SCOS Update June
We have five fab items in the SCOS news update this month:
1) The SCOS 2014 Utrecht Conference Countdown! Still a short time left to register online!
2) A call for Doctoral Students to register for a workshop with the lovely Ilaria Boncori and me – being run on the first day of the Utrecht Conference
3) Abstracts are invited for the workshop: ‘The Break Up of Modern Management’, at Copenhagen Business School in November 2014
4) Why not become SCOS's next Meetings Secretary! SCOS Board opportunity!
5) Super job vacancies at University College Dublin
6) And finally, a call for sub-theme proposals for the 9th International Conference in Critical Management Studies, ‘Is there an alternative? Management after Critique’, at the University of Leicester, July 2015
1) The SCOS 2014 Utrecht Conference Countdown! Still a short time left to register online!
2) A call for Doctoral Students to register for a workshop with the lovely Ilaria Boncori and me – being run on the first day of the Utrecht Conference
3) Abstracts are invited for the workshop: ‘The Break Up of Modern Management’, at Copenhagen Business School in November 2014
4) Why not become SCOS's next Meetings Secretary! SCOS Board opportunity!
5) Super job vacancies at University College Dublin
6) And finally, a call for sub-theme proposals for the 9th International Conference in Critical Management Studies, ‘Is there an alternative? Management after Critique’, at the University of Leicester, July 2015
Item 1:
The Final Countdown!
SCOS Conference 2014: ‘Sport, Play and Game’, Utrecht, 7th – 10th July
SCOS 2014 is approaching quickly, and so is our registration deadline on the 8th of June! So, just a few days left to register for the conference that will be held at Utrecht on the 7th until the 10th of July.
You can find the registration form and payment details under ‘registration’ on our website:
www.scos2014.nl
You can also get updates and details about the conference via our SCOS Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/SCOS/224269947611411
We are also on Twitter @SCOS2014 so please follow all the news, views and updates there too!
Item 2:
Calling all Doctoral Students/ Researchers
Ilaria Boncori and Harriet Shortt are running a pre-conference workshop at SCOS this year, called:
‘Playing the Academic Game’ – a pre-conference doctoral workshop that explores the sport, play and game of academic life.
Details are below. If you would like to sign up to this workshop, please email Ilaria: iboncori@essex.ac.uk or Harriet harriet.shortt@uwe.ac.uk to register. Places are restricted to 15 participants.
The workshop will be run on Monday 7th July, 1 – 3pm.
Academic life could be described as a complex, strategic game surrounded by known and unknown rules and regulations, permeated by power and politics, and in which some are excluded and others dominate. It could also be seen as a game where rules can be broken, offering new opportunities for players to resist, innovate and potentially change the game. Indeed, organization studies scholars have reflected on various game-playing aspects of life in academia and raise important questions regarding its current practice and impact on research, teaching, scholarly activity and the wider community. For example, Gabriel has discussed the competitive nature of the ‘REF’, arguing that this Research Exercise Framework is having a ‘disastrous effect on UK academic life and performance’ (2013). Grey has highlighted the political, often exclusionary, status-driven relationship between European and North American journals, and critical versus mainstream research (2010), and Willmott has examined the ‘elite’ journals listed by the Association of Business Schools and the potentially ‘damaging’ consequences this may have on funding and the culture of research (2011). Furthermore, and relevantly here, Prasad, in his recent article in Organization ‘Playing the game and trying not to lose myself: a doctoral student’s perspective on the institutional pressures for research output’, also highlights the pressures of the academic game and the ‘often neglected voices of doctoral students’ within this field (2013).
Therefore this workshop, whilst adopting the SCOS ethos of ‘serious fun’ and embracing the theme of SCOS 2014, intends to explore the ‘game’ of academic life. Specifically, the objective of this workshop is to give space and opportunity to doctoral students for reflection/ discussion regarding past/ present experiences and the future of working in this arena. In this participative workshop we will reflect on such questions as: how do we play the publishing game? What are the often unwritten rules of the academic game? What type of academic do you want to be? Are there rules that can be broken? What struggles might we face when we resist the game? Who is ‘in’ the game and who is ‘out’?
