With a love of research/scholarship theme, the Baltic Sessions have expanded internationally (to include academics from across the UK, US, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Greece, UAE). The current session follows on from past Baltic Sessions from many of the world's leading academics who have something to say about individual and organizational futures in HE and beyond... Just some of the speakers include Mats Alvesson, Hugh Willmott, David Knights, Mark Learmonth, Kevin Morrell, Paul Hibbert, Martin Parker, Gibson Burrell, Steffen Boehm, Chris Grey, Sarah Robinson, Dennis Tourish, Roy Suddaby, Stewart Clegg, Jean Mills, Albert Mills, Andrew Hoffman, Kathy Lund Dean, Jean Bartunek, Robert Macintosh, Katy Mason, Nic Beech, Damian O’Doherty, Marianna Fotaki, Todd Bridgman, Chris Land, Emma Bell, Stephen Cummings, Guy Huber, Rick Delbridge, Karen Dale, Fiona Hurd, Suzette Dyer, Shankar Sankaran, Amy Kenworthy, Peggy Hedhes, Greg Bamber, Martyna Sliwa, Rosemary Deem, Richard Hall, Jurgen Enders, Simon Marginson, Lefteris Kretsos and Monika Kostera.
I have invited many of these past speakers to this talk, along with future (and potential) speakers as well. It has been great to see many of you are still tuning into the Baltic Sessions. They now have a distribution way beyond many conferences and associated workshops in this area. We are welcoming lots of people new to the sessions who have been in touch and expressed an interest in being part of them, as well as the usual people. It tends to attract people who are interested in the critical future of HE, the public sector, alternative organising, management learning, alternative careers as well as people interested in tackling the societal challenges around this (climate change, equality, inclusion, diversity, AI etc.) – you get the picture! Space, place, identity, power, time and embodiment are entangled within this confessional conversation resonating across national boundaries, disciplinary specialisms and career levels. To coin a phrase used by one of the past speakers (beer is not included!!)… ‘they refresh the parts that other conferences/sessions cannot reach’ – well here’s hoping!
The Baltic Sessions aim to develop an open, informal, interactive research discussion around the topic in question. The Sessions have a levelling ethos, which attempts to create a regular, non-judgmental meeting space and culture to boost an outward looking collegiality, above and beyond specific research specialisms and groups. They aim to move beyond interdisciplinary rhetoric and aspiration towards a more processual meeting space for generative ideas and agency.
You can find all the past events’ titles, speakers’ bios and their abstracts below. Feel free to dive into the world of the Baltic Sessions!
Please contact with Muhammed to be part of the session or email list.
See you in the upcoming Baltic Sessions!
Also find us on LinkedIn and Facebook
Details of our next event will be detailed here.
Recordings of the Session
Chair: Prof. David Jones, Northumbria University, UK
Welcome Speech: Prof. Robert MacIntosh, Pro Vice-Chancellor of Faculty of Management & Law, Northumbria University, UK
Panel:
1. Prof. Greg Bamber, Monasch University, Australia
2. Prof. Martyna Sliwa, Durham University, UK
3. Prof. Rosemary Deem, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
4. Prof. Richard Hall, De Montfort University, UK
5. Prof. Mats Alvesson, Lund University, Sweden
6. Prof. Jurgen Enders, University of Bath, UK
7. Prof. Simon Marginson, University of Oxford, UK
8. Dr. Lefteris Kretsos, Brunel University London, UK (Ex Greek, Syriza government minister)
9. Prof. Monika Kostera, University of Warsaw, Poland
Hi folks,
I have the pleasure to chair what I hope you can see is the biggest and most ambitious Baltic Session we have ever held (in the five years since the sessions began). For this final Baltic Session of the semester, we have an illustrious panel of academics who are all going to take on the task of tackling the title of the session - ‘Critical Futures of HE Organising: Problems, Possibilities & Pathways’. In fact, I see this as just a beginning to a whole range of Baltic Sessions to explore the urgent need to explore HE futures, in the context of changing socio- economic-political pressures.
