SCOS Update, November
We have six items for you this week:
1) Information on the next SCOS conference in wonderful Warsaw!
2) Four fab full-time fully-funded p/g research opportunities at the University of Leicester, School of Management
3) Call for papers for the Special issue of Culture and Organization Volume 20, issue 3, 2014: Organizing Through Displacement, Travel and Movement
4) Workshop on Diversity and Difference in the Contemporary Workplace, January 31- February 1, 2013 at Copenhagen Business School
5) Call for papers for the Special issue of Scripta Nova Volume 17, issue 420, 2014: Nomadism and Organising
6) Call for papers for the Critical Entrepreneurship Studies, at The 8th International Conference in Critical Management Studies
1) Information on the next SCOS conference in wonderful Warsaw!
2) Four fab full-time fully-funded p/g research opportunities at the University of Leicester, School of Management
3) Call for papers for the Special issue of Culture and Organization Volume 20, issue 3, 2014: Organizing Through Displacement, Travel and Movement
4) Workshop on Diversity and Difference in the Contemporary Workplace, January 31- February 1, 2013 at Copenhagen Business School
5) Call for papers for the Special issue of Scripta Nova Volume 17, issue 420, 2014: Nomadism and Organising
6) Call for papers for the Critical Entrepreneurship Studies, at The 8th International Conference in Critical Management Studies
Item 1:
2013 SCOS Conference, in Warsaw!
The countdown begins for next year and our fantastic SCOS conference in Warsaw, Poland!
Please visit the official website for more information: http://scos2013.wz.uw.edu.pl/
…or e-mail the organisers for more details: scos2013@mail.wz.uw.edu.pl
Item 2:
Fully-funded postgraduate research opportunities at the University of Leicester
The University of Leicester, School of Management is pleased to offer four full-time fully-funded postgraduate research opportunities from 29th April 2013. For more detailed information about each one please click on the headings.
1. Graduate Teaching Assistantship
This four year full-time Graduate Teaching Assistantship offers teaching experience while working on PhD research. We welcome applications from those interested in the critical rethinking of either global work, organizations, employment, business, management, labour markets and the labour process, training and development and/ or industrial relations. The proposal can be based in organization studies; marketing; the sociology of work; HRM; finance; accounting; political economy; management of science and technology; or related fields.
2. PhD Studentship in Labour Market Studies
This three year full-time studentship is located within the Centre for Labour Market Studies at ULSM. We welcome applications from those interested in the critical rethinking of labour market studies, especially in youth transitions to work, employability and locality, work and worker organisations, academic practice and distance learning, and skills, performance and development.
3. PhD Studentship in Management of Science and Technology
This three year full-time studentship is for a project on ‘Government policy, the Green Deal and the role of the builder’s merchant’. It is supported by the National Merchant Buying Society. The studentship involves concerted work with the NMBS and its scope has been partly established in advance. Based on Actor-Network Theory, this PhD will explore the dilemmas of the implementation of government policy around buildings, energy and the environment (the Green Deal) through an ethnographic study of the NMBS.
4. PhD Studentship in Management, Organisation and Entrepreneurship
This three year full-time studentship is for a project on ‘SME growth in a recession: Market mapping and development’. It is co-funded by ULSM and the Kettering-based automotive firm Headlands/KLM. The studentship involves concerted work with Headlands/KLM and its scope has been partly established in advance. This PhD will examine the possibilities for SME growth in challenging trading conditions, using Headlands/KLM as a case study. The student will work closely with the management of Headlands/KLM, analysing the firm, market dynamics, financial and regulatory contexts and prospects for expansion.
Closing date for all these applications: 11th January 2013.
It is anticipated that short listed candidates will be interviewed in February 2013.
Please also see our website at: http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/management/postgraduate/research
Item 3:
Call for papers: Special issue of Culture and Organization – Organizing Through Displacement, Travel and Movement
Volume 20, issue 3, 2014
Following the success of the 30th SCOS conference on the theme of ‘Organizing through Displacement, Travel and Movement’, we are inviting contributions for a special issue of Culture and Organization that explore the ways in which we organize through mobilities.
Michel de Certeau draws attention to the literal relationship between metaphor and movement by pointing out that in modern Athens the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. ‘To go to work or come home’, says de Certeau, ‘one takes a “metaphor” – a bus or a train’ (de Certeau [1984] 2001, 88). As soon we are travelling on the metaphor, we are moving. And thus the wider use of metaphor, likewise, invariably connotes movement. Insofar as we rely on metaphor to imagine the social and the organizational (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), we simultaneously invoke movement (albeit often implicitly or unconsciously). Moreover, not only are mobility, movement and travel inexorable features of the social, they are, arguably, also constitutive of self. Whether we move physically from office to classroom, from living room to kitchen, from one continent to another, or – through acts of imagination – travel to alternative social worlds, organizations or futures, ‘we all journey, and from our journeying, define ourselves’ (Roberson 2001, xi).
Despite the fact that in our pursuits as academics we are used to travelling with our bodies and minds, it is something of a paradox that, more often than not, explanations of organizing and the social appear fixed and static rather than reticular, mobile, dynamic. In other words, there is something of a disjuncture between the self-evident centrality of movement in everyday life and the relatively immobile structures of explanation we academics often resort to in accounting for it. We live, imagine and reflect on movement and travel, but we often narrate by connecting a series of fixed points, thereby stabilizing things and relations that are intrinsically in a state of flux and flow. Process philosophy (from Heraclitus to Whitehead and Deleuze) has pointed to the impossibility of any form of fixity, seeking to establish in its stead an ontology of transience and instability. Certain scholars have taken up the challenge of thinking through the implications of this philosophy for the study of organizations (Chia 1998a, 1998b, 1999; Chia & Holt 2009; Cooper 2005, 2006).
