I'm sending this on behalf of David Bell and Martin Parker so could anyone
who is interested please respond to them (their contact details are below).
Thanks, Joanne
Organizing the Space Age
A Special Issue of Management and Organizational History
Edited by Martin Parker ( University of Leicester) and David Bell
(University of Leeds)
The launch of Sputnik in 1957 had a profound effect on American
consciousness. Into a society which was optimistic about the potential of
technology to solve social problems, and in the context of the Cold War,
Sputnik raised the spectre of technology's unlimited potential (as it was
most often seen then) being used by the "forces of darkness." This time
period coincides with the growth of the American business school, and
Administrative Science Quarterly had been launched just the previous year.
Yet, only twelve years later, Apollo 11 landed on the moon, a project which
rested on the forms of complex organization and human systems engineering
which the business school was teaching. The images of the Earth from space,
of Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon, the massive cold war apparatus of NASA
and the Soviet space program, and the countless books, films and products
associated with space travel have a huge significance in terms of popular
culture and artistic practice. However, it is remarkable how little impact
the space age has had on discussions concerning management and organization
more specifically. The Apollo programme was a vast demonstration of the
supposed superiority of US management and organization, as well as being a
covert state subsidy for employment and shareholder value in Big Aerospace
companies. Apollo also defined, for a while, what a brave and
technologically sophisticated organization should look like, and its
employees were heroes to many across the world. Now, 40 years after
Armstrong, we would like to investigate the impact that the space age had on
practice and imagination in management and organization. This seems
particularly timely given that private sector companies like Virgin Galactic
are now seeing space as a new frontier, the Russians have effectively
commercialised their space programme, and NASA has become the bureaucratic
dinosaur standing in the way of the free market.
The areas we would welcome submissions around include:
The economics of space travel and the state
Marketing space products
NASA, bureaucracy and the private sector Technoscience and the military
industrial complex Space science fact and fiction Space age project
management Histories of the space age The archaeology and consumption of the
space age
The colonization of space and the colonization of business
Please send a brief abstract or synopsis by 1st July 2008. Full first drafts
will be required by 1st December 2008, final revised versions by 1st March 2009.
Final chapters should be 5-6000 words long, including notes and references.
In the first instance, please email questions and abstracts to the editors:
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