn, 2011: 299), sexuality has never been so organized.

The dialectical emphasis on sexuality as a ‘frontier’ of control and resistance, advocated in ‘Sex and Organizational Analysis’, has been reflected in many subsequent attempts to make sense of the relationship between sexuality and organization through a series of interventions over the past thirty years or so that have sought to emphasize the centrality of sexuality to organizational power relations in all their many forms. As Fleming (2007: 239) has recently noted in this respect, ‘following Burrell’s landmark analysis of sexuality and organization, a good deal of the discussion has been couched in terms of power, control and resistance’. It is this complex melange of power and pleasure, control and resistance, exclusion and over-inclusion that continues both to fascinate and elude organizational scholars, and which means that sexuality remains a central if relatively neglected aspect of organizational lives and processes.

Inter-disciplinary and iconoclastic in its orientation, Organization has played a crucial role in expanding the field of organization studies, providing an often ground-breaking context within which to explore themes and ideas that have traditionally been neglected or negated by mainstream management studies, including a concern with the relationship between sexuality and organization. Continuing this tradition, this special issue seeks to provide a timely opportunity to reflect on developments in the study and lived experience of sexuality within organizations over the last three decades. It also seeks to provide a provocative forum in which to anticipate possible future developments in organizational forms, policies and practices, as well as to map out potential conceptual, methodological and theoretical directions in the study of sexuality and organizations.

With this mind, we invite empirical, conceptual, methodological and theoretical contributions to this special issue of Organization from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds and perspectives. Possible areas for investigation might include (but need not be limited to) any of the following:
· Sexuality and organizational power, control and resistance; sexuality and surveillance.
· Sexual harassment, violence and violation within/through organizations.
· Organizational de/re-eroticization.
· Sex work and sexualized forms of labour.
· Physically, social and morally ‘dirty work’, abjection and sexuality.
· Sex, religion and organizational spirituality.
· Global organizations and sexuality; imperialism and neo-colonialism.
· Sexuality, art and organizational aesthetics.
· Sexual language, imagery and organizational culture.
· Sexuality, work and organizations in the mass media and popular culture.
· Information and communication technologies, virtuality and sexuality.
· Sexual commodification, co-optation and branding.
· Sexual identity, diversity and difference; sexuality as a human resource within organizations; the management of sexuality; legislative and institutional change.
· Intersectionalities between sexuality, age, class, disability, ethnicity, gender, generation, ‘race’ and nationality; trans-gendering and trans-sexualities.
· Sexuality, corporeality and ethics; sexual communities.
· Sexuality, eroticism and leadership.

Submission:
Papers should be submitted electronically by 31st October 2012 to SAGETrack at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/organization

Papers must be no more than 8,000 words, excluding references, and will be blind reviewed in accordance with the journal’s standard review process. Manuscripts should be prepared according to the guidelines published in Organization and on the journal’s website: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsProdDesc.nav?level1=600&currTree=Subjects&catLevel1=&prodId=Journal200981

For further information or to discuss a possible submission, please contact one of the guest editors: Jo Brewis (j.brewis@le.ac.uk), Albert Mills (albert.mills@SMU.CA) or Melissa Tyler (mjtyler@essex.ac.uk)

References
Burrell, G. (1984) ‘Sex and Organizational Analysis’, Organization Studies. 5(2): 97-118.
Fleming, P. (2007) ‘Sexuality, Power and Resistance in the Workplace’, Organization Studies. 28(2): 239-256.
Hearn, J. (2011) ‘Sexualities, Work, Organizations, and Managements: Empirical, Policy, and Theoretical Challenges’, in E. Jeanes, D. Knights and P.Y. Martin (eds) Handbook of Gender, Work and Organization. Chichester: Wiley, pp. 299-314.