In contrast to mainstream views that would see organizations as relatively stable, these scholars insist that our epistemology, methodology and ethics should reflect, and reflexively enact, an underlying process ontology. One implication of taking this argument seriously is to substitute systemic thinking about organizations with more localized, reticular, rhizomic and networked conceptions.
Networks could be considered more supple than systems, because the elements of a system all depend on one another and form a whole, whereas the actors in a network are mobile, independent, autonomous. Those organization studies scholars persuaded of the value of actor network approaches have begun to move with actors (Latour 2005) – to follow flows and apprehend reticular processes and assemblages that emerge. Actors/actants enter into relations with one another while also being separable, thus constituting a mobile, liquid network.
The mobility we would like to explore in this special issue is not exclusively concerned with displacement in space. Of equal importance is the kind of mobility that could inspire stories, which represents alternative explanations of the ‘status quo’, and which does not recreate an antagonism between settling and moving. The point of such an enquiry would be to foreground the transition, the change during the change, the displacement.
Accordingly, manuscript submissions are invited which connect with questions of organizing and movement, mobility, transition, transformation and travelling. Contributions can be theoretical, empirical or methodological, but should address their subject matter in a critical and rigorous fashion. Some possible lines of flight would include (but not be restricted to):
• What we think or do when we move
• Who we become when we move (identities)
• Transitions from being at home to leaving home
• Entering and leaving organizations
• Visions and practices of migrants/nomads
• The gendering of transition and displacement
• Projections: travelling into the future
• Remembering: travelling into the past
• Nomadic theories of organizing
• The perpetually displaced global manager
• Changes of mind – changes of heart
• Exiles from organizations
• Narrating organizations on the move
• Transfer and relocation
• Traversing organizational cultures
• Travel, displacement and alienation
This list is intended to be indicative only. Innovative interpretations of the call are encouraged. With its long tradition of inter-disciplinary approach, C&O invites papers that draw insights and approaches from across a range of social sciences and humanities. In addition to scholars working in management and organization studies we welcome contributions from anthropology, sociology, philosophy, politics, art history, communication, film, gender and cultural studies.
We welcome papers from any disciplinary, paradigmatic or methodological perspective as long as they directly address the themes of movement, transition and transformation and its relationship to organization.
Guest editors: The guest editors are Hugo Gaggiotti, University of the West of England, UK, and Peter Case, James Cook University, Australia.
Submission and informal enquiries: Papers should be submitted via the Culture and Organization ScholarOne site at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/gsco. You will have to sign up for an account before you are able to submit a manuscript. Please also 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, and that you indicate that you are submitting to the ‘Organizing through displacement’ special issue on the site itself.
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 Hugo Gaggiotti at hugo.gaggiotti@uwe.ac.uk.
The submission deadline is 01/04/2013.
References
Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic Subjects: embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Chia, R. (ed.)(1998a). Organized Worlds: Explorations in Technology and Organization with Robert Cooper. London: Routledge.
Chia R. (ed.) (1998b). In the Realm of Organization: Essays for Robert Cooper. London: Routledge.
Chia, R. (1999). ‘A “rhizomic” model of organizational change and transformation - perspectives from a metaphysics of change’. British Journal of Management, 10, 209-227.
Chia, R. & Holt, R. (2009). Strategy Without Design: The Silent Efficacy of IndirectAction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cooper, R. (2005). ‘Relationality’. Organization Studies, 26(11), 1689-1710.
Cooper, R. (2006). ‘Making present: autopoiesis as human production’. Organization,13(1), 59-81.
De Certeau, M. (2001) [1984]. ‘Spatial stories’, in Roberson, S. (2001). DefiningTravel: Diverse Visions. Oxford, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press, p.88-104.
Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. London: University of Chicago Press.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory.Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Roberson, S. (2001). Defining Travel: Diverse Visions. Oxford, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press.
Item 4:
Workshop on: Diversity and Difference in the Contemporary Workplace
January 31- February 1, 2013
Copenhagen Business School
All are kindly invited to submit abstracts for working papers that will be presented at the Negotiating the Public and Private in Diversity Management Practices workshop to be held January 31- February 1, 2013. Academic scholars, politicians, business leaders, and practitioners are invited to this workshop, which will include two days of seminars, keynote speeches, presentations, and networking. Day one will include a mixture of presentations from practitioners, academics, and keynote speeches. Day two is reserved for an academic workshop with paper sessions. All are invited to attend both days.
Diversity continues to remain a salient issue for all types of organizations. Statements like ‘we value diversity’ and ‘we see difference as an asset’ appear more and more frequently in corporate, governmental, and NGO repertoire of values. Organizations of all sizes are beginning to realize that employee diversity is a critical issue that must be considered part of their central organizational strategy.
While most scholars and practitioners acknowledge both the importance and reality of increased organizational diversity, we have yet to experience success in understanding the diverse workplace nor implementing effective diversity management policies. Increasingly organizations see diversity as a strategic resource and are actively seeking to manage it in order to realize its positive potential. However, this increased attention to diversity in organizations and the concomitant focus on how diversity can be managed raises academic questions concerning the conceptualization of diversity and its consequences. Moreover, diversity and diversity management strategies are especially difficult to understand because they transcend traditional organizational boundaries. Diversity management practices – such as diversity sensitivity training, work/family balance policies, and recruitment and hiring strategies – are the precise places where very private matters such as one’s sexual orientation, race, gender, and religion meet public performance. Traditional strategy and management theories are unable to account for this public/private tension. Therefore, this workshop will bring together academics and practitioners in an effort to learn more about current organizational diversity practices and create interdisciplinary dialogue between these two groups. In bringing practitioners and academics together, we hope to foster a dialogue that also includes business professionals, NGO workers, and politicians that highlights the shared goals of these organizations as well as the points of public-private conflict that manifest themselves in the workplace and in our everyday lives.