Please do check out the above list of the roundtable participants to give you just a flavour of what to expect (their bios are below). An outline programme with timing is also included below (including a coffee/tea break at 15.00-15.30 pm UK time).
The panel represent an eclectic and international mix of scholars (from Greece, UK, Australia, Germany, Poland, and Sweden) who I am hoping will both move beyond dystopic problem framing and simplistic, extrapolative organising solutions for our sector. Many of these scholars (please do check out their scholarship and policy making in this area) have deconstructed the space and place of our universities- they have written extensively and provocatively about what they view as both hopeless (more often than not around the neoliberal centrality of corporate managerialism) and more nuanced hopeful HE futures. So, this Baltic Session endeavours to begin to try to unpick hopeful, meaningful signs and pathways (such as our solidarity and care for and with each other) from what many see as a sector, at best which has lost its way and at worst has impacted in a highly toxic way on peoples’ lives. Alienation, despair, mistrust, and bullshit are the cries, amidst a complicit drive to never be quite ‘excellent’ enough in our continual aspiration for high flying HE careers.
The following are my provocations to these scholars and to the Baltic audience (connected to the title):
1. At this crucial time, with many pivotal elections across the world, which HE policies and practices could collectively be crafted to further equitable, inclusive and sustainable HE futures that engage/resist these socio-political-economic changes?
2. What is the agentic role of academics, managers, students, administrators, policy makers, politicians and the public in crafting a HE system we feel proud of?
3. What do the student protests tell us about activism and university responses to freedom of speech on campus?
4. Dare I say (in Baltic Session fashion) how do we bring back love of critical scholarship amidst such current challenges?
5. Do we need to think about not only organising but disorganising?
6. In which ways do we need to look beyond the borders of our institutions, disciplines, career stages and nations to restore HE?
7. Do we need to move from the current funding models and how can we collectively move to a place which is not at the whim of wider political manoeuvring?
8. How do we navigate our way from the current simplistic and insecure preoccupation with metric management, audits and self-marketing, towards a more confident, liberating and fair future?
9. Has slow scholarship a central role in a hopeful future?
10. How do we move beyond tokenistic agendas that represent only platitudes of care?
11. What are the steps to get there?
12. Are we rejecting strategic planning and control for a more emergent, organic way of being?
13. To what extent do senior academics and managers alike have a responsibility to use the privilege of their roles much more fully to inspire and enact hope with more marginalised actors?
14. To what extent do our knowledge forums, meeting spaces and places, such as journals and conferences, exacerbate our precarious predicament?
I could go on.... Lots of questions - hopefully our panel and audience can both offer some tentative answers and through a friendly, critical dialogue come up with new questions and challenges to different HE actors.
Welcome to the Baltic Sessions- Rosemary, Mats, Monika, Richard, Greg, Martyna, Jurgen, Simon & Lefteris - our 9 panelists. We also welcome Robert Macintosh who is the Pro Vice Chancellor of the Faculty of Business and Law who will welcome everyone.
All are welcome to listen and engage in the discussions, either if you come over in person or to tune in online. Our social media accounts’ links are at the bottom of this email. You can follow our events from them.
As per usual I would urge early career academics, doctoral students, more senior academics and senior managers to attend the session (and for those retired but still more than active), not only for the specific subject covered, but the chance to hear from scholars who are endeavouring to make a difference to their own working lives, others and the HE sectors more broadly.
Kind Regards, David
Below are the key details and agenda for the event:
Roundtable Outline:
1:00 PM - 3:00 PM: First Half (around 2 hours)
3:00 PM - 3:30 PM: Coffee Break (30 minutes)
Please find the bios of the speakers below:
David Jones is Professor of Sustainability & Management learning at Northumbria University, in the UK. He is also a Visiting Professor in the International Centre for Higher Education Management at the University of Bath. He is an Associate Editor for the journal, Management Learning and is Founder & Director of the Baltic Sessions: An interdisciplinary & collegiate space for international academic critical engagement & provocation. He is currently writing a book by Edward Elgar called Rethink’ing the Business School to Restore Higher Education’.