We aim to provide a space where PhD students can discuss their understanding/ aspirations/ concerns regarding the academic game while gaining exposure to different experiences from early career academics and more experienced ones. We will ask participants to bring and share their stories, which we will discuss whilst working with vignettes from other academic contributors who are at various points in their careers and who offer different approaches or perspectives on the academic game. We hope this workshop will encourage open/ honest conversation from both contributors and participants and consider alternative metaphors for what we hope and want the academic game to become.
Workshop Plan
Game-plan:
Introductions, aims and objectives of the session.
First half: ‘Playing the Publishing Game’
The publishing game can be a difficult one to navigate – who are the referees? How can you train for this? Are there coaches that you can rely on? Is it a fair game?
Second half: ‘A Game of Two Halves’
Academic life can involve teaching, administrative/management roles and research. Here we reflect on the struggles of ‘balance’, managing boundaries and offside rules.
Extra time: ‘Game-changing?’
We discuss how academic work can ‘push the boundaries’, how we might break the rules, question if it possible to change the game and reflect on the struggles we might experience when doing so.
Post-match Analysis:
Finally, we draw together key points raised throughout the workshop and reflect on how participants may write their own ‘golden rules’ for academic life. Can we create a new game or change the current one?
References
Gabriel, Y. (2013) Academic Life http://www.yiannisgabriel.com/search/label/Academic%20life (last accessed 28/01/14)
Grey, C. (2010) Organizing Studies: Publications, Politics and Polemic, Organization Studies 31, 6, p. 677-694
Prasad, A. (2013) Playing the game and trying not to lose myself: a doctoral student’s perspective on the institutional pressures for research output, Organization, 20, 6 p. 936-948
Willmott, H. (2011) Journal list fetishism and the perversion of scholarship: reactivity and the ABS list, Organization, 8, 4, p. 429-442
Item 3:
Abstracts are invited for the following workshop: The Break Up of Modern Management
Keynotes:
Professor Steve Brown, Management School, University of Leicester.
Professor Fabian Muniesa, Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation, Ecole des Mines de Paris (now Mines ParisTech
Professor Andre Spicer, CASS Business School, City University, London
Brit Winthereik, IT university of Copenhagen
Management has become an on-going matter of public controversy. Trust in management, for example, is now widely questioned in the wake of a number of recent crises and scandals taking place in both public organizations (health, education, social services) and private industries - the banking and financial services, energy, advertising, etc. The butt of comedy from Monty Python to David Brent’s ‘The Office’, management is pictured as more or less absurd and for many it will be difficult to imagine that students in higher education actively want a career in ‘management’. Does this suggest that management as a discipline or profession is currently in crisis and that we are witness to the break-up of management as we have come to understand it? At the same time, belief in the necessity of management has not disappeared and indeed appears to be unscathed: more management is typically the proposed solution to any ‘crisis’. Despite a widespread recognition that management entails unintended and unanticipated effects, it continues to marshal hope and belief in creating better and more rational organizations. In this workshop, we seek to explore these dynamics through science and technology studies (STS), actor-network theory (ANT), or critical management studies (CMS).
The workshop is funded and free to attend. Places are strictly limited and offered on a first come, first served basis. Please send your abstracts of between 1000 and 1500 to breakupmanagement@gmail.com and visit our website https://sf.cbs.dk/breakupmgt
Dr Damian O'Doherty
Manchester Business School
University of Manchester
Manchester, M15 6PB, UK
T: +44(0)1613063489: E: damian.odoherty@mbs.ac.uk
Item 4:
SCOS Board Opportunity:
Looking to add administrative responsibilities to your CV and want a serious fun way to do it? Why not become SCOS's next Meetings Secretary!
Nominations to Lynne Baxter (lynne.baxter@york.ac.uk) by Friday 18th July - please have first and second SCOS member to support you.