Item 5:

Special issue of Culture and Organization – Recovery and organization, Volume 19, issue 5, 2013

Call for papers:
Following the success of the 29th SCOS conference on the theme of ‘Recovery’, we are inviting contributions for a special issue of Culture and Organization that explore the ways in which the world is living on and living through the impact, persistence and aftershocks of the recent economic crisis. What this recovery might look like, and how we might experience it, naturally depends on perspective. The radical left we assume may articulate recovery as an ongoing legitimation crisis, in which recovery involves a global ‘waking’ up to the inequities and environmental degradation which capitalism generates. Moving much further right on the political spectrum, those in the neo-liberal Hayekian camp will presumably construct recovery as a swift return to free market economics without the ‘unnecessary’ intervention of an ‘always clumsy’ government of whatever kind. And of course there will be innumerable way stations in between, and myriad possible recoveries.

Recovery then is an evocative and often circuitous concept which we can approach from multiple vantage points. There is, for example, the possibility of exploring recovery as a process of change leading to improved health and well-being. As such recovery can be framed as a process of healing and transformation for the better, at the level of the individual, the organization and/ or the national and international economies. This also necessitates conceptualizing malaise or decline (which itself can be done in myriad ways) and of what might constitute the converse. Then there is the question here of whether recovery should be seen as a process – perhaps a never-ending one - or as the end state of wellness. But recovery might equally be about (re-)discovery of a real or imagined (or both/ and) organizational/ national/ international time and place. And in any case what exactly is being re(dis)covered here? Considering questions of collective and individual memory requires us to reflect on the inevitably reconstructionist qualities of remembering and nostalgia, as well as the dangers of forgetting what has gone before. Recovering could therefore be interpreted as individual or collective concealment, obfuscation, mystification or revisionism – or, on the other hand, as revelation and unveiling. To recover can also signify to get something back, to have it returned, to reclaim it as the ‘rightful’ owner or to be compensated for its loss. Still further, we can see recovery as the excavation of what lies beneath and is not immediately accessible – as in the extraction of natural substances such as oil, and the enormous environmental controversies surrounding such activities which in their turn link to the ongoing debates around carbon trading and ‘carbon democracies’. And recovery can additionally signify reconstituting useful substances from refuse or waste.

In all of these approaches to framing recovery – which are by no means exhaustive – it is experienced by individuals, organizations and other collectives at various meso and macro levels. And such dualisms might themselves be in crisis in any possible recovery. Recovery also implies a movement from past through present to future, which might be supported, resisted, subverted, imagined, re-imagined and unimagined.

As such, possible themes of recovery as it intersects with organization include, but are absolutely not limited to:
· Rediscovery of frames of the past, present and future at work
· Repair, regeneration and renewal in organizations and beyond
· Memory, nostalgia and forgetting in organizations and elsewhere
· Concealment, deceit, complicity, manipulation and recidivism in organizations and elsewhere
· The limits of recovery and the failure to recover: organizational deterioration, loss, death
· Signs and signifiers of recovery in organizations and beyond
· Body, mind, soul and well-being at work
· Recovery as an organizational/ economic imaginary or utopia
· Redemption, reparation and recuperation: from pre- to post-recovery in organizations and beyond
· Organizational spaces, places and times of recovery
· Ecologies of recovery and work systems as ecologies of healing
· Relationships of organizational and/ or economic recovery
· The East and West, or North and South, of organizational/ national/ transnational recovery
· Organizational heroes and heroics, healing and salvation – and their opposites
· Resistance to recovery in organizations and beyond
· What can be recovered? Organizational reclamations and compensations

In short, we welcome papers from any disciplinary, paradigmatic or methodological perspective as long as they directly address the theme of recovery and its relationship to organization.

Guest editors
The guest editors are Jo Brewis, University of Leicester, UK, and Mustafa Özbilgin, Brunel University, UK, and Université Paris-Dauphine, France.

Submission and informal enquiries
Papers should be submitted as e-mail attachments in Word 2007 if possible to recovery@mail.cfs.le.ac.uk by 1st October 2012. Please ensure that you follow the C and O house style, as outlined at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=1475-9551&linktype=44. Papers should be between 8000 and 9000 words in length, and may be returned for shortening before consideration if the editors deem it appropriate.

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 Jo Brewis at recovery@le.ac.uk.