Jürgen Enders is Professor of Higher Education Management at the School of Management, University of Bath. His academic interest is focused on the study of institutional change in the field of universities, and their role in society and economy. He also addresses processes of internationalisation and globalisation in higher education and undertakes cross-national comparative research. Jürgen is a Fellow of the Academia Europaea and of the German Academe of Science and Engineering, and Honorary Fellow of the Society for Research in Higher Education. He is member of the editorial board of the book series ‘Higher Education Dynamics’ and the journal ‚Higher Education’. He has written and (co)edited 14 books and published more than 150 articles in books and journals including Organization Studies, Public Management, Public Management Review, Studies in Higher Education, Higher Education and Scientometrics. Elsevier and University of Stanford released data has recently named him among the top 2% of most highly cited academics in the world in the social sciences.
Greg J Bamber is @ Monash Business School, and Research Theme Lead: Future of Work, Monash Data Futures Institute, Monash University, Australia. He is a Visiting Professor, Newcastle University. His research covers several sectors including aviation, hospitals and universities, and includes a focus on implications of new technologies. He has more than two hundred academic publications including: “Human resourcemanagement in the age of generative artificial intelligence:Perspectives and research directions on ChatGPT,” Human Resource Management Journal, and International& Comparative Employment Relations: Global Crises& Institutional Responses, 7th edn. SAGE. He collaborates with colleagues, private- and public-sector enterprises, governments, unions and the International Labour Organization. He has served on many editorial boards, as an arbitrator, and as a director on non-profit boards. He has also served as president of several academies including the International Federation of Scholarly Associations of Management. For more details, see his Monash profile or LinkedIn:gregjbamber.
Professor Rosemary Deem(she/her)
OBE; PhD; FSRHE; FAcSocSci; Member, Academia Europaea
Orcid: 0000-0003-3081-7225
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=L49Ge0gAAAAJ&hl=e
Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management;
Chair of Trustees, Sociological Review Foundation;
Honorary Life Member, UK Council for Graduate Education;
Co-Editor, Higher Education (Springer);
Co-Convenor, Network 22 (Higher Education) European Educational Research Association;
Dept of HRM and Organisational Studies, School of Business and Management,
Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX, UK
email: R.Deem@rhul.ac.uk, tel: 0044 7905335802
Richard Hall is Professor of Education and Technology at De Montfort University, and the research and evaluation lead for Decolonising DMU. A UK National Teaching Fellow, Richard writes about the political economy of higher education. He is the author of The Hopeless University: Intellectual Work at The End of The End of History (Mayfly Books, 2021), and The Alienated Academic: The Struggle for Autonomy Inside the University (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Richard is an independent visitor for a looked-after child, and a governor of both the Leicester Primary Pupil Referral Unit and Leicester Partnership School. He writes about life in higher education at richard-hall.org
Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Oxford and Joint Editor-in-Chief of Higher Education. He is also an Honorary Professor at Tsinghua University, Professorial Associate of the University of Melbourne, a Fellow of the British Academy, the Academy of Social Sciences in UK and of the Society for Research into Higher Education, and a member of Academia Europaea. He formerly worked at Monash and Melbourne universities in Australia and at UCL Institute of Education in London, and from 2015-2024 he was Director of the ESRC/RE Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE). Simon’s research is focused primarily on global, international and comparative higher education, global science, higher education in East Asia, higher education funding, the contributions of higher education to the public and common good, and higher education and social inequality. His scholarship is widely published and cited (Google h-index 85). Recent books include Assessing the contributions of higher education, edited with Brendan Cantwell, Daria Platonova and Anna Smolentseva (Edward Elgar, 2023).