Your responsibilities would consist of: planning and facilitation of three Board meetings a year, liaising with local hosts, obtaining and communicating details of meeting venue, dinner locations and accommodation to representatives, attending the Board meetings.
Tenure: 3 years
You can ask either Lynne Baxter or the current incumbent, Thomas Lennerfors about the role if you have further questions.
Item 5:
Vacancies at University College, Dublin
UCD has advertised a number of lecturing positions. The positions are in Accountancy, Digital Marketing, Information Systems and Organisation, Marketing, Organisational Behaviour, Strategy/Entrepreneurship, and Supply Chain Management.
Full details available at: http://www.ucd.ie/hr/jobvacancies/
Select ‘Job Vacancies for External Candidates’ and then select ‘Academic - Business’.
Item 6:
The 9th International Conference in Critical Management Studies – Is There an Alternative? Management After Critique
University of Leicester
8-10 July 2015
CALL FOR SUB-THEME PROPOSALS
“There is clearly no alternative but to declare man’s freedom to exercise his faculties”, Herbert Spencer, 1851
“There is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by the free-enterprise system.”, Milton Friedman, 1979
“There is no alternative to austerity”, Vitor Bento, 2013
Herbert Spencer was very fond of using the expression ‘there is no alternative’, especially as it related to his staunch defence of liberalism and the pursuit of progress. The fittest, he argued,will survive as society evolves in accordance with the law of nature. The liberalism that Spencer articulated as necessary and desirable has cast a long shadow on the politics of the present day. The natural laws that are defended today are those of the market; a fundamental set of laws to which, we have been told again and again by politicians and economists, we have no alternative but to submit. In recent history this translates as no alternative to capitalism, globalization, free markets, free trade, democracy, austerity and budget cuts.
With neoliberalism having washed over the world with unrelenting vigour, it can appear that there are likewise no alternatives to management and managerialism. Alongside the so called consensus of gargantuan global capital, and echoing through the halls of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, liberalization is not just to be achieved, but has to be managed. Neoliberalism’s sidekick comes in the figure of the manager. This elevation of management as a virtuous profession has ushered in the vast expansion of executive remuneration, the cult of the CEO, the massification of management education, the advent of guru managers and the export of managerialism to all sectors of society. These days we are also encouraged to manage ourselves through practices such as personal branding, developing communication content strategies, monitoring personal web citations and articulating a life mission.
The theme of this conference invites contributors to explore alternatives to the ubiquity of neoliberal market managerialism in all its many guises. Critical Management Studies has been effective at mounting a critique of various elements of managerialist ideology, but less effective at exploring and promoting different ways of thinking about organizing and markets. This begs questions of the purpose of critique in itself and the possibilities that may follow from critique. Critique might thus be positioned as an activity of articulating and enabling the possibility of alternatives, especially when those in power try to bolster their own interests by insisting there is only one singular and inevitable course to follow.
This conference aims to engage thinking that explores alternatives, as well as rejecting the idea that there are none. Such alternatives could be understood in practical terms of specific organizational forms and practices, or theoretical developments (particularly in feminism, anarchism, communism, green thinking and so on) that may inspire a generation of new forms of localism or alter-globalization as resistance to neoliberalism. They may reflect personal alternatives, relating to the choices people make in terms of how to live their lives in the context of a neoliberal globalized world. Even more generally alternatives might focus on the critique of economic, political, managerial and organizational dogma, as it becomes embedded as the supposed ‘one best way’ of doing things.
At this stage we are inviting stream proposals that address this theme and submissions are expected to include an outline of the proposed sub-theme (500-750 words), as well as a short description of the team of convenors, including their academic background and experience. We expect most of the submissions to be linked with the overall conference theme, but other submissions are also welcome, as long as they are likely to appeal to the wider CMS community. We particularly welcome proposals from convenor teams that are international in their composition with convenors coming from at least two countries. We are also keen to encourage critical proposals from the range of business and management studies subject disciplines (accounting and finance, human resource management, industrial relations, marketing and consumption, international business, etc.). In keeping with the ethos of the conference theme, proposals can also be for alternative format sessions. We are open to suggestions for workshops, symposia, experiential approaches, non-academic activities, arts-based research, performance activities and any other creative or non-conventional approaches.