Keynote speakers include
– Yvonne Benchop, Nijmegen School of Management, Radboud University Nijmegen
– Patrice Buzzanell, Brian Lamb School of Communication, Purdue University
– Organizational speakers include
– Novo Nordisk A/S
– Foreningen Nydansker
Registration
The workshop is free of charge but binding for all participants and presenters.
Location of the workshop is Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Room details and directions will be posted on the website soon.
Important Dates
• 8 December 2012 - You are invited to submit an abstract of your working paper (between 300-500 words).
Please send abstracts to Robyn Remke rr.ikl@cbs.dk or Annette Risberg ari.ikl@cbs.dk.
• 15 December - 2012 Notification of offer to present will be sent.
• 15 January 2013 - Working papers to be sent to the conference organisers.
Hotel: We recommend Radisson Blu Falconer Hotel which is located in walking distance from the Copenhagen Business School.
Please contact Robyn Remke (rr.ikl@cbs.dk) or Annette Risberg (ari.ikl@cbs.dk) if you have any questions.
Programme
31 January - Day 1
9.00 Welcome to the workshop and morning coffee
9.30 - 12.00 Companies and organizations sharing their experiences of practicing diversity and equality. Examples of speakers include:
• Annelise Goldstein, Director Global Diversity & Inclusion at Novo Nordisk A/S
• Torben Møller-Hansen, Director Foreningen Nydansker
12.00 – 13.00 Lunch break
13.00 – 14.30 Workshops – work in small groups discussing challenges and best practices – lead by workshop facilitators. Mixed groups with academics and practitioners.
14.30 – 15.00 Feedback from the working groups
15.00 – 15.30 Break – refreshments will be served
15.30 – 17.00 Keynote Presentations
• Professor Yvonne Benchop, Nijmegen School of Management
• Professor Patrice Buzzanell, Purdue University
17.00 – 18:30 Reception – food and drinks are served.
1 February – Day 2
Day two is reserved for academic and research presentations. All are invited to participate in the paper discussions. Lunch and refreshments will be served during the day.
The workshop is supported by the BiS Strategy and the Public-Private Platform
Item 5:
Call for papers – Special issue of Scripta Nova: Nomadism and Organising
Volume 17, issue 420, 2014
Guest editors: Hugo Gaggiotti, University of the West of England (United Kingdom), Monika Kostera, University of Warsaw (Poland) and Ricardo Bresler, Fundação Getulio Vargas (Brazil).
Mainstream western epistemologies and methodologies on organising persist in attempts to delineate and fix reality. Within social science our questions (to ‘research subjects’, ourselves and colleagues) often invite static answers: where are you from?; are you male or female?; how old are you?; how long have you had this job?; where do you feel most at home?; what is my epistemology?; are you a positivist, constructivist, interpretativist, postmodernist, etc., etc.? Offering one possible line of flight from such fixity, Rosi Braidotti (1994) suggests acknowledging nomadism as an existential condition.
Ideas around nomad+global are becoming exchangeable representations of a vocabulary that in contemporary capitalism has to be universally understood, like nomad+millionaire (Palan, 2003). Nevertheless, our perception is that nomad and global are concepts that not necessarily and always are associated with organising. We still imagine organising very static, located and practicing in a place inscribed in a space (Gaggiotti 2006), necessarily creating a sense of a community, in what Czarniawska and others (Czarniawska, forthcoming; Latour, 2002) have referred to as a deeply rooted modernist belief in spatial homogenization. But seems that nomadism create a sense of a community too (Waller, 1998) or serves to populate the imagery of a global community, a practice that some authors have suggested embedded with a colonial and post-colonial corporate world (Noyes, 2004).
The nomadism we would like to discuss in this special issue is not exclusively concerned with nomadism in space. What intrigues us also is the kind of nomadism that could inspire stories, represents alternative explanations of the ‘status quo’, and which do not recreate an antagonism between settling and moving. The point of such an enquiry would be to explain the transition – the change during the change – the nomadism through space and time (Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga, 2003).
During SCOS XXX conference (Barcelona, 2012), interest on nomadic practices of organising was discussed through a rich variety of discussions. We are inviting contributions for a special issue of Scripta Nova that explore the ways in which we organize through nomadism. The special issue intends to explore different relations between movement and organisational and work practices. In contemporary society where there is a shift towards the global and networked society, we want to discuss the implications this has on notions of working and organising, through ideas around social movement, hence the nomadic. We therefore want to contribute to this discussion by exploring ideas of, for example, the relation between travel and organizing (Roberson 2001), the nomadic and migration of images (Waller, 1998), the wisdom acquired through travelling (Nightingale, 2004) or the displacement through virtual communities (Driskell and Lyon, 2002).
Possible themes of nomadism as it intersects with organizing include, but are absolutely not limited to:
· How do concepts of organisations and work shift in displacement?
· Is the organisational actor becoming the digital image of a nomad? (Makimoto and Manners, 1997).
· Who we become when we move (emotion, wisdom)?
· How we imagine the nomadic leaders of the future?
· What might nomadic theories of organising and working be?
· How might we conceptualise the perpetually displaced nomad?
· How nomadism helps us understand changes of working and organising?
· How might we develop ideas around ‘the static panic’ (the panic to be attached to a place and not to be in permanent movement)?
We welcome papers from any disciplinary, paradigmatic or methodological perspective as long as they directly address the themes of movement, transition and transformation and its relationship to organization.
Deadline to submit papers: 28.02.13. Publication date: December 2013. January 2014 (Submission of papers in English, to be published in Spanish or Portuguese. Translation from English to Spanish by Scripta Nova).
Papers should be submitted as e-mail attachments in Word to hugo.gaggiotti@uwe.ac.uk, by 19th November 2012. Publication date is January 2014 (tbc).
