Deadline for abstracts: September 19th, 2014
Call for papers for a Workshop on February 27th-28th 2015 at Goldsmiths
College London
Triage Devices: How Organizations Manage Commitments
organised by Nils Ellebrecht (University of Freiburg) and Monika Krause
(Goldsmiths College, University of London) with support from the
ESRC-funded project “Triaging Values”
This workshop at Goldsmiths College brings together research and
reflections on practices and devices that involve the allocation of
scarce resources in different fields of expertise.
The term triage comes initially from military medicine, where it
describes the process by which doctors decide whom to treat first when
they arrive at a battlefield and have more patients than they could
reasonably treat in a timely manner. In military and emergency medicine
it is generally accepted that medical attention is based on medical need
but also on chances of survival. Doctors try not to “waste” scarce
resources on patients who have little chance of survival. Triage, as
practiced in emergency medicine is extreme in how explicitly it
aggregates consequences for individuals into collective calculations and
how explicitly it justifies that some “units” are left to die, but other
practices of prioritization, in medicine and in other fields, whether
explicit or implicit, can also have dramatic implications.
This workshop will explore how organizations and individuals in
organizations pick among the different things they could be doing in
their everyday work. This will include consideration of explicit
decision-making processes but also of routines and taken-for-granteds.
The workshop aims at developing a better understanding of how
organizations manage their commitments in view of limited means. We
welcome contributions that address practices in one of many different
substantive areas, such as, for example, healthcare, policing and
surveillance, education, environmental conservation, development
practice, and we aim to include work on organizations in the public,
private and the third sector.
Questions might include: - What resources are labelled as scarce? - What
kind of units function as the targets of distributions (individuals,
territorial units, priority themes, company divisions, product lines
etc.)? - What are the knowledge-claims involved in making decisions
among units and how are debates about this knowledge resolved? - What
role do management tools and devices play in selecting among things that
could be done? - What are the time frames involved in these commitments?
- How are trade-offs involved in selecting priorities reflected? Is
triage or rationing explicit or implicit? - What different
kinds/types/logics of allocation are observable? In how far do “talk,
decision, and action” (Brunsson) differ with regard to the
organisational distribution of scarce resources?
- How do actors make sense of triage and its dilemmas? How do they deal
with the responsibility that is involved?
Examining these organizational practices in more detail and in
comparative perspective is important in itself. The workshop will also
explore to what extent research questions about triage can form the
basis of new ways of describing patterns or “orders” established within
and around organizations, which could then be used to answer broader
kinds of questions in new and interesting ways.
Practicalities
Please submit a long abstract of 300 to 500 words by email to
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September 19th 2014. A limited budget to help with travel expenses is
available. Accommodation and meals will be provided. Invited presenters
will be notified by Oct 1st 2014. Please be prepared to share your paper
by February 6th 2015. Papers will be circulated before the workshop. The
workshop will be reserved for intensive discussion of papers.
PDF:
http://www.soziologie.uni-freiburg.de/personen/nellebrecht/Cfp_triage_devices
--
Nils Ellebrecht
Institut für Soziologie
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität
Rempartstraße 15
79085 Freiburg im Breisgau
Raum HS 4511
Tel: +49 761 203 3492
Fax: +49 761 203 3493
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http://www.soziologie.uni-freiburg.de/personen/nellebrecht
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