International Critical Management Studies Conference
'Critique and Inclusivity: Opening the Agenda'

4-6 July 2005
Judge Institute of Management,
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Call for papers: Service Work and Consumer Culture stream

Convenors: Marek Korczynski (Loughborough University, UK) Email: [log in to unmask], Cameron Macdonald (University of Wisconsin-Madison, US), Melissa Tyler (Loughborough University, UK) and Yiannis Gabriel (Imperial College, UK)

This stream continues the vibrant and growing research tradition which critically analyses the nature of service work in contemporary consumer culture. It has become more common for analyses of service work to step outside of the management-worker dyad of traditional critical sociology to focus on aspects of what Leidner has termed the ‘customer-worker-management triangle’. While this development is welcome it is still the case that in practice in this literature ‘the customer’ often becomes a shadowy, ill-defined figure rather than a central aspect of the analysis. This stream calls for papers in which the analysis of the customer and consumer culture more generally, in the context of service work, is more fore-grounded. It offers an opportunity for a meeting between the critical study of production relations and the critical study of consumption.

Potential topics for papers to address include:

• Conceptualisations around the customer-worker-management triangle.
• Empirical studies of production and consumption in sales/service interactions.
• The role of front line workers in consumption during service/sales interactions.
• The role of customers in production during service/sales interactions.
• The management of customer/service work interactions.
• Theoretical accounts of the production/consumption interface in service work.
• The ways in which production and consumption in service/sales interactions are shaped by identities such as gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, and embodiment.

Both theoretical and empirical research-based papers are welcome.

Timeline

Abstracts to convenor (email) - 1 October 2004

Decisions on acceptance/rejection communicated - 1 December 2004

Full papers to convenor (email) - 1 April 2005

Abstracts should fit the following requirements:

·        Submissions in Word

·        Arial font

·        Maximum length 1500 words

·        Including: title, authors (affiliation, contact details, body of text, references)

For further details about this stream (and for submission of abstracts) email:

[log in to unmask]

For further details about CMS 2005 see: http://www.dialspace.dial.pipex.com/town/close/hr22/cms2005/