Item 6:

Call for papers/proposals for an ESRC inVisio Symposium

“Visual organization studies” as a nascent discipline is gaining momentum. In 2007 the ESRC funded the inVisio seminar series at the same time as the EIASM conferences on ‘Imagining Business’ began (2008, 2011), followed by the 2010 Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism themed ‘Vision’. Management journals have begun to publish special issues on the visual, including the Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal (2009), Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management (2012) and Culture and Organization (2012), and two edited collections have recently been commissioned by international publisher Routledge: Puyou et al.’s (2011) Imagining Organizations, and Bell et al.’s (2013) handbook, The Routledge Companion to Visual Organization. Recognising this groundswell of interest, the ESRC further funded inVisio through a researcher development initiative (2010 – 2012) tasked with building capacity in visual methodologies among business and management researchers. At the time of writing, inVisio has 390 members, many of whom are supervising doctoral students using visual methods suggesting that the popularity of visual methodologies is likely to grow in the future.

The aim of this symposium is to bring together researchers addressing visual and/ or image-based dimensions of organizational life in productive dialogue to contribute to this ‘capacity building’ agenda through sharing work-in-progress, conceptual and methodological developments, and reflections on how best to develop this field of inquiry.

We therefore invite paper presentations, short films, exhibitions or contributions in any appropriate format that further any or all of these aims. We envisage papers that might address, but are not limited to:
· The historical roots of visual media in organization studies
· Critical implications of a visual organizational perspective for method, theory or practice
· The rise of visual social media and implications for organizations
· Studying visible/invisible dimensions of identity and culture in the workplace
· Producer perspectives on corporate images and design
· Studies of strategic organizational images, such as websites, brochures, advertising, reports
· Subversion of organizational images and viral resistance
· Depictions of leadership and organization in popular visual media
· Investigations of visual tools/aids in organizing processes
· Photographic exhibitions/displays about work and working
· Developments in understanding visual literacy/competence
· The interplay between the visual and other modes of communication
· Ethnographic, documentary or other films about organizational life
· Interdisciplinary perspectives of the visual in organizational studies
· Spaces of performance in the visual and visualities
· Embodied visualities in theory and method
· Methodological innovations

This ESRC inVisio Symposium will be held at the Wivenhoe House Hotel, University of Essex, Colchester, UK http://www.wivenhoehouse.co.uk/

Weds 28th – Thurs 29th November 2012

Keynote speaker Prof. Dvora Yanow:
“Learning what it means to be 'scientific'? Bodies seeing and walking the museum line”

Abstracts should be 750 words, in Word format and proposals for exhibitions etc. should clearly outline the event, time and equipment required. We expect demand to be very high for this symposium, so please email Charlotte Smith on csmithh@essex.ac.uk to submit your abstract/ proposal as soon as possible, at the latest by 1st October 2012. You will be notified of abstract acceptance within 2 weeks of submission and may submit a full paper if you wish, although this is optional.
Priority will be given to paper presenters, but the conference will also be open to non-presenting delegates on a first come, first served basis. Please email Charlotte at the above email address to register your interest.

Fee: £50 (free for PhD students and third sector) Includes dinner, and overnight stay on Wednesday; breakfast and lunch on Thursday, plus all the usual conference paraphernalia.
Click here for a PDF of the call for papers

The symposium will begin late afternoon on Wednesday, with Prof. Yanow’s plenary address and welcome reception, followed by dinner and an overnight stay at the stunning, newly renovated Wivenhoe House Hotel (or local historic B&B accommodation). Thursday will include a full programme of delegates’ research papers and a round-table discussion on ‘inspire’ the ESRC inVisio Researcher Development Initiative website: www.in-visio.org. The symposium will close around 5pm on Thurs 29th.

Due to generous support from our sponsors, we are able to offer this event at a greatly subsidized cost. In return we will be asking delegates to provide qualitative feedback on the online ‘inspire’ researcher development resources, available at www.in-visio.org.

From the symposium organising committee, Samantha Warren, Emma Bell, Jane Davison, Bill Lee, Christine McLean, Caroline Scarles, Jonathan Schroeder, Harriet Shortt and Charlotte Smith