Please ensure that you follow Scripta Nova house style (ISO 690), as outlined at http://www.fsport.uniba.sk/fileadmin/user_upload/editors/English/science/acta_facultatis/Bibliographic_references_and_citations_01.pdf
Papers should be between 8000 and 9000 words in length (without references and figures), in English 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 Hugo Gaggiotti at hugo.gaggiotti@uwe.ac.uk
References
Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic Subjects: embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Czarniawska, B. (forthcoming). Nomadic work as life-story plot. Journal-of-Computer-Supported-Cooperative-Work.
Driskell, R.B., and Lyon, L. (2002). Are virtual communities true communities? Examining the environments and elements of community. City and Community, 1, pp. 373-390.
Gaggiotti, H. (2006). Un lugar en su sitio. Narrativas y organización cultural urbana en el espacio latinoamericano. Sevilla: Editorial JJ/Comunicación Social.
Latour, B. (2002). War of the Worlds. What about Peace? Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Low, S. M. and Lawrence-Zúñiga, D. 2003 (eds.). The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Makimoto, T. and Manners, D. (1997). Digital Nomad. Chichester: John Wiley
Nightingale, A.W. (2004). Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Noyes, J. (2004). Nomadism, nomadology, postcolonialism: By way of introduction, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 6:2, 159-168
Palan, R. (2003) The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places, and Nomad Millionaires. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press.
Roberson, S. (2001). Defining Travel: Diverse Visions. Oxford, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press.
Waller, M. (1998) Corporate nomads with the skill to step into the breach. The Times, 13 October: 31.
Item 6:
Call for papers – Critical Entrepreneurship Studies
The 8th International Conference in Critical Management Studies
This stream aims to explore the self-evidences of entrepreneurship scholarship, including its (neo-capitalist) ideologies, dominant assumptions, grand narratives, preferred sites, objects and practices of inquiry. Even though entrepreneurship is a very diverse phenomenon that calls for divergence and multiplicity in its understandings, the majority of entrepreneurship research is still functionalist in nature (Jennings et al, 2005). As Calas, Smircich and Bourne (2009: 552) suggest, with “few exceptions, the extensive literature on entrepreneurship positions it as a positive economic activity”. The normative assumption that entrepreneurship is a ‘good thing’ prevails along with an acceptance that ‘the more entrepreneurs the merrier’ (cf. Weiskopf and Steyaert, 2009). Entrepreneurship as a field of study has generally been dominated by research and researchers interested in it as a purely market-based phenomenon: a ‘special’ trait or set of behaviours which drive venture creation. This focus on entrepreneurship as a ‘desirable’ economic activity, perceived unquestioningly as positive, obscures important questions: for instance, questions of identity, phenomenology, ideology and relations of power.
Drawing on and intensifying previous critical work on entrepreneurship by, for instance, Nodoushani & Nodoushani, 1999, Ogbor, 2000, Steyaert and Hjorth (2007); Hjorth and Steyaert (2009) and Down (2006; 2010), we propose this stream as a means to create space for what Calas et al. (2009) refer to as Critical Entrepreneurship Studies . Continuing our earlier (2011) CMS stream on Critical Entrepreneurship Studies and Special Issue in Organization (Tedmanson, Verduyn, Essers and Gartner, 2010), we invite papers that critically reflect on entrepreneurship’s authoritative voices, forces, discourses, assemblages or desires that make us believe that there is no other option than conceiving entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs as neo-liberal icons. Critical inquiries of entrepreneurship’s exclusionary linguistic conventions are also highly appreciated for they have proven effective in disclosing, for instance, the mystification of ‘the entrepreneur’ based on essentialist conceptualisations of archetypically ‘white’ attributes (Calas et al., ibid). Moreover, we are interested in papers dealing with how the rationality of the entrepreneur is used politically – both inside and outside of the economy (e.g. in the public sector, the voluntary sector or in popular culture) – to interpellate individuals as entrepreneurial subjects, who then “further the cause of post-industrial capital through their own volition” (Jones and Spicer, 2009: 27).
On the other hand, we also embrace papers that try to save entrepreneurship from its neo-liberal over-codification by probing the constitutive voices that constantly punctuate, transgress and challenge the received wisdom. Attempts to bring to light entrepreneurship’s inherent, if often suppressed, alterity via empirical work might follow the example of Ahl (2004), Rehn and Taalas (2004), Pio (2005), Essers and Benschop (2007; 2009), Essers (2008; 2009) and Ozkazanc-Pan (2009) who have sought to ‘voice’ other entrepreneurial subjectivities than those traditionally privileged in dominant stories of entrepreneurship. On the conceptual end, papers engaging critically with the canon of entrepreneurship studies might find inspiration in Rindova et al. (2009) who have convincingly suggested to move scholarship away from a focus on wealth creation as a dominant motive for starting a venture, and to start addressing entrepreneurship’s ‘dark sides’ as well as its emancipatory possibilities. Also, papers might consider geographical, discursive and social dimensions of entrepreneurship other than those typically studied by researchers (Steyaert and Katz, 2004). Methodologically, papers might look into entrepreneurship research’s performative and interventionist possibilities and thus demonstrate how research can be used as a vehicle for bringing into existence different entrepreneurial realities (Steyaert, 2011).
While the above offers possible entry points of how entrepreneurship might be approached from a critical vantage point, we rather openly seek through this stream to further the momentum for alternate analyses of entrepreneurship within the field of critical scholarship. Aiming to unleash myriad ways of enacting entrepreneurship differently, any surprises that move forward the critical agenda of entrepreneurship are welcome.