Martyna Śliwa is Professor of Business Ethics and Organisation Studies, as well as Associate Dean for Ethics, Responsibility and Sustainability at Durham University Business School. Her research spans across a range of topics within the fields of organisation studies and international management. She is particularly interested in diversity, inclusivity and intersectionality in organisations, and especially in the ways in which gender and linguistic diversity influences people’s work experiences and careers, as well as organisational power relations and hierarchies. Martyna also serves as Vice-Chair of the British Academy of Management for Equality, Diversity, Inclusivity and Respect, and as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Management Learning.
Mats Alvesson is Professor of Organizational Studies at Lund University, Sweden. His current research projects focus on leadership, functional stupidity in organizations and experiences of bureaucracy and managerial work in universities. His research interests include critical theory, gender, power, management of professional service (knowledge intensive) organizations, leadership, identity, organizational image, organizational culture and symbolism, qualitative methods and philosophy of science. His most recent books include Re-imagining the Research Process: Conventional and Alternative Metaphors. (Sage, 2021, with J. Sandberg), Return to Meaning (Oxford University Press 2017), Reflexive Leadership (Sage, 2017, with Martin Blom and Stefan Sveningsson),The Stupidity Paradox (Profile 2016, with André Spicer), Managerial Lives (Cambridge univ Press 2016, with Stefan Sveningsson),The Triumph of Emptiness (Oxford University Press 2013), Qualitative Research and Theory Development (Sage 2011, with Dan Kärreman), Constructing Research Questions. (Sage 2013, with J Sandberg) Interpreting Interviews (Sage 2011), Metaphors We Lead By: Understanding leadership in the real world. (Routledge 2011, ed with André Spicer), Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies (Oxford University Press, edited with Todd Bridgman and Hugh Willmott). Understanding gender and organizations (Sage, 2009, 2nd ed with Yvonne Billing), Reflexive methodology (Sage, 2009, 2nd ed, with Kaj Skoldberg), Changing organizational culture (Routledge 2015 2nd ed, with Stefan Sveningsson), and Knowledge work and knowledge-intensive firms (Oxford University Press,2004).
Lefteris Kretsosis a Lecturer in Business and Management. Prior to joining Brunel University London he was a Senior Lecturer in HRM at University of Greenwich, Greenwich Business School, a Research Fellow at Coventry University, Coventry Business School and a Lecturer in Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen Business School. His achievements were acknowledged by City University of London through the distinguished honor of an Honorary Senior Lectureship. His research activity focused on the study of precarious work especially among young and cultural workers. He is currently working in the intersection of political economy and employment relations focusing on how AI, Public Policy and Management interventions result in certain outcomes, processes and strategies. Lefteris has been published in leading academic presses and in world-class journals such as Work, Employment and Society, Work and Occupations, Industrial Relations Journal, Industrial Law Journal. His research has also been funded by various organisations and streams including the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the European Research Council (ERC awards). In addition, Lefteris has been on a range of editorial boards and committees, he has proposed legislation and holds proven record in policy making and analysis in government and intergovernmental organisations (for example European Commission, ILO, OECD, Unesco). From March 2015 to July 2019 Lefteris served as a Cabinet Minister of Alexis Tsipra's government and as General Secretary responsible for Digital and Media Policy in Greece. During his tenure he initiated the restructuring of public policy organisations and championed policies for making Greece a global film friendly location.
