As always, apologies for the fact that some of you quite probably
will get this more than once.
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Call for Papers for Workshop at Swansea University, School of
Business and Economics, June 2006
ORGANIZING REVOLUTION: FROM THE HALLS OF VERSAILLES TO “THE
REVOLUTIONARY ATKINS DIET!”
Alf Rehn (Åbo Akademi University), Christian De Cock (Swansea
University) & Peter Fleming (Cambridge University).
In his “Brief, Yet Helpful, Guide to Civil Disobedience” Woody Allen
gives the following theoretical introduction of revolution: "In
perpetrating a revolution, there are two requirements: someone or
something to revolt against and someone to actually show up and do
the revolting. Dress is usually casual and both parties may be
flexible about time and place but if either faction fails to attend,
the whole enterprise is likely to come off badly."
Drawing on this concise definition we invite papers to explore the
historical meaning and impact of the concept of revolution in
organization and business discourse. It was not long ago that any
mention of the world ‘revolution’ in the context of business would
see managers reaching for their proverbial revolvers. At first
glance, the situation today appears to be different. The relentless
march of the commodity has seen the marketing machine digest its
erstwhile ‘radical other’, and transform Che Guevara and Lenin into
pin-up boys for Coke. Moreover, management books now relish in the
revolutionary motif, including Hammer and Champy’s Reengineering the
Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, Guy Kawasaki’s
Rules for Revolutionaries, and Gary Hamel’s Leading the Revolution.
But the dangerous and unsettling connotations of revolution cannot be
so easily erased from our cultural memory (the October revolution,
French revolution, May 1968, etc.). Although frequently laughed off
in cynical advertising campaigns and crass corporate slogans, the
spectre of revolution still haunts the most intimate beliefs of the
capitalist free-market system. It is this aporia that we seek to
investigate in the workshop.
Calling for philosophical, sociological, historical,
phenomenological, economical, ethical, and anthropological analyses
and examples of revolution as an organizational phenomenon, we want
to open a discussion as to the varied (contradictory) connotations
‘revolution’ has taken. We are particularly interested in the
precarious relationship between the radical historical meaning of the
term revolution, and its present evocation in contemporary business
discourse. Potential themes are the philosophy of revolution,
organizational practices of revolution, historical case-studies of
revolution, the ‘dream-world’ of revolution, revolution and time,
discourses of revolution, minor revolutions, the inoculation of
revolutionary potential and the historical presence of revolution in
contemporary work forms.
The workshop organizers invite expressions of interest from potential
participants. The workshop will run at the School of Business and
Economics, Swansea University June 2006. A number of historically
orientated papers will be selected for publication in a special issue
of Management and Organizational History (see http://
moh.sagepub.com/) in August 2007. For further details, please contact
either Alf Rehn ([log in to unmask]), Christian de Cock (C.De-
[log in to unmask]) or Peter Fleming ([log in to unmask]).
--
Professor Alf Rehn
Chair of Management and Organization (Åbo Akademi University)
SSES Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Royal Institute of
Technology)
Åbo Akademi University
Department of Business Studies
Henriksgatan 7
20500 Åbo, FINLAND
Royal Institute of Technology
Department of Industrial Economics and Management
10044 Stockholm, SWEDEN
[log in to unmask], [log in to unmask]
http://www.alfrehn.com/
"Velox, vilis, immunda"
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