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Managing overflows: How people and organizations deal with daily overflows ________________________________ The Guest Editors invited for this special issue are: Barbara Czarniawska, University of Gothenburg, Sweden Jonathan Metzger, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden Grazyna Wieczorkowska-Wierzbinska, University of Warsaw, Poland Overflow is defined in dictionaries as the excess or surplus impossible to be accommodated within an available space. This neutral definition leads to a great many research questions. Who, what and how decides what space is available? Who, what and how decides what "accommodate" means, and who or what will be doing this accommodation? Who, what and how decides what is excess and surplus, and where does the border or the edge lie? This special issue invites papers that describe and analyse the way people and organizations deal with overflows of various kinds: not only information, goods and tasks, but also abstract concepts such as diagnoses or concrete beings such as people (Czarniawska and Löfgren, 2012). The principal query is when and where the notion of overflow - framed in terms of excess and abundance and/or their opposites, scarcity and dearth - appears, and how is it dealt with in different contexts, from domestic consumption to refugee influx to climate control? Do seemingly diverse overflows have similar dynamics? And, does the management of different overflows follow a similar logic, or does such logic depend on the type of overflow? Does such logic change in different settings and times? Answers to such questions necessitate a historical and comparative approach (Galbraith, 1958/1998; Offer, 2006). For whom is abundance a problem or a blessing? What one culture defines as necessity, another might see as excess; and such differences can exist even in the same society among different levels of the social hierarchy. It has become clear that uses and definitions of a concept such as overflow are culturally charged, and framed by the given social and historical context in which they are applied. New kinds of overflows, or even old kinds of overflows in new settings, necessitate new or renewed ways of managing them. The very term "managing", however, has a double meaning: controlling but also coping. Thus the ways of dealing with overflow could be divided into learning to live with overflow or learning to control it, depending on the frame chosen. To define something as an overflow is already a way to control it, while living with it might turn out to be a way of reproducing or even magnifying it (Czarniawska and Löfgren, 2013). Do attempts to deal with overflow generate new competences, routines and coping strategies for organizations as well as individuals? Studies and papers describing how such different strategies work are very welcome. Every manuscript submitted to this special issue needs to provide a clear conceptual contribution. All submissions will be subject to the EMJ's usual double-blind peer-review process, should respect the journal's general publication guidelines and should be submitted electronically to http://ees.elsevier.com/emj/ between 25th August and 15th December 2016. To ensure that all manuscripts are correctly identified for consideration for this Special Issue, it is important that authors select SI: Managing Overflows when they reach the "Article Type" step in the submission process. The European Management Journal is a generalist, academic journal covering all fields of management. The EMJ aims to present the latest thinking and research on major management topics in the form of articles that meet high academic quality standards, while still being accessible to non-specialists. Interdisciplinary research and cross-functional issues are particularly favoured. The Journal takes a broad view of business and management and encourages submissions from other disciplines if they contribute significantly to problems considered by managers and researchers. References Czarniawska, Barbara, & Löfgren, Orvar (2012). Managing overflow in affluent societies. New York: Routledge. Czarniawska, Barbara, & Löfgren, Orvar (2013). Coping with excess: How organizations, communities and individuals manage overflows. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Galbraith, John K. (1958/1998). The affluent society. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Offer, Avner (2006). The challenge of affluence: Self-control and well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press http://www.journals.elsevier.com/european-management-journal/call-for-papers/managing-overflows-how-people-and-organizations-deal-with-da Jonathan Metzger, (Docent, PhD) Associate Professor / Universitetslektor Director of Postgraduate Research Studies Division of Urban and Regional Studies KTH - Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> telephone: +46-(0)8-7907905 cell: +46-(0)70-4451593 mailing adress: Division of Urban and Regional Studies, ABE-school, KTH, SE-100 44 Stockholm, SWEDEN