Monika Kostera, Titular Professor in economics and the humanities. She works as Professor in Sociology and Management at Warsaw University, as well as Professor in Management at Warsaw University and Södertörn University, Sweden, and is affiliated with LITEM, l'Université Évry Val-d'Essonne, France. She has also been employed as professor and chair in the UK, including at Durham University. She writes and publishes texts on organization theory as well as poetry. She is Associate Editor at the Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion and at Culture and Organization, and C-Editor-in-Chief at Tamara Journal for Critical Organization Inquiry. Her current research interests include organizational imagination, disalienated work and organizational ethnography. She is member of Erbacce Poets’ Cooperative. www.kostera.pl
Chair: Prof. David R. Jones
Speakers:
Dr. Fiona Hurd (Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand)
Prof. Amy Kenworthy (Bond University, Australia)
Dr. Suzette Dyer (University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand)
Prof. Shankar Sankaran (University of Technology Sydney, Australia)
Prof. Peggy Hedges (University of Calgary, Canada)
Prof. Tony Wall (Liverpool John Moores University, UK)
Venue: First Floor, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (combined with Virtual session for
those further afield)
Hi folks,
Another Baltic Session is to take place on the 21st of June. All are welcome to listen and engage in the discussions, either if you come over in person or to tune in online.
I have the pleasure to welcome a whole host of academics from four different countries, representing six different HE institutions, multiple disciplines, and career stages to this upcoming Baltic Session. Drawing from this diversity, they will talk about their four year-long collaboration in which they research beyond boundaries in a group they call the ‘waffle group’. Within a neo-liberal context, they advocate a form of waffling engagement that is a counter space to the instrumentalism of academics’ settings across multiple countries. This holds many lessons around making our individual and collective stories and journeys precious within the entanglement of academic work, friendship along with their writing and publishing together. They will share their ideas of how this group came into being and how through the pandemic and post- pandemic they are building a collective care and agency. They will show how waffling has helped them to navigate academic working life and the way in which they are gaining meaning, nurturing wellbeing, and asserting their power collectively within and beyond their institutions, career stage and disciplines. A real lesson of how collective auto-ethnography can be so impactful - I know this as I am part of this group! I would recommend this Baltic Session to any academic who feels constrained by their institution, discipline, or career stage. Using the pre-public space and public space framing of Hannah Arendt this session will explore how academics can come together to craft a future which takes our relative freedom back in our own collective hands. The waffle group is illustrative of several other groups of academics who are also coming together in a similar way – endeavouring to craft a caring, inclusive, and equitable HE future.
As per usual I would urge early career academics, doctoral students, more senior academics and senior managers to attend the session (and for those retired but still more than active), not only for the specific subject covered, but the chance to hear from scholars who are endeavouring to make a difference to their own working lives, others and the HE sector more broadly.
For those people who work in the local universities or can get to Newcastle you are very welcome to come to the Baltic Centre to attend in person (15 places max). Otherwise, please do accept the virtual Teams meeting invitation as everyone is very welcome. Please contact us with any questions.
Kind Regards,
David
Abstract: In Praise of Waffling: creating collaborative research spaces across countries, disciplines and career levels
In this session, a group of seven academics from across the world share insights from their four-year research journey, which traverses disciplinary, geographic, institutional and career stage boundaries. Initiating this collaboration from a happenstance meeting at a conference required us to trust each other, to invest time into a group of people who were unknown, yet shared the same desire for a different form of academic work. At one level, the story we share here is about conducting a meaningful collaborative autoethnographic research project across complex and layered borders. However, we also importantly, in making our process explicit, highlight the way storying was experienced within our collective space. In doing so, and drawing inspiration from Hannah Arendt’s work, we explore how the stories that we ‘release’ into the public, through publication and presentation, are adapted and transformed through a process of navigating the development of, and transitions between, pre-public and public spaces. As such, we find that our collaborative storytelling ‘pre-public’ space was both generative, nurturing, and importantly fertile ground for resurfacing storytelling as a political act.
Our experiences hold insights for the ways we might look past our geographic, hierarchical, career stage or disciplinary borders in creating meaningful research collaborations that both challenge existing institutional and instrumental pressures, and nurture academic wellbeing.
Bios:
Peggy Hedges is a Teaching Professor and Teaching Fellow at the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary in Canada, teaching in the areas of Finance and Strategy. She has published papers in entrepreneurship, classroom and pedagogy techniques, small business financing, alternative funding for defined benefit pension plans, behavioral aspects of payday loan use, and risk analysis of catastrophic bonds.
