**Apologies for cross-posting**

Critical Perspectives on the Third Sector

A Stream within the Critical Management Studies Workshop,

Montreal, August 4th – 5th, 2010

Convenors:    Richard Hull  [log in to unmask]

                   Fiona Whitehurst [log in to unmask]

                   Kasia Zdunczyk  [log in to unmask]


Deadline for Abstracts: January 15th.

The CMS Division of the US Academy of Management will conduct a research
workshop immediately prior to the 2010 Academy of Management meetings in
Montreal in August 2010. The workshop will begin mid-morning of Wednesday
Aug 4 and run till the evening of Thursday Aug 5.  We are coordinating a
stream called The Third Sector in this workshop, and seek submissions from
interested researchers.

By the Third Sector we mean, crudely, all of that which is in neither the
Private nor the Public sectors. It thus includes charities and a range of
organisations which may be labelled as non governmental, voluntary,
community or not-for-profit, but also those which are at least attempting to
make a surplus but with a prominent social element or commitment;
organisations such as housing associations, credit unions, worker or
consumer co-operatives, social enterprises and the new legal forms such as
L3C (Low-profit Limited Liability) in the US and CIC (Community Interest
Company) in the UK. Many governments believe the Third Sector or ‘social
economy’ (Haugh & Kitson, 2007; Moulaert, 2005) is of increasing strategic
importance. There is in the UK for instance considerable financial and other
support for groups of workers in the health and social care services to
establish co-operative employment agencies and various forms of social
enterprise care provision. In addition the new CIC legal structure is
designed to ease the legislative, accounting and administrative burden for
new social enterprises, and the government is co-funding a large Economic &
Social Research Council research centre for Third Sector research.

A cynical view is that this governmental attention and support is merely a
new version of attempts to privatise public services and reduce public
spending. A more sophisticated but still cynical view is that it is an
essentially New Labour attempt to respond to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone
and to exploit the newly discovered social capital and citizens’ capacities
for self-help – but again with the overall aim of reducing public spending.
This view is reinforced by governmental enthusiasm for methods of
calculating and monetising the social benefits achieved by specific third
sector organisations.

On the other hand some Third Sector models such as worker co-operatives may
provide similar or better value services but with improved working
conditions; in addition, greater mutuality in financial services companies
might have prevented some of the worst aspects of the recent financial
crisis; and medical charities may justly deserve their new role as
significant actors in pharmaceutical R&D.

Critical Management Studies has made little significant engagement with this
major sector of the economy and therefore there is a very wide range of
potential topics. However, in the spirit of CMS we are especially interested
in empirical papers which provide rigorous and/or personal accounts of
specific sub-sectors, organisations or types of work (see for example Amin
2009). Theoretical papers are also welcomed, but should preferably be based
on new empirical material. Possible sub-topics include but are not limited
to the following:-

   1. Critical case studies of specific Third Sector organisations
   2. Third Sector provision of public services – problems, issues and/or
resistances.
   3. Critical and radical techniques for evaluating ‘social return on
investment’.
   4. Management and leadership in the Third Sector
   5. Managing volunteers
   6. Volunteering and Volunteers – descriptions, perspectives, analyses
   7. Social Entrepreneurs (in the US) versus Social Enterprises (rest of
the world).
   8. The role of the Third Sector in scientific and product R&D
   9. Genealogies of key concepts in the Third Sector or any of its
constituent parts.
  10. The political economy of the Third Sector (the one topic where we
favour theoretical papers).

The motivation for the workshop is simple: neither the PDW nor the main
program events at the AOM give us enough opportunity to engage in in-depth
discussion of papers in critical management studies. Therefore this workshop
will be organized as a series of parallel streams (working groups), with
each stream comprising of people who have contributed papers on a
well-defined topic (perhaps with some invited discussants), working together
over the course of the day-and-a-half, discussing the papers in depth. In
order to maximize discussion, authors will not present their own papers, but
rather participants will be asked to present and discuss each others’
papers. We will also arrange a couple of plenary sessions and some social
time where all the participants come together.

The organisers have yet to finalize the cost of the workshop, but hope to be
able to offer low-cost accommodation during the event, and dovetail it with
the AOM meetings, especially those events involving the CMS Division. They
will finalize the details quickly on the expenses of the workshop.

If you wish to be part of this stream, please submit a 250 word abstract to
[log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask] by January 15th,
2010.  Please note that submissions can be concurrently on review at the
regular AOM 2010 conference as well.  The submission of an abstract
constitutes a good-faith agreement to submit a full paper for the stream by
June 1, 2010 if the paper is accepted.  The final paper should be less than
8000 words in length.  For guidance, see the previous workshops of 2006 and
2008,  


http://group.aomonline.org/cms/Meetings/Atlanta/Workshop06/Altanta06main.htm  


http://group.aomonline.org/cms/Meetings/Los_Angeles/Workshop08/LA08_Abs.htm

 

References

Amin, Ash (2009), “Extraordinarily ordinary: working in the social economy”
Social Enterprise Journal, Vol. 5 (1) pp. 30-49.

Haugh, Helen and Kitson, Michael (2007) “The Third Way and the third sector:
New Labour’s economic policy and the social economy”, Cambridge Journal of
Economics Vol. 31 pp. 973-994.

Moulaert, Frank and Ailenei, Oana (2005) “Social economy, third sector and
solidarity relations: A conceptual synthesis from history to present”, Urban
Studies Vol. 42 (11) pp. 2037-54.