Stream convenors:
Dr. Caroline Essers (VU University Amsterdam and Radboud University Nijmegen), c.essers@fm.ru.nl
Dr. Pascal Dey (University of St. Gallen), pascal.dey@unisg.ch
Dr. Karen Verduyn (VU University Amsterdam), karen.verduijn@vu.nl
Deirdre Tedmanson (University of South Australia and Hawke Research Institute), deirdre.tedmanson@unisa.edu.au
Please send abstracts or any questions to c.essers@fm.ru.nl
Extended abstracts (maximum 1000 words, A4 paper, single spaced, 12 point font), including a clear research question and short but clear elaboration on the used methods (when authors have based their work on empirical research), should be submitted by 31st January 2013.
Notification of paper acceptance: 22nd February 2013
Full papers will be expected by 1st May 2013
2013 SCOS Conference, in Warsaw!
The countdown begins for next year and our fantastic SCOS conference in Warsaw, Poland!
Please visit the official website for more information: http://scos2013.wz.uw.edu.pl/
…or e-mail the organisers for more details: scos2013@mail.wz.uw.edu.pl
Item 2:
Fully-funded postgraduate research opportunities at the University of Leicester
The University of Leicester, School of Management is pleased to offer four full-time fully-funded postgraduate research opportunities from 29th April 2013. For more detailed information about each one please click on the headings.
1. Graduate Teaching Assistantship
This four year full-time Graduate Teaching Assistantship offers teaching experience while working on PhD research. We welcome applications from those interested in the critical rethinking of either global work, organizations, employment, business, management, labour markets and the labour process, training and development and/ or industrial relations. The proposal can be based in organization studies; marketing; the sociology of work; HRM; finance; accounting; political economy; management of science and technology; or related fields.
2. PhD Studentship in Labour Market Studies
This three year full-time studentship is located within the Centre for Labour Market Studies at ULSM. We welcome applications from those interested in the critical rethinking of labour market studies, especially in youth transitions to work, employability and locality, work and worker organisations, academic practice and distance learning, and skills, performance and development.
3. PhD Studentship in Management of Science and Technology
This three year full-time studentship is for a project on ‘Government policy, the Green Deal and the role of the builder’s merchant’. It is supported by the National Merchant Buying Society. The studentship involves concerted work with the NMBS and its scope has been partly established in advance. Based on Actor-Network Theory, this PhD will explore the dilemmas of the implementation of government policy around buildings, energy and the environment (the Green Deal) through an ethnographic study of the NMBS.
4. PhD Studentship in Management, Organisation and Entrepreneurship
This three year full-time studentship is for a project on ‘SME growth in a recession: Market mapping and development’. It is co-funded by ULSM and the Kettering-based automotive firm Headlands/KLM. The studentship involves concerted work with Headlands/KLM and its scope has been partly established in advance. This PhD will examine the possibilities for SME growth in challenging trading conditions, using Headlands/KLM as a case study. The student will work closely with the management of Headlands/KLM, analysing the firm, market dynamics, financial and regulatory contexts and prospects for expansion.
Closing date for all these applications: 11th January 2013.
It is anticipated that short listed candidates will be interviewed in February 2013.
Please also see our website at: http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/management/postgraduate/research
Item 3:
Call for papers: Special issue of Culture and Organization – Organizing Through Displacement, Travel and Movement
Volume 20, issue 3, 2014
Following the success of the 30th SCOS conference on the theme of ‘Organizing through Displacement, Travel and Movement’, we are inviting contributions for a special issue of Culture and Organization that explore the ways in which we organize through mobilities.
Michel de Certeau draws attention to the literal relationship between metaphor and movement by pointing out that in modern Athens the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. ‘To go to work or come home’, says de Certeau, ‘one takes a “metaphor” – a bus or a train’ (de Certeau [1984] 2001, 88). As soon we are travelling on the metaphor, we are moving. And thus the wider use of metaphor, likewise, invariably connotes movement. Insofar as we rely on metaphor to imagine the social and the organizational (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), we simultaneously invoke movement (albeit often implicitly or unconsciously). Moreover, not only are mobility, movement and travel inexorable features of the social, they are, arguably, also constitutive of self. Whether we move physically from office to classroom, from living room to kitchen, from one continent to another, or – through acts of imagination – travel to alternative social worlds, organizations or futures, ‘we all journey, and from our journeying, define ourselves’ (Roberson 2001, xi).
Despite the fact that in our pursuits as academics we are used to travelling with our bodies and minds, it is something of a paradox that, more often than not, explanations of organizing and the social appear fixed and static rather than reticular, mobile, dynamic. In other words, there is something of a disjuncture between the self-evident centrality of movement in everyday life and the relatively immobile structures of explanation we academics often resort to in accounting for it. We live, imagine and reflect on movement and travel, but we often narrate by connecting a series of fixed points, thereby stabilizing things and relations that are intrinsically in a state of flux and flow. Process philosophy (from Heraclitus to Whitehead and Deleuze) has pointed to the impossibility of any form of fixity, seeking to establish in its stead an ontology of transience and instability. Certain scholars have taken up the challenge of thinking through the implications of this philosophy for the study of organizations (Chia 1998a, 1998b, 1999; Chia & Holt 2009; Cooper 2005, 2006).
In contrast to mainstream views that would see organizations as relatively stable, these scholars insist that our epistemology, methodology and ethics should reflect, and reflexively enact, an underlying process ontology. One implication of taking this argument seriously is to substitute systemic thinking about organizations with more localized, reticular, rhizomic and networked conceptions.
Networks could be considered more supple than systems, because the elements of a system all depend on one another and form a whole, whereas the actors in a network are mobile, independent, autonomous. Those organization studies scholars persuaded of the value of actor network approaches have begun to move with actors (Latour 2005) – to follow flows and apprehend reticular processes and assemblages that emerge. Actors/actants enter into relations with one another while also being separable, thus constituting a mobile, liquid network.