Fiona Hurd is an Associate Professor at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. Her research focuses on the inequitable impacts of global changes to work and organisation, with particular focus on interdisciplinary and multi-level research, and transforming management education to equip students for this dynamic context. She teaches in the areas of strategy, social impact and international business.
Amy Kenworthy is a Professor of Management at Bond University and Chair of the Research in Management Learning and Education (RMLE) Unconference Executive Team (www.rmle.org). She is a nationally and internationally recognised service-learning practitioner and scholar and has won numerous national and international reviewing and teaching awards. Her current research interests include Ukrainian academics’ adaptation and resilience through war and the impact of micro expressions of care within organisations.
Suzette Dyer is a Senior Lecturer at the Waikato Management School, University of Waikato in New Zealand. She teaches, researchers, and publishes in the areas of career development and management, women’s organisational experiences, and management pedagogy. She has particular interest in researching management pedagogy, women’s pathways to leadership, sexual harassment, and diversity, equality, and inclusion.
Shankar Sankaran is a Professor of Organizational Project Management at the School of the Built Environment, University of Technology Sydney in Australia. His research interests are in project management and leadership, systems thinking and action research. He is a manager from industry who became an academic and interested in why management practices work differently in the two cultures.
Tony Wall is Full Professor and Faculty Associate Dean at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK and holds visiting positions in Sweden and Vietnam. He currently leads the British Council's Digi:Doi Consortium which is creating an ASEAN-UK cooperation for digital transformation in universities. His research into management development is ranked #1 on Google Scholar.
Speaker: Prof Karen Dale (Lancaster University)
Chair: Prof. David R. Jones
Venue: First Floor, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (combined with Virtual session for those further afield)
Hi folks,
Another Baltic Session is to take place on the 8th of May. All are welcome to listen and engage in the discussions, either if you come over in person or to tune in online.
I have the pleasure to welcome Professor Karen Dale to the Baltic Sessions. Karen is Professor at Lancaster University, having held past academic positions at Leicester and Warwick University. Karen’s thought provoking, novel scholarship in the research area of embodiment offers us an example of someone who is continually offering provocations to contest the preconceived notions of what organisational and individual success means in our institutions. This is all in the context of a political/cultural/identity challenge arising from the economic and ideological neoliberal order. Karen draws upon diverse philosophical and sociological scholarship (to align with her pre-academic diverse experience working within healthcare and local government) to make us think more rigorously about the meaning and experience of contemporary work.
My take on Karen’s Baltic Session is that it reminds us to think beyond our atomised, human biological body towards how we can craft our collective body of labour (and how the former has been expropriated and reengineered with successive regimes of control to diminish the latter) - this relational turn being an emergent theme of the Baltic Sessions. It is no surprise that she frames her analytical gaze through the relatively recently translated (often overlooked) scholarship of Guery and Deleule, in The Productive Body (1972/transl. 2014). Her key contribution here is around what this 1970s framing (bridging Foucault and Marx amongst others) means for contemporary work. Exciting stuff as this lens opens us up to what is happening and hiding in plain sight, around the biopolitical power of the performative university and our academic relationship within and beyond it. What I love about Karen’s work is that by painting a clearer picture of our predicament today, it opens up possibilities to resist and collectively assert our agency tomorrow, within a context that we find severely lacking. My Baltic Session question is around how we can assert our love of research and critical scholarship to reconnect with the all the power of both emerging social bodies and our (un)productive biological bodies? I would argue that Karen’s talk opens up a whole host of HE futures that are far cry from current prescriptions, which tend to disconnect us from ourselves and others.
As per usual I would urge early career academics, doctoral students, more senior academics and senior managers to attend the session(and for those retired but still more than active), not only for the specific subject covered, but the chance to hear from innovative and thought-provoking world leading scholars.
For those people who work in the local universities or can get to Newcastle you are very welcome to come to the Baltic Centre to attend in person (20 places max). Otherwise, please do accept the virtual Teams meeting invitation as everyone is very welcome. Please contact us with any questions.
