CfP special issue of M@n@gement « Interconnecting the practice turn and communicative approach to organizing: A new challenge for collective action? »

A follow up on AIME: the publication of the English version of the Specbook

A year ago, a group of scholars (including some of the CCO community) met at the Écoles des Mines, in Paris, for a Diplomatic writing workshop. This workshop was intended to close the 2 years inquiry of the AIME project, led by Bruno Latour and his team (for more details on this workshop and its final conference, see previous posts on 21/07/2014 and 08/08/2014). One of the purposes of the workshop was the writing of a text, called a Specbook (i.e. a specification manual), that would be used to present the “Moderns” to Gaia and to the non-moderns. This Specbook was structured around 4 major “institutions” that the “Moderns”, represented by the participants of this workshop, proposed to re-institute in order to establish a ‘common ground’ for diplomatic negotiation. These ‘re-institutions’ are: ‘Our nature’, ‘Our Politics’, ‘Our Religion’, and ‘Our Economy’. The Specbook was presented and discussed by the “Chargés d’affaires” (B. Cassin, E. Viveiros de Castro, A. Mol, D. Chakrabarty, D. Danowski, P. Weibel, and S. Schaffer ) during the final conference of the AIME project.

The Specbook is now publicly available in English on the AIME platform.

For us interested in organization, I recommend reading primary ‘Our Politics’ and ‘Our Economy’. The first one proposes to ‘deflate’ politics by redefining it in terms of ‘“I can live with that…”; “we can live with that…”, which foregrounds a new ontology for how we negotiate the constitution of the ‘we’. The second one proposes to ‘slow down the economy’ by reconsidering the ‘price’ of attachement and care and by inscribing the possibility of disorder in organizational scripts.

The last activity related to the AIME project is scheduled for April 2016 and will consist of and exposition at the ZKM Karlsruhe entitled ‘Reset Modernity‘.

Happy launch of new EGOS Standing Working Group “Organization as Communication”

The European Group of Organizational Studies (EGOS) Colloquium in Athens/Greece (July 1-4, 2015) featured the launch of the new Standing Working Group “Organization as Communication” (OaC). The launch involved a number of activities:

• The pre-colloquium Paper Development Workshop (PDW) Investigating the Constitutive Role of Communication for Organization and Organizing on July 1 (organized by Michael Etter, Nicolas Bencherki, and Consuelo Vasquez) brought together junior scholars with more experienced scholars for vivid conversations on how to further advance their resecarch projects and papers (more info on the PDW plus a video of the panel debate involving Linda Putnam, Cliff Oswick, and Dan Kärreman will follow in this blog soon…).

• The sub-theme Organization as Communication: The Performative Power of Talk from July 2-4 (organized by François Cooren, Lars Thøger Christensen, and Dennis Schoeneborn) included a rich set of 36 papers and fruitful debates in the various sessions. As a special feature, Martin Brigham and Donncha Kavanagh used the final paper session for facilitating special meeting format that allowed participants to reflect on the “Sense of the Sub-Theme”. Their meeting minutes offer a nice summary of the sub-theme – you can download them here.

Next year’s EGOS Colloquium in Naples/Italy (July 6-9, 2016) will again include a PDW and a sub-theme organized by the Standing Working Group “Organization as Communication” (the Call for Papers will follow in the fall 2015). We hope to see many of you there (again)!