The mobility we would like to explore in this special issue is not exclusively concerned with displacement in space. Of equal importance is the kind of mobility that could inspire stories, which represents alternative explanations of the ‘status quo’, and which does not recreate an antagonism between settling and moving. The point of such an enquiry would be to foreground the transition, the change during the change, the displacement.
Accordingly, manuscript submissions are invited which connect with questions of organizing and movement, mobility, transition, transformation and travelling. Contributions can be theoretical, empirical or methodological, but should address their subject matter in a critical and rigorous fashion. Some possible lines of flight would include (but not be restricted to):
• What we think or do when we move
• Who we become when we move (identities)
• Transitions from being at home to leaving home
• Entering and leaving organizations
• Visions and practices of migrants/nomads
• The gendering of transition and displacement
• Projections: travelling into the future
• Remembering: travelling into the past
• Nomadic theories of organizing
• The perpetually displaced global manager
• Changes of mind – changes of heart
• Exiles from organizations
• Narrating organizations on the move
• Transfer and relocation
• Traversing organizational cultures
• Travel, displacement and alienation
This list is intended to be indicative only. Innovative interpretations of the call are encouraged. With its long tradition of inter-disciplinary approach, C&O invites papers that draw insights and approaches from across a range of social sciences and humanities. In addition to scholars working in management and organization studies we welcome contributions from anthropology, sociology, philosophy, politics, art history, communication, film, gender and cultural studies.
We welcome papers from any disciplinary, paradigmatic or methodological perspective as long as they directly address the themes of movement, transition and transformation and its relationship to organization.
Guest editors: The guest editors are Hugo Gaggiotti, University of the West of England, UK, and Peter Case, James Cook University, Australia.
Submission and informal enquiries: Papers should be submitted via the Culture and Organization ScholarOne site at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/gsco. You will have to sign up for an account before you are able to submit a manuscript. Please also 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, and that you indicate that you are submitting to the ‘Organizing through displacement’ special issue on the site itself.
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 Hugo Gaggiotti at hugo.gaggiotti@uwe.ac.uk.
The submission deadline is 01/04/2013.
References
Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic Subjects: embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Chia, R. (ed.)(1998a). Organized Worlds: Explorations in Technology and Organization with Robert Cooper. London: Routledge.
Chia R. (ed.) (1998b). In the Realm of Organization: Essays for Robert Cooper. London: Routledge.
Chia, R. (1999). ‘A “rhizomic” model of organizational change and transformation - perspectives from a metaphysics of change’. British Journal of Management, 10, 209-227.
Chia, R. & Holt, R. (2009). Strategy Without Design: The Silent Efficacy of IndirectAction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cooper, R. (2005). ‘Relationality’. Organization Studies, 26(11), 1689-1710.
Cooper, R. (2006). ‘Making present: autopoiesis as human production’. Organization,13(1), 59-81.
De Certeau, M. (2001) [1984]. ‘Spatial stories’, in Roberson, S. (2001). DefiningTravel: Diverse Visions. Oxford, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press, p.88-104.
Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. London: University of Chicago Press.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory.Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Roberson, S. (2001). Defining Travel: Diverse Visions. Oxford, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press.
Item 4:
Workshop on: Diversity and Difference in the Contemporary Workplace
January 31- February 1, 2013
Copenhagen Business School
All are kindly invited to submit abstracts for working papers that will be presented at the Negotiating the Public and Private in Diversity Management Practices workshop to be held January 31- February 1, 2013. Academic scholars, politicians, business leaders, and practitioners are invited to this workshop, which will include two days of seminars, keynote speeches, presentations, and networking. Day one will include a mixture of presentations from practitioners, academics, and keynote speeches. Day two is reserved for an academic workshop with paper sessions. All are invited to attend both days.
Diversity continues to remain a salient issue for all types of organizations. Statements like ‘we value diversity’ and ‘we see difference as an asset’ appear more and more frequently in corporate, governmental, and NGO repertoire of values. Organizations of all sizes are beginning to realize that employee diversity is a critical issue that must be considered part of their central organizational strategy.
While most scholars and practitioners acknowledge both the importance and reality of increased organizational diversity, we have yet to experience success in understanding the diverse workplace nor implementing effective diversity management policies. Increasingly organizations see diversity as a strategic resource and are actively seeking to manage it in order to realize its positive potential. However, this increased attention to diversity in organizations and the concomitant focus on how diversity can be managed raises academic questions concerning the conceptualization of diversity and its consequences. Moreover, diversity and diversity management strategies are especially difficult to understand because they transcend traditional organizational boundaries. Diversity management practices – such as diversity sensitivity training, work/family balance policies, and recruitment and hiring strategies – are the precise places where very private matters such as one’s sexual orientation, race, gender, and religion meet public performance. Traditional strategy and management theories are unable to account for this public/private tension. Therefore, this workshop will bring together academics and practitioners in an effort to learn more about current organizational diversity practices and create interdisciplinary dialogue between these two groups. In bringing practitioners and academics together, we hope to foster a dialogue that also includes business professionals, NGO workers, and politicians that highlights the shared goals of these organizations as well as the points of public-private conflict that manifest themselves in the workplace and in our everyday lives.
Keynote speakers include
– Yvonne Benchop, Nijmegen School of Management, Radboud University Nijmegen
– Patrice Buzzanell, Brian Lamb School of Communication, Purdue University
– Organizational speakers include
– Novo Nordisk A/S
– Foreningen Nydansker
Registration
The workshop is free of charge but binding for all participants and presenters.
Location of the workshop is Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Room details and directions will be posted on the website soon.
Important Dates
• 8 December 2012 - You are invited to submit an abstract of your working paper (between 300-500 words).
Please send abstracts to Robyn Remke rr.ikl@cbs.dk or Annette Risberg ari.ikl@cbs.dk.