Deadline for submission of sub-theme proposals: 1 September 2014.
Convenors will be notified by 29 September 2014 of the outcome of their submissions
For any questions you might have regarding this call for sub-theme proposals, and to submit your proposals, please contact Martin Parker and Mel Simms on behalf of the local organizing committee on cms2015@le.ac.uk.
The Final Countdown!
SCOS Conference 2014: ‘Sport, Play and Game’, Utrecht, 7th – 10th July
SCOS 2014 is approaching quickly, and so is our registration deadline on the 8th of June! So, just a few days left to register for the conference that will be held at Utrecht on the 7th until the 10th of July.
You can find the registration form and payment details under ‘registration’ on our website:
www.scos2014.nl
You can also get updates and details about the conference via our SCOS Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/SCOS/224269947611411
We are also on Twitter @SCOS2014 so please follow all the news, views and updates there too!
Item 2:
Calling all Doctoral Students/ Researchers
Ilaria Boncori and Harriet Shortt are running a pre-conference workshop at SCOS this year, called:
‘Playing the Academic Game’ – a pre-conference doctoral workshop that explores the sport, play and game of academic life.
Details are below. If you would like to sign up to this workshop, please email Ilaria: iboncori@essex.ac.uk or Harriet harriet.shortt@uwe.ac.uk to register. Places are restricted to 15 participants.
The workshop will be run on Monday 7th July, 1 – 3pm.
Academic life could be described as a complex, strategic game surrounded by known and unknown rules and regulations, permeated by power and politics, and in which some are excluded and others dominate. It could also be seen as a game where rules can be broken, offering new opportunities for players to resist, innovate and potentially change the game. Indeed, organization studies scholars have reflected on various game-playing aspects of life in academia and raise important questions regarding its current practice and impact on research, teaching, scholarly activity and the wider community. For example, Gabriel has discussed the competitive nature of the ‘REF’, arguing that this Research Exercise Framework is having a ‘disastrous effect on UK academic life and performance’ (2013). Grey has highlighted the political, often exclusionary, status-driven relationship between European and North American journals, and critical versus mainstream research (2010), and Willmott has examined the ‘elite’ journals listed by the Association of Business Schools and the potentially ‘damaging’ consequences this may have on funding and the culture of research (2011). Furthermore, and relevantly here, Prasad, in his recent article in Organization ‘Playing the game and trying not to lose myself: a doctoral student’s perspective on the institutional pressures for research output’, also highlights the pressures of the academic game and the ‘often neglected voices of doctoral students’ within this field (2013).
Therefore this workshop, whilst adopting the SCOS ethos of ‘serious fun’ and embracing the theme of SCOS 2014, intends to explore the ‘game’ of academic life. Specifically, the objective of this workshop is to give space and opportunity to doctoral students for reflection/ discussion regarding past/ present experiences and the future of working in this arena. In this participative workshop we will reflect on such questions as: how do we play the publishing game? What are the often unwritten rules of the academic game? What type of academic do you want to be? Are there rules that can be broken? What struggles might we face when we resist the game? Who is ‘in’ the game and who is ‘out’?
We aim to provide a space where PhD students can discuss their understanding/ aspirations/ concerns regarding the academic game while gaining exposure to different experiences from early career academics and more experienced ones. We will ask participants to bring and share their stories, which we will discuss whilst working with vignettes from other academic contributors who are at various points in their careers and who offer different approaches or perspectives on the academic game. We hope this workshop will encourage open/ honest conversation from both contributors and participants and consider alternative metaphors for what we hope and want the academic game to become.
