Dear Aacorners,

The next EGOS conference in Goteborg, Sweden, July 2011, will have an 
Aacorn-related sub-theme called "Art, Design and Organization" or 
shortly: ADO. The sub-theme is the opening for a series of meetings on 
the topic over the next years. We hope the sub-theme inspires your 
curiosity, and we would be glad to receive your submissions via the EGOS 
web page.

Please find the call for submissions below. Deadline is the first week 
of January 2011.

Best regards,
Mary Jo Hatch
Ulla Johansson
Stefan Meisiek


Call for Submissions - EGOS 2011 (www.egosnet.org)

Sub-theme 14:

Art, Design and Organization

Convenors:
Mary Jo Hatch, Gothenburg University and Copenhagen Business School, 
[log in to unmask]
Stefan Meisiek, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, [log in to unmask]
Ulla Johansson, Gothenburg University, Sweden, [log in to unmask]

What can art, design and organization studies learn from one another? 
And where are their boundaries, when a growing number of organization 
scholars draw on design thinking and artistic theories to explain 
contemporary organizational phenomena? To answer such questions, this 
track will look for convergences between art, design and organization 
and hopes to attract those interested in their intersecting lines of 
flight.

In relation to the conference theme we are curious to learn how art and 
design might reconnect fragmented streams of research in organization 
studies and how combining these forces might reassemble increasingly 
fragmented organizations. For example, while artists and designers have 
produced theories (e.g., Brecht’s alienation effect, Beuys’ social 
sculpture, Kelley’s design thinking), compared to organization theory, 
theirs invite alternative interpretations rather than excluding them. 
How, then, might artistic or design-based ways of theorizing inform, 
complement or at least compare to more traditional theorizing about 
organization? Another, more practice-oriented question is if – and how – 
art and design are suitable for each and every organizational problem. A 
number of writers seem to suggest that they are. But where do they 
become too costly, or where are they outright damaging to organizations? 
Due process and accountability might not always go well with designer 
stubble and artistic panache.

With this, there is a methodological challenge in bringing art and 
design into organization studies. Art and design typically take place in 
the studio, and are certainly taught using studio methods, while 
organization studies is much more oriented towards analytical armchair 
reflections. It is not clear that an analysis of art or design processes 
or outcomes will take us into the realms of emotion and aesthetic 
sensibility within which art and design make their most impressive 
contributions.

For this reason we will hold some of our conference track meetings in a 
studio setting at Gothenburg University’s School of Design and Craft, 
where we will use facilitated studio thinking to reflectively explore 
differences between art, design and organization studies as exemplified 
by the projects and papers submitted by track participants. We will 
start off using themes and ideas from participant submissions to define 
our creative constraints and to guide our explorations together. 
Following the studio experience, we shift focus to reflective sessions 
for refining and improving the ideas and methods we jointly develop. The 
process will end with a critique and review session, where we bring the 
strands together. We hope the result will eventually produce material 
for an edited book on the intersection of art, design and organization 
inspired by all three during our track.

Topics appropriate to our track include, but are not restricted to:
- designerly approaches to organization design
- art collections and organizational change
- art-based organizational interventions
- the fine art of leadership
- strategy as design
- managing design vs. designing management
- branding as design and/or art
- the relevance of material artifacts and objects in art, design and 
organization
- design thinking and organization
- design thinking and entrepreneurship (e.g. effectuation)
- artful making

Participants should submit a short paper describing their current 
thinking about how art and/or design relate to organization in 
productive ways. Please feel free to propose activities for the group in 
its studio context, or to offer more traditional forms of argumentation 
appropriate to our themes.

About the convenors:

Mary Jo Hatch is C. Coleman McGehee Eminent Scholars Research Professor, 
Emerita of Banking and Commerce, University of Virginia, USA and 
currently Adjunct Professor, School of Management, Boston College, USA; 
Adjunct and Visiting Professor, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark; and 
Visiting Professor, School of Business Economics and Law, Business and 
Design Lab, Gothenburg University, Sweden. She received her PhD in 
Organization from Stanford University and her MBA in Finance from 
Indiana University. She is a past officer of the Organization and 
Management Theory (OMT) Division of the Academy of Management and, among 
numerous other writings on organization is the author of Organizations: 
A Very Short Introduction (due March 2011, Oxford).

Stefan Meisiek is Associate Professor of Leadership at Copenhagen 
Business School and Visiting Professor at Nova SBE (Universidade Nova de 
Lisboa). He received his PhD in Management from the Stockholm School of 
Economics, and his MA from the Free University, Berlin. He is currently 
working to develop the Enterprise Studio, a design-based experience for 
organizations and academics that draws on his extensive research in the 
field of art and management and on his current study of studio learning 
in organizations.

Ulla Johansson is the Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Professor of Design 
Management and Director of the Business & Design Lab, a cooperation 
between the School of Design and Crafts and the School of Business, 
Economics and Law at Gothenburg University, Sweden. Her research areas 
include “design management”, “responsibility and organizations”, “gender 
and organizations” and “irony and organizations”. She has published six 
books and a number of articles. She is actively involved in the Swedish 
and Scandinavian networks for design and design management research, and 
is a reviewer for the European Academy of Design. She has supervised 
doctoral students in both design and management.