• 15 December - 2012 Notification of offer to present will be sent.
• 15 January 2013 - Working papers to be sent to the conference organisers.
Hotel: We recommend Radisson Blu Falconer Hotel which is located in walking distance from the Copenhagen Business School.
Please contact Robyn Remke (rr.ikl@cbs.dk) or Annette Risberg (ari.ikl@cbs.dk) if you have any questions.
Programme
31 January - Day 1
9.00 Welcome to the workshop and morning coffee
9.30 - 12.00 Companies and organizations sharing their experiences of practicing diversity and equality. Examples of speakers include:
• Annelise Goldstein, Director Global Diversity & Inclusion at Novo Nordisk A/S
• Torben Møller-Hansen, Director Foreningen Nydansker
12.00 – 13.00 Lunch break
13.00 – 14.30 Workshops – work in small groups discussing challenges and best practices – lead by workshop facilitators. Mixed groups with academics and practitioners.
14.30 – 15.00 Feedback from the working groups
15.00 – 15.30 Break – refreshments will be served
15.30 – 17.00 Keynote Presentations
• Professor Yvonne Benchop, Nijmegen School of Management
• Professor Patrice Buzzanell, Purdue University
17.00 – 18:30 Reception – food and drinks are served.
1 February – Day 2
Day two is reserved for academic and research presentations. All are invited to participate in the paper discussions. Lunch and refreshments will be served during the day.
The workshop is supported by the BiS Strategy and the Public-Private Platform
Item 5:
Call for papers – Special issue of Scripta Nova: Nomadism and Organising
Volume 17, issue 420, 2014
Guest editors: Hugo Gaggiotti, University of the West of England (United Kingdom), Monika Kostera, University of Warsaw (Poland) and Ricardo Bresler, Fundação Getulio Vargas (Brazil).
Mainstream western epistemologies and methodologies on organising persist in attempts to delineate and fix reality. Within social science our questions (to ‘research subjects’, ourselves and colleagues) often invite static answers: where are you from?; are you male or female?; how old are you?; how long have you had this job?; where do you feel most at home?; what is my epistemology?; are you a positivist, constructivist, interpretativist, postmodernist, etc., etc.? Offering one possible line of flight from such fixity, Rosi Braidotti (1994) suggests acknowledging nomadism as an existential condition.
Ideas around nomad+global are becoming exchangeable representations of a vocabulary that in contemporary capitalism has to be universally understood, like nomad+millionaire (Palan, 2003). Nevertheless, our perception is that nomad and global are concepts that not necessarily and always are associated with organising. We still imagine organising very static, located and practicing in a place inscribed in a space (Gaggiotti 2006), necessarily creating a sense of a community, in what Czarniawska and others (Czarniawska, forthcoming; Latour, 2002) have referred to as a deeply rooted modernist belief in spatial homogenization. But seems that nomadism create a sense of a community too (Waller, 1998) or serves to populate the imagery of a global community, a practice that some authors have suggested embedded with a colonial and post-colonial corporate world (Noyes, 2004).
The nomadism we would like to discuss in this special issue is not exclusively concerned with nomadism in space. What intrigues us also is the kind of nomadism that could inspire stories, represents alternative explanations of the ‘status quo’, and which do not recreate an antagonism between settling and moving. The point of such an enquiry would be to explain the transition – the change during the change – the nomadism through space and time (Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga, 2003).
During SCOS XXX conference (Barcelona, 2012), interest on nomadic practices of organising was discussed through a rich variety of discussions. We are inviting contributions for a special issue of Scripta Nova that explore the ways in which we organize through nomadism. The special issue intends to explore different relations between movement and organisational and work practices. In contemporary society where there is a shift towards the global and networked society, we want to discuss the implications this has on notions of working and organising, through ideas around social movement, hence the nomadic. We therefore want to contribute to this discussion by exploring ideas of, for example, the relation between travel and organizing (Roberson 2001), the nomadic and migration of images (Waller, 1998), the wisdom acquired through travelling (Nightingale, 2004) or the displacement through virtual communities (Driskell and Lyon, 2002).
Possible themes of nomadism as it intersects with organizing include, but are absolutely not limited to:
· How do concepts of organisations and work shift in displacement?
· Is the organisational actor becoming the digital image of a nomad? (Makimoto and Manners, 1997).
· Who we become when we move (emotion, wisdom)?
· How we imagine the nomadic leaders of the future?
· What might nomadic theories of organising and working be?
· How might we conceptualise the perpetually displaced nomad?
· How nomadism helps us understand changes of working and organising?
· How might we develop ideas around ‘the static panic’ (the panic to be attached to a place and not to be in permanent movement)?
We welcome papers from any disciplinary, paradigmatic or methodological perspective as long as they directly address the themes of movement, transition and transformation and its relationship to organization.
Deadline to submit papers: 28.02.13. Publication date: December 2013. January 2014 (Submission of papers in English, to be published in Spanish or Portuguese. Translation from English to Spanish by Scripta Nova).
Papers should be submitted as e-mail attachments in Word to hugo.gaggiotti@uwe.ac.uk, by 19th November 2012. Publication date is January 2014 (tbc).
Please ensure that you follow Scripta Nova house style (ISO 690), as outlined at http://www.fsport.uniba.sk/fileadmin/user_upload/editors/English/science/acta_facultatis/Bibliographic_references_and_citations_01.pdf
Papers should be between 8000 and 9000 words in length (without references and figures), in English 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 Hugo Gaggiotti at hugo.gaggiotti@uwe.ac.uk
References
Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic Subjects: embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Czarniawska, B. (forthcoming). Nomadic work as life-story plot. Journal-of-Computer-Supported-Cooperative-Work.
