CALL FOR PAPERS

INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP: TOWARDS A CULTURAL STUDIES OF ORGANIZATIONS

10-11th November 2005, The Management Centre, University of Leicester

Coordinators:
Martin Parker, University of Leicester
Carl Rhodes, University of Technology, Sydney

Background
For more than 20 years now the field of organization studies has taken
as one of its mainstays the study of culture.  When culture is
considered, however, it is almost exclusively done so in terms of corporate
culture, organizational culture or cultural diversity at work.  It seems
that while the culture of 9 to 5 has been discussed exhaustively,
relatively little thinking has gone in to the relationship between work and
the culture of 5 to 9.  Elsewhere, in cultural studies, organizations
and industry have also received significant attention. There, much of the
focus has been on the practices of the 'culture industries' and how
they relate to the control of cultural production and consumption.
Attention has also been paid to the relationship between the commodification
of culture and the preservation of social and economic structures. What
falls in the gap between these two important areas of study is the
relationship between popular culture and the experience and organization of
work.  This workshop seeks papers that explore this relationship.

Although there is little currently in the way of a cultural studies of
organizations, such a possibility does have some important antecedents
- both established and recent.  As far back as 1956 William H. Whyte
bolstered his thesis on The Organizational Man by devoting two chapters
to an exploration of this 'man' in the cinema, novels and popular
magazines.  It has even been suggested that Max Weber might be best
understood as "less a classical management theorist and rather more a
student of culture, practicing what today we would call 'cultural studies'"
(Clegg, 2005).  More recently popular culture has been implicated with
organizations in relation to detective novels (Czarniawska, 1999), science
fiction films (Smith et al, 2001), popular cinema (Hassard and Holliday,
1998), animated cartoons (Rhodes, 2000, 2002) and popular music (Rehn
and Sköld, 2004; Rhodes, 2004).

Despite such developments, the creation of a 'cultural studies of
organization' is still very much nascent.  It is our hope that this workshop
will serve to further such a form of study. We seek to go beyond the
assumption that the production of mass culture is purely economic and/or
exploitative so as to explore the potency of popular culture's
ambivalence and hostility to organizations (Parker, 2002). We also wish to
explore the possibility that a materialist cultural studies might begin to
transcend the disciplinary and intellectual boundaries between
production and consumption, as was the case with some of the work from the
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham in the 1970s (Willis
1977).

We welcome papers that address the general issues outlined above.
Specific topics could include, but are not limited to:
·     The consumption of popular culture by people at work
·     Critical representations of work and organizations in popular
culture
·     Popular culture as a site of resistance to management
·     If or how popular culture offers an expression of the cultural
meaning of work
·     The relationship between the 'critique of culture' and the
'critique in culture'
·     Popular management texts as forms of popular culture
·     Popular culture as a shaper of professional identity (eg police,
lawyers, doctors)
·     The creative use of popular culture at work (eg re-worked song
lyrics, use of cartoon images to caricature management)

Abstracts
Abstracts of no more that 500 words should be sent to [log in to unmask]
no later than Friday 1 July 2005. Please submit abstracts in MS Word or
Rich Text Format.  Acceptance will be notified by August 2005. This
will be a small, single stream workshop with between eight and twelve
papers, so we will be selective about acceptance. Please also note that we
intend to approach a publisher with a proposal for an edited volume
after the workshop, so are primarily interested in papers that have not
been published elsewhere.

Conference Fee and Organization
The conference fee will be in the region of £160, including
accommodation and dinner. Exact prices, further details and registration
information will be available by late August 2005, but places will be
limited. Please contact [log in to unmask] for details at that time.

References
Clegg, S.R. (2005, in press) Puritans, visionaries and survivors,
Organization Studies
Czarniawska, B. (1999) Management she wrote. On parallels between
detective novel and organization theory. Studies of Cultures, Organizations,
Societies, 5(1): 13-42.
Hassard, J. and Holiday, R. (eds.) (2001) Organization Representation:
Work and Organization in Popular Culture, London: Sage.
Parker, M. (2002) Against Management, Cambridge: Polity.
Rehn, A. and Sköld, D. (2004) 'Makin' It': The entrepreneurial
discourses of hip-hop culture, 6th International Conference on Organizational
Discourse: Artefacts, Archtypes and Architexts, 28-30 July 2004,
Amsterdam.
Rhodes, C. (2001) D'Oh: The Simpsons, popular culture and the
organizational carnival, Journal of Management Inquiry, 10: 374-383.
Rhodes, C. (2002) Coffee and the business of pleasure: The case of
Harbucks vs. Mr. Tweek, Culture and Organization, 8: 293-306.
Rhodes, C. (2004) 'Utopia in Popular Management Writing and the Music
of Bruce Springsteen: Do You Believe in the Promised Land?',
Consumption, Markets and Culture. 7(1): 1-20.
Smith, M., Higgins, M., Lightfoot, G. and Parker, M (eds.) (2001)
Science Fiction and Organization. London: Routledge.
Whyte, W. (1956) The Organization Man, New York: Simon and Schuster.
Willis, P (1977) Learning to Labour, Farnborough: Saxon House.