2nd Conference of Practical Criticism in the Managerial Social Sciences
University of Leicester, 8th - 9th January, 2009

Call for Papers

Background

Occasioned by a sense that there has occurred an atrophy of the critical
function in the academic study of management, the First Conference of
Practical Criticism in the Social Sciences of Management (PC Conference) was
held at the University of Leicester School of Management in January 2008.
The gathering was considered very successful by those who attended; the
presentations and debate being of a high standard and very enjoyable. A
selection of the papers from that first conference is available in the
University of Leicester Research Archive at
https://lra.le.ac.uk/handle/2381/3591 and refereed versions, together with
any replies received from those authors whose work was criticised, are to be
published in Ephemera towards the end of 2008. Thus encouraged, we invite
submissions for a Second Conference to be held on the 8th and 9th of
January, also at University of Leicester School of Management.

Rationale

As the strong programme in the sociology of science reminds us, there are
centripetal tendencies at work in any formally-open field of enquiry. Where
careers are made on the basis of ‘becoming an authority’, that authority is
routinely exercised through the various instruments of what Bourdieu called
‘professorial power’. So it is that examinerships, appointments committees,
editorships and the advisory boards of grant-giving bodies are used to
favour loyalists and infiltrate them into positions of influence. Thus
consolidated through a network of alliances, professorial power is in a
strong position to suppress any interrogation of its academic basis.

Coexisting with these authoritarian tendencies the social sciences of
management have also undergone a kind of Balkanisation. The uncertain and
contested relationship between management research and practice, has made it
possible for the energetic and determined scholar to fashion ‘new’ fields of
knowledge as an alternative to an apprenticeship of conformity and
deference.  Once institutionalised, academic authority in these new fields
is able to consolidate itself through the mechanisms of censorship and
self-censorship already described.

The result of this dialectic of differentiation and conformity is a
deformation of the critical process in management research. There is
criticism a-plenty between the quasi-independent fiefdoms into which the
field has fragmented but little of it within them. Between academic regimes,
there are exchanges of critical position-statements but there is little
detailed re-appraisal of particular pieces of research except insofar as
they embody the approach of a particular school. Experience suggests that
criticism of the first type (‘paradigm wars’) is largely ineffective,
possibly because it poses no threat to authority relationships within the
academic regime at which it is directed. Criticism of the second type, on
the other hand, is fundamental to academic production, if only because what
stands in the literature can be legitimately cited in argument. It is,
however, very much the exception, because of the threat which it poses to
academic authority. On the assumption that their refereeing and editorial
procedures are a sufficient guarantee of what they publish, journals appear
to operate a kind of double jeopardy rule, wherein what has survived the
refereeing process is normally exempt from subsequent criticism. The notes
of dissent which occasionally accompany some articles are only an apparent
exception since these ordinarily originate in the refereeing process itself.
Thus insulated from criticism, the standing of the authority-figures within
particular academic regimes becomes both self-confirming and
self-perpetuating. Their standing as academics is attested by a mass of
publications certified by a refereeing process which simultaneously refracts
their own authority and protects it.

Observing similar processes of collusion around the manufacture of
reputations in the literary London of the 1920s, the critic F.R. Leavis
coined the evocative term ‘flank-rubbing’. In these terms, the Leicester
Conference of Practical Criticism is directed against flank-rubbing and its
products in the social sciences of management. Its principle means of doing
so are modelled on the close-reading techniques of practical criticism
pioneered by Leavis’ mentor I.A. Richards. Particular works by academics who
are prominent within their fields of study are subject to a detailed
examination in respect of the arguments they make, the evidence and the
representations of previous scholarship on which they are based and the
validity of their claims to have made important and original contributions.
What is to be scrutinised, in other words, are the standards of scholarship
which are being implicitly promulgated through the influence-networks of
managerial social science.

That said, the form which contributions might take is flexible. Some
contributions to the first conference critiqued the processes of refereeing
and reputation-building in themselves, sometimes in general terms, sometimes
with reference to particular cases. Others were aimed at a revision of our
view of the corpus of scholarship on management, seeking to resuscitate
scholarly contributions which have been obliterated by the contemporary
noise of reputation-building. What matters is that contributions should be
aimed at opening up the process of academic production to critical scrutiny
where presently it is closed.

Submission and Selection of Papers

Papers will be selected by a committee which includes Peter Armstrong,
Campbell Jones, Simon Lilley, Geoff Lightfoot and Martin Parker of Leicester
University and Cliff Oswick of Queen Mary, University of London.

Please send abstracts via e-mail to [log in to unmask] by 30th September
2008.  The abstracts should include details, where appropriate, of the
work(s) to be criticised and the grounds of criticism. 

Successful submissions will be notified by 31st October 2008. Complete
papers should be received by 30th November 2008.

Publication

We will invite presenters to make their papers widely accessible through the
Leicester Research Archive. A selection of the best papers presented at the
conference will be published in The Leading Journal in the Field in late
2009 or early 2010.