-----Original Message-----
From: Watkins, Ceri [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Fri 4/03/2005 2:59 a.m.
To: artofmanagement - subscription list
Cc:
Subject: Organization and Representation: Organizational Analysis through the Lens of Visual Art, Film and Literature
APOLOGIES FOR CROSS POSTING. WE WOULD LIKE TO DRAW ATTENTION TO THIS STREAM AT APROS, MELBOURNE, DECEMBER, 2005.
http://www.businessandlaw.vu.edu.au/apros/Streams.htm
Organization and Representation: Organizational Analysis through the Lens of Visual Art, Film and Literature
Convenors: George Cairns & Katarzyna Kosmala
Contact: George Cairns & Katarzyna Kosmala <mailto:[log in to unmask];[log in to unmask]>
In this stream, we invite papers on critical studies of organizations which draw on visual art, film, and literature. We particularly seek papers which contribute to organizational research on aesthetics and organization, exploring non-cognitive and non-rationalised dimensions of everyday organizational experience.
We argue that subjectivity in the organizational context needs to be examined outside participation in, or rejection of controlled practices, and through engagement in less rational, spontaneous spaces or activities, in spaces beyond ideological fantasy, where employees' emotions, desires and anxieties can be expressed more freely.
In recent years there has been a growing interest in alternative approaches to organizational analysis through critical reflection on how organization is represented in works of art. Pierre Guillet de Monthoux (1983/91) expressed the notion that we should look to the novel for an understanding of the process of change in society and in organizations, not to the academic texts, whilst John Hassard and Ruth Holliday (1998) presented various papers on representations through art media in their edited book, Organization-Representation.
Antonio Strati (1999) points out the importance of the sensory faculties and aesthetic judgement in studying organizational life. We believe that drawing on visual arts, film and literature for theorising organizational life balances our emphatic knowledge with the artist's analytical detachment. For instance, visual arts can help us to critically explore collective utterances and representations of ideological fantasy deriving from the experiences of the everyday organizational reality. Art and literature can also be used as a vehicle for looking below the surface of appearances, into the depth of the embodied behaviour, allowing us to explore complex and fragmented patterns of action and associated meanings.
The convenors of this stream have been involved in various projects that seek to analyse organizations through study of representation in works of art, including the video art of Alicja Zebrowska and Katarzyna Kozyra the painting and photography of David Hockney, the cinema of Alfred Hitchock, and the novels of Milan Kundera and Aldous Huxley. However, we consider that the field remains relatively under-developed.
We invited critical studies of organization through reference to visual art, cinema and literature. Approaches and topics may include, but are not limited to:
a) Critical comparison of representations of organization and lived experience
b) Discussion of methodological issues of studies of representation
c) Discussion of critical organizational issues represented in art forms: gender, violence, corruption, unconsciousness, alienation, identity, etc.
d) Exploration of symbolical refashioning of the regulated world of work represented in a peculiar mixture of the affective forms of submission and resistance, through jouissance with the organizational rules, and through enacting organizational rituals
|