[csaa-forum] CFP: Cultural Studies of Organizations

[Melissa Gregg]

CALL FOR PAPERS

INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP:
TOWARDS A CULTURAL STUDIES OF ORGANIZATIONS

10-11th November 2005, The Management Centre, University of Leicester

Coordinators:
Martin Parker
University of Leicester
Carl Rhodes
University of Technology, Sydney

Background
For more than 20 years now the field of organization studies has taken 
as one of its mainstays the study of culture.  When culture is 
considered, however, it is almost exclusively done so in terms of 
corporate culture, organizational culture or cultural diversity at 
work.  It seems that while the culture of 9 to 5 has been discussed 
exhaustively, relatively little thinking has gone in to the 
relationship between work and the culture of 5 to 9.  Elsewhere, in 
cultural studies, organizations and industry have also received 
significant attention. There, much of the focus has been on the 
practices of the ‘culture industries’ and how they relate to the 
control of cultural production and consumption.  Attention has also 
been paid to the relationship between the commodification of culture 
and the preservation of social and economic structures. What falls in 
the gap between these two important areas of study is the relationship 
between popular culture and the experience and organization of work.  
This workshop seeks papers that explore this relationship.

Although there is little currently in the way of a cultural studies of 
organizations, such a possibility does have some important antecedents 
– both established and recent.  As far back as 1956 William H. Whyte 
bolstered his thesis on The Organizational Man by devoting two chapters 
to an exploration of this ‘man’ in the cinema, novels and popular 
magazines.  It has even been suggested that Max Weber might be best 
understood as “less a classical management theorist and rather more a 
student of culture, practicing what today we would call ‘cultural 
studies’” (Clegg, 2005).  More recently popular culture has been 
implicated with organizations in relation to detective novels 
(Czarniawska, 1999), science fiction films (Smith et al, 2001), popular 
cinema (Hassard and Holliday, 1998), animated cartoons (Rhodes, 2000, 
2002) and popular music (Rehn and Sköld, 2004; Rhodes, 2004).

Despite such developments, the creation of a ‘cultural studies of 
organization’ is still very much nascent.  It is our hope that this 
workshop will serve to further such a form of study. We seek to go 
beyond the assumption that the production of mass culture is purely 
economic and/or exploitative so as to explore the potency of popular 
culture’s ambivalence and hostility to organizations (Parker, 2002). We 
also wish to explore the possibility that a materialist cultural 
studies might begin to transcend the disciplinary and intellectual 
boundaries between production and consumption, as was the case with 
some of the work from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at 
Birmingham in the 1970s (Willis 1977).

We welcome papers that address the general issues outlined above.  
Specific topics could include, but are not limited to:
•	The consumption of popular culture by people at work
•	Critical representations of work and organizations in popular culture
•	Popular culture as a site of resistance to management
•	If or how popular culture offers an expression of the cultural 
meaning of work
•	The relationship between the ‘critique of culture’ and the ‘critique 
in culture’
•	Popular management texts as forms of popular culture
•	Popular culture as a shaper of professional identity (eg police, 
lawyers, doctors)
•	The creative use of popular culture at work (eg re-worked song 
lyrics, use of cartoon images to caricature management)

Abstracts
Abstracts of no more that 500 words should be sent to m.parker at le.ac.uk 
no later than Friday 1 July 2005. Please submit abstracts in MS Word or 
Rich Text Format.  Acceptance will be notified by August 2005. This 
will be a small, single stream workshop with between eight and twelve 
papers, so we will be selective about acceptance. Please also note that 
we intend to approach a publisher with a proposal for an edited volume 
after the workshop, so are primarily interested in papers that have not 
been published elsewhere.

Conference Fee and Organization
The conference fee will be in the region of £160, including 
accommodation and dinner. Exact prices, further details and 
registration information will be available by late August 2005, but 
places will be limited. Please contact j.hern at le.ac.uk for details at 
that time.

References
Clegg, S.R. (2005, in press) Puritans, visionaries and survivors, 
Organization Studies
Czarniawska, B. (1999) Management she wrote. On parallels between 
detective novel and organization theory. Studies of Cultures, 
Organizations, Societies, 5(1): 13-42.
Hassard, J. and Holiday, R. (eds.) (2001) Organization Representation: 
Work and Organization in Popular Culture, London: Sage.
Parker, M. (2002) Against Management, Cambridge: Polity.
Rehn, A. and Sköld, D. (2004) ‘Makin’ It’: The entrepreneurial 
discourses of hip-hop culture, 6th International Conference on 
Organizational Discourse: Artefacts, Archtypes and Architexts, 28-30 
July 2004, Amsterdam.
Rhodes, C. (2001) D’Oh: The Simpsons, popular culture and the 
organizational carnival, Journal of Management Inquiry, 10: 374-383.
Rhodes, C. (2002) Coffee and the business of pleasure: The case of 
Harbucks vs. Mr. Tweek, Culture and Organization, 8: 293-306.
Rhodes, C. (2004) ‘Utopia in Popular Management Writing and the Music 
of Bruce Springsteen: Do You Believe in the Promised Land?’, 
Consumption, Markets and Culture. 7(1): 1-20.
Smith, M., Higgins, M., Lightfoot, G. and Parker, M (eds.) (2001)  
Science Fiction and Organization. London: Routledge.
Whyte, W. (1956) The Organization Man, New York: Simon and Schuster.
Willis, P (1977) Learning to Labour, Farnborough: Saxon House.