Apologies for cross posting...
DIALOGUES IN CRITICAL MANAGEMENT STUDIES (CMS)
At the intersection: Critical/writing
Call for abstracts (December 4th, 2017)
For the past 20 years, I have been in dialogue with CMS ideas and with the people who authored them. It is impossible to imagine my intellectual life without referring to the body of work that comes under this broad heading or without the friendships it has brought. But something has always restricted what I have been able to say, or write, or think as a critical scholar. I now understand that the language we are forced to use as academics is stultifying both my writing and the ideas that I would generate if I did not have to force them into the straitjacket of ‘scientific’ writing. This dominant form of writing makes me feel as if my academic home is uncanny, disorienting, not wholly ours or mine.
This is my personal rationale for a book that aims to break free of the restrictions of ‘academic writing’. I know others share my discomfort with the language within which we think, write, and speak. This book will allow experimentation with writing styles. We cannot know what may emerge if we throw off its restrictions, although other academics, such as Kathleen Stewart and Katherine Angel have illustrated how profound may be the insights that are generated when authors free themselves from the conventional rules.
The ‘Writing Differently’ field within CMS is growing. Borrowing from a range of inspiring, foundational contributions from feminism, queer theory, film, cultural studies and beyond, this movement is moving. There is a substantial body of work arguing for the need for a new form of writing about management, organisations, workers, ourselves, and our lives, but, ironically perhaps, these calls are made within the traditional scientific language. There is just the start of work that attempts to do what has been advocated; that attempts to write differently. It is currently writing at the margins but it is not necessarily writing of the margins. At its best, this writing provides profound new insights about organizations, management and working lives: authors do not forget their allegiance to the discipline, and neither do they indulge in the sort of self-revelatory excesses that, some have argued, plague auto-ethnography and certain forms of research reflexivity. It is a writing that may be from experience; it is writing about the body and writing from the body. It explores class, race, gender fluidity, ethics, family/home and the doing of ethnography. But it never loses its roots in critical management and organization studies.
This volume of Dialogues in Critical Management Studies aims to facilitate the growth of this nascent movement – one that arguably has its ‘home’ within CMS but is currently located at the fruitful, creative margins. To this end, at Editor in Chief, I’m issuing a call for abstracts (1,000 words maximum please) by December 4th, 2017 which outline a potential contribution to this coming edition. There is no restriction on the subject matter. There is no restriction on form: poetry, short stories, journalistic pieces, accounts of dreams, daily life, accounts of the ordinary/usual and the extraordinary are all welcome, but the writing must contribute to CMS and/or engage with thinking/writing/researching/studying organizations and working lives. Authors who go outside these bounds should argue for the relevance of their accounts to this community of scholars and their writing differently work. Currently we are envisioning four sections for the collection with the overall aim of revisioning CMS through writing:
• Beyond the critical moment in CMS - how writing advances a critical agenda
• Practice, reflexivity and writing
• Feminine writing
• The tensions between materiality, discourse and writing.
The Editorial Team is a strong and experienced one composed of Nancy Harding ([log in to unmask]) , Jenny Helin ([log in to unmask]) and Alison Pullen ([log in to unmask]) – a group of academics who continue to make foundational contributions to writing differently. Any queries about the abstracts, the process, the content can be addressed either to me ([log in to unmask]) or to the editorial team. Accepted authors will be notified by the end of January 2018. Full contributions will be required by September 2018 with revisions by the end of February 2019.
Publication of DCMS is scheduled for summer 2019.
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