Special issue of Culture and Organization
Volume 19, issue 5, 2013
Recovery and organization
Following the success of the 29th SCOS conference on the theme of ‘Recovery’, we are inviting contributions for a special issue of Culture and Organization that explore the ways in which the world is living on and living through the impact, persistence and aftershocks of the recent economic crisis. What this recovery might look like, and how we might experience it, naturally depends on perspective. The radical left we assume may articulate recovery as an ongoing legitimation crisis, in which recovery involves a global ‘waking’ up to the inequities and environmental degradation which capitalism generates. Moving much further right on the political spectrum, those in the neo-liberal Hayekian camp will presumably construct recovery as a swift return to free market economics without the ‘unnecessary’ intervention of an ‘always clumsy’ government of whatever kind. And of course there will be innumerable way stations in between, and myriad possible recoveries.
Recovery then is an evocative and often circuitous concept which we can approach from multiple vantage points. There is, for example, the possibility of exploring recovery as a process of change leading to improved health and well-being. As such recovery can be framed as a process of healing and transformation for the better, at the level of the individual, the organization and/ or the national and international economies. This also necessitates conceptualizing malaise or decline (which itself can be done in myriad ways) and of what might constitute the converse. Then there is the question here of whether recovery should be seen as a process – perhaps a never-ending one - or as the end state of wellness. But recovery might equally be about (re-)discovery of a real or imagined (or both/ and) organizational/ national/ international time and place. And in any case what exactly is being re(dis)covered here? Considering questions of collective and individual memory requires us to reflect on the inevitably reconstructionist qualities of remembering and nostalgia, as well as the dangers of forgetting what has gone before. Recovering could therefore be interpreted as individual or collective concealment, obfuscation, mystification or revisionism – or, on the other hand, as revelation and unveiling. To recover can also signify to get something back, to have it returned, to reclaim it as the ‘rightful’ owner or to be compensated for its loss. Still further, we can see recovery as the excavation of what lies beneath and is not immediately accessible – as in the extraction of natural substances such as oil, and the enormous environmental controversies surrounding such activities which in their turn link to the ongoing debates around carbon trading and ‘carbon democracies’. And recovery can additionally signify reconstituting useful substances from refuse or waste.
In all of these approaches to framing recovery – which are by no means exhaustive – it is experienced by individuals, organizations and other collectives at various meso and macro levels. And such dualisms might themselves be in crisis in any possible recovery. Recovery also implies a movement from past through present to future, which might be supported, resisted, subverted, imagined, re-imagined and unimagined.
As such, possible themes of recovery as it intersects with organization include, but are absolutely not limited to:
Rediscovery of frames of the past, present and future at work
Repair, regeneration and renewal in organizations and beyond
Memory, nostalgia and forgetting in organizations and elsewhere
Concealment, deceit, complicity, manipulation and recidivism in organizations and elsewhere
The limits of recovery and the failure to recover: organizational deterioration, loss, death
Signs and signifiers of recovery in organizations and beyond
Body, mind, soul and well-being at work
Recovery as an organizational/ economic imaginary or utopia
Redemption, reparation and recuperation: from pre- to post-recovery in organizations and beyond
Organizational spaces, places and times of recovery
Ecologies of recovery and work systems as ecologies of healing
Relationships of organizational and/ or economic recovery
The East and West, or North and South, of organizational/ national/ transnational recovery
Organizational heroes and heroics, healing and salvation – and their opposites
Resistance to recovery in organizations and beyond
What can be recovered? Organizational reclamations and compensations
In short, we welcome papers from any disciplinary, paradigmatic or methodological perspective as long as they directly address the theme of recovery and its relationship to organization.
Guest editors
The guest editors are Jo Brewis, University of Leicester , UK , and Mustafa Özbilgin, Brunel University , UK , and Université Paris-Dauphine, France.
Submission and informal enquiries
Papers should be submitted as e-mail attachments in Word 2007 if possible to [log in to unmask], by 1st October 2012. Please ensure that you follow the C and O house style, as outlined at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal ... inktype=44. 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 Jo Brewis at [log in to unmask]
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