Workshop Plan
Game-plan:
Introductions, aims and objectives of the session.
First half: ‘Playing the Publishing Game’
The publishing game can be a difficult one to navigate – who are the referees? How can you train for this? Are there coaches that you can rely on? Is it a fair game?
Second half: ‘A Game of Two Halves’
Academic life can involve teaching, administrative/management roles and research. Here we reflect on the struggles of ‘balance’, managing boundaries and offside rules.
Extra time: ‘Game-changing?’
We discuss how academic work can ‘push the boundaries’, how we might break the rules, question if it possible to change the game and reflect on the struggles we might experience when doing so.
Post-match Analysis:
Finally, we draw together key points raised throughout the workshop and reflect on how participants may write their own ‘golden rules’ for academic life. Can we create a new game or change the current one?
References
Gabriel, Y. (2013) Academic Life http://www.yiannisgabriel.com/search/label/Academic%20life (last accessed 28/01/14)
Grey, C. (2010) Organizing Studies: Publications, Politics and Polemic, Organization Studies 31, 6, p. 677-694
Prasad, A. (2013) Playing the game and trying not to lose myself: a doctoral student’s perspective on the institutional pressures for research output, Organization, 20, 6 p. 936-948
Willmott, H. (2011) Journal list fetishism and the perversion of scholarship: reactivity and the ABS list, Organization, 8, 4, p. 429-442
Item 3:
Abstracts are invited for the following workshop: The Break Up of Modern Management
Keynotes:
Professor Steve Brown, Management School, University of Leicester.
Professor Fabian Muniesa, Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation, Ecole des Mines de Paris (now Mines ParisTech
Professor Andre Spicer, CASS Business School, City University, London
Brit Winthereik, IT university of Copenhagen
Management has become an on-going matter of public controversy. Trust in management, for example, is now widely questioned in the wake of a number of recent crises and scandals taking place in both public organizations (health, education, social services) and private industries - the banking and financial services, energy, advertising, etc. The butt of comedy from Monty Python to David Brent’s ‘The Office’, management is pictured as more or less absurd and for many it will be difficult to imagine that students in higher education actively want a career in ‘management’. Does this suggest that management as a discipline or profession is currently in crisis and that we are witness to the break-up of management as we have come to understand it? At the same time, belief in the necessity of management has not disappeared and indeed appears to be unscathed: more management is typically the proposed solution to any ‘crisis’. Despite a widespread recognition that management entails unintended and unanticipated effects, it continues to marshal hope and belief in creating better and more rational organizations. In this workshop, we seek to explore these dynamics through science and technology studies (STS), actor-network theory (ANT), or critical management studies (CMS).
The workshop is funded and free to attend. Places are strictly limited and offered on a first come, first served basis. Please send your abstracts of between 1000 and 1500 to breakupmanagement@gmail.com and visit our website https://sf.cbs.dk/breakupmgt
Dr Damian O'Doherty
Manchester Business School
University of Manchester
Manchester, M15 6PB, UK
T: +44(0)1613063489: E: damian.odoherty@mbs.ac.uk
Item 4:
SCOS Board Opportunity:
Looking to add administrative responsibilities to your CV and want a serious fun way to do it? Why not become SCOS's next Meetings Secretary!
Nominations to Lynne Baxter (lynne.baxter@york.ac.uk) by Friday 18th July - please have first and second SCOS member to support you.
Your responsibilities would consist of: planning and facilitation of three Board meetings a year, liaising with local hosts, obtaining and communicating details of meeting venue, dinner locations and accommodation to representatives, attending the Board meetings.
Tenure: 3 years
You can ask either Lynne Baxter or the current incumbent, Thomas Lennerfors about the role if you have further questions.
Item 5:
Vacancies at University College, Dublin
UCD has advertised a number of lecturing positions. The positions are in Accountancy, Digital Marketing, Information Systems and Organisation, Marketing, Organisational Behaviour, Strategy/Entrepreneurship, and Supply Chain Management.