Driskell, R.B., and Lyon, L. (2002). Are virtual communities true communities? Examining the environments and elements of community. City and Community, 1, pp. 373-390.
Gaggiotti, H. (2006). Un lugar en su sitio. Narrativas y organización cultural urbana en el espacio latinoamericano. Sevilla: Editorial JJ/Comunicación Social.
Latour, B. (2002). War of the Worlds. What about Peace? Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Low, S. M. and Lawrence-Zúñiga, D. 2003 (eds.). The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Makimoto, T. and Manners, D. (1997). Digital Nomad. Chichester: John Wiley
Nightingale, A.W. (2004). Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Noyes, J. (2004). Nomadism, nomadology, postcolonialism: By way of introduction, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 6:2, 159-168
Palan, R. (2003) The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places, and Nomad Millionaires. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press.
Roberson, S. (2001). Defining Travel: Diverse Visions. Oxford, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press.
Waller, M. (1998) Corporate nomads with the skill to step into the breach. The Times, 13 October: 31.
Item 6:
Call for papers – Critical Entrepreneurship Studies
The 8th International Conference in Critical Management Studies
This stream aims to explore the self-evidences of entrepreneurship scholarship, including its (neo-capitalist) ideologies, dominant assumptions, grand narratives, preferred sites, objects and practices of inquiry. Even though entrepreneurship is a very diverse phenomenon that calls for divergence and multiplicity in its understandings, the majority of entrepreneurship research is still functionalist in nature (Jennings et al, 2005). As Calas, Smircich and Bourne (2009: 552) suggest, with “few exceptions, the extensive literature on entrepreneurship positions it as a positive economic activity”. The normative assumption that entrepreneurship is a ‘good thing’ prevails along with an acceptance that ‘the more entrepreneurs the merrier’ (cf. Weiskopf and Steyaert, 2009). Entrepreneurship as a field of study has generally been dominated by research and researchers interested in it as a purely market-based phenomenon: a ‘special’ trait or set of behaviours which drive venture creation. This focus on entrepreneurship as a ‘desirable’ economic activity, perceived unquestioningly as positive, obscures important questions: for instance, questions of identity, phenomenology, ideology and relations of power.
Drawing on and intensifying previous critical work on entrepreneurship by, for instance, Nodoushani & Nodoushani, 1999, Ogbor, 2000, Steyaert and Hjorth (2007); Hjorth and Steyaert (2009) and Down (2006; 2010), we propose this stream as a means to create space for what Calas et al. (2009) refer to as Critical Entrepreneurship Studies . Continuing our earlier (2011) CMS stream on Critical Entrepreneurship Studies and Special Issue in Organization (Tedmanson, Verduyn, Essers and Gartner, 2010), we invite papers that critically reflect on entrepreneurship’s authoritative voices, forces, discourses, assemblages or desires that make us believe that there is no other option than conceiving entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs as neo-liberal icons. Critical inquiries of entrepreneurship’s exclusionary linguistic conventions are also highly appreciated for they have proven effective in disclosing, for instance, the mystification of ‘the entrepreneur’ based on essentialist conceptualisations of archetypically ‘white’ attributes (Calas et al., ibid). Moreover, we are interested in papers dealing with how the rationality of the entrepreneur is used politically – both inside and outside of the economy (e.g. in the public sector, the voluntary sector or in popular culture) – to interpellate individuals as entrepreneurial subjects, who then “further the cause of post-industrial capital through their own volition” (Jones and Spicer, 2009: 27).
On the other hand, we also embrace papers that try to save entrepreneurship from its neo-liberal over-codification by probing the constitutive voices that constantly punctuate, transgress and challenge the received wisdom. Attempts to bring to light entrepreneurship’s inherent, if often suppressed, alterity via empirical work might follow the example of Ahl (2004), Rehn and Taalas (2004), Pio (2005), Essers and Benschop (2007; 2009), Essers (2008; 2009) and Ozkazanc-Pan (2009) who have sought to ‘voice’ other entrepreneurial subjectivities than those traditionally privileged in dominant stories of entrepreneurship. On the conceptual end, papers engaging critically with the canon of entrepreneurship studies might find inspiration in Rindova et al. (2009) who have convincingly suggested to move scholarship away from a focus on wealth creation as a dominant motive for starting a venture, and to start addressing entrepreneurship’s ‘dark sides’ as well as its emancipatory possibilities. Also, papers might consider geographical, discursive and social dimensions of entrepreneurship other than those typically studied by researchers (Steyaert and Katz, 2004). Methodologically, papers might look into entrepreneurship research’s performative and interventionist possibilities and thus demonstrate how research can be used as a vehicle for bringing into existence different entrepreneurial realities (Steyaert, 2011).
While the above offers possible entry points of how entrepreneurship might be approached from a critical vantage point, we rather openly seek through this stream to further the momentum for alternate analyses of entrepreneurship within the field of critical scholarship. Aiming to unleash myriad ways of enacting entrepreneurship differently, any surprises that move forward the critical agenda of entrepreneurship are welcome.
Stream convenors:
Dr. Caroline Essers (VU University Amsterdam and Radboud University Nijmegen), c.essers@fm.ru.nl
Dr. Pascal Dey (University of St. Gallen), pascal.dey@unisg.ch
Dr. Karen Verduyn (VU University Amsterdam), karen.verduijn@vu.nl
Deirdre Tedmanson (University of South Australia and Hawke Research Institute), deirdre.tedmanson@unisa.edu.au
Please send abstracts or any questions to c.essers@fm.ru.nl
Extended abstracts (maximum 1000 words, A4 paper, single spaced, 12 point font), including a clear research question and short but clear elaboration on the used methods (when authors have based their work on empirical research), should be submitted by 31st January 2013.
Notification of paper acceptance: 22nd February 2013
Full papers will be expected by 1st May 2013