Full details available at: http://www.ucd.ie/hr/jobvacancies/
Select ‘Job Vacancies for External Candidates’ and then select ‘Academic - Business’.
Item 6:
The 9th International Conference in Critical Management Studies – Is There an Alternative? Management After Critique
University of Leicester
8-10 July 2015
CALL FOR SUB-THEME PROPOSALS
“There is clearly no alternative but to declare man’s freedom to exercise his faculties”, Herbert Spencer, 1851
“There is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by the free-enterprise system.”, Milton Friedman, 1979
“There is no alternative to austerity”, Vitor Bento, 2013
Herbert Spencer was very fond of using the expression ‘there is no alternative’, especially as it related to his staunch defence of liberalism and the pursuit of progress. The fittest, he argued,will survive as society evolves in accordance with the law of nature. The liberalism that Spencer articulated as necessary and desirable has cast a long shadow on the politics of the present day. The natural laws that are defended today are those of the market; a fundamental set of laws to which, we have been told again and again by politicians and economists, we have no alternative but to submit. In recent history this translates as no alternative to capitalism, globalization, free markets, free trade, democracy, austerity and budget cuts.
With neoliberalism having washed over the world with unrelenting vigour, it can appear that there are likewise no alternatives to management and managerialism. Alongside the so called consensus of gargantuan global capital, and echoing through the halls of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, liberalization is not just to be achieved, but has to be managed. Neoliberalism’s sidekick comes in the figure of the manager. This elevation of management as a virtuous profession has ushered in the vast expansion of executive remuneration, the cult of the CEO, the massification of management education, the advent of guru managers and the export of managerialism to all sectors of society. These days we are also encouraged to manage ourselves through practices such as personal branding, developing communication content strategies, monitoring personal web citations and articulating a life mission.
The theme of this conference invites contributors to explore alternatives to the ubiquity of neoliberal market managerialism in all its many guises. Critical Management Studies has been effective at mounting a critique of various elements of managerialist ideology, but less effective at exploring and promoting different ways of thinking about organizing and markets. This begs questions of the purpose of critique in itself and the possibilities that may follow from critique. Critique might thus be positioned as an activity of articulating and enabling the possibility of alternatives, especially when those in power try to bolster their own interests by insisting there is only one singular and inevitable course to follow.
This conference aims to engage thinking that explores alternatives, as well as rejecting the idea that there are none. Such alternatives could be understood in practical terms of specific organizational forms and practices, or theoretical developments (particularly in feminism, anarchism, communism, green thinking and so on) that may inspire a generation of new forms of localism or alter-globalization as resistance to neoliberalism. They may reflect personal alternatives, relating to the choices people make in terms of how to live their lives in the context of a neoliberal globalized world. Even more generally alternatives might focus on the critique of economic, political, managerial and organizational dogma, as it becomes embedded as the supposed ‘one best way’ of doing things.
At this stage we are inviting stream proposals that address this theme and submissions are expected to include an outline of the proposed sub-theme (500-750 words), as well as a short description of the team of convenors, including their academic background and experience. We expect most of the submissions to be linked with the overall conference theme, but other submissions are also welcome, as long as they are likely to appeal to the wider CMS community. We particularly welcome proposals from convenor teams that are international in their composition with convenors coming from at least two countries. We are also keen to encourage critical proposals from the range of business and management studies subject disciplines (accounting and finance, human resource management, industrial relations, marketing and consumption, international business, etc.). In keeping with the ethos of the conference theme, proposals can also be for alternative format sessions. We are open to suggestions for workshops, symposia, experiential approaches, non-academic activities, arts-based research, performance activities and any other creative or non-conventional approaches.
Deadline for submission of sub-theme proposals: 1 September 2014.
Convenors will be notified by 29 September 2014 of the outcome of their submissions
For any questions you might have regarding this call for sub-theme proposals, and to submit your proposals, please contact Martin Parker and Mel Simms on behalf of the local organizing committee on cms2015@le.ac.uk.