Kind Regards, David
Bio: Karen Dale
She is a Professor of Organisation Studies at Lancaster University. She has researched and written on embodiment, including Anatomising Embodiment and Organisation Theory; about architecture, space and organisation, including The Spaces of Organisation and the Organisation of Space: Power, Identity and Materiality at Work with Gibson Burrell, and Organizational Space and Beyond: The Significance of Henri Lefebvre for Organization Studies, jointly co-edited with Sytze Kingma and Varda Wasserman; and on contemporary work, in Experiencing the New World of Work, edited with Jeremy Aroles and François-xavier de Vaujany.
Abstract: Productive Bodies and Love of Research
Although organisation studies have paid attention to the effects and experiences of work on the human body, this has primarily and understandably focused on the body of the individual worker. In this seminar I consider the need to also consider the collective body of labour, and how we might do this by drawing upon the work of Guery and Deleule, in The Productive Body (1972/transl. 2014). This short book is of particular interest because it is one of the few references made by Michel Foucault (in Discipline and Punish, 1977) to other work from which he found inspiration. Guery and Deleule’s work centres on a productive ambiguity between the body of an individual worker and the collective body of labour (corps/corpus). They argue that capitalism’s construction of a ‘productive body’ squeezes out awareness of the social and collective nature of work (the ‘social body’) in favour of a sense of the individualised, ‘biological body’.
Guery and Deleule, writing in the early 1970s, and aiming to extend the work of Marx in Capital Volume 1, on the nature of the human body in capitalist production, do not directly address the characteristics of contemporary labour. However, I argue that their analysis speaks to conditions of work which, for example, rely on greater immaterial skills, the subjectivization of the worker, and more intensive cultures of performance management. They provide us with tools to unpack Virno’s argument that “in post-Fordism the general intellect is not fixed in machines, but in the bodies of workers”. I further suggest it might be used to reflect on our own relation to our work as academics, particularly in the context of our ‘love for research’. In their introduction to the English translation, Barnard and Shapiro characterise Guery and Deleule’s use of the productive body as a “tactical intervention”, which holds out the possibility of recognising the collective and embodied conditions of contemporary labour and thus a different way of responding to and resisting them.
Speaker: Prof Rick Delbridge (Cardiff University)
Chair: Prof. David R. Jones (Northumbria University)
Venue: First Floor, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (combined with Virtual Session for those further afield)
Hi folks,
The Baltic Sessions are continuing.
All are welcome to listen and engage in the discussions, either if you come over in person or to tune in online.
For the second Baltic Session this semester, I am delighted to announce that we are hosting Rick Delbridge, Professor of Organisational Analysis and Co-convenor of the Centre for Innovation Policy at Cardiff University (his short bio and his abstract is attached), who has kindly agreed to speak. Just to say a bit about Rick….In order to highlight his standing in the field of organisation, management and wider social science communities, he recently received the Richard Whipp Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Academy of Management (BAM). This follows on from being made a Fellow ofBAM in 2013 (along with being Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences (2009), Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales (2014)) and receiving the BAM Medal for Leadership in 2020 and his many ESRC roles over his career. There are many more plaudits for Rick I could mention, but I hope this paints a picture! This recognition is for both his world leading scholarly contribution to organisation and management theory and his key role within capacity building and policy orientated approach in the HE sector. I see this session as exploring what is immediately apparent, his career long aspiration to appropriately utilise these two core strengths.
More specifically, Rick will tell the story of his role in setting up the world’s first social science park at Cardiff University. More specifically as Dean of Research, Innovation and Enterprise at Cardiff University from 2012-2019 he led the development of the Social Science Research Park (SPARK) opened in March 2022. I see this story as particularly significant for the Baltic Sessions, as it tackles the fundamental question of the sessions, arounds new forms of HE organising that deal head on with emerging ecological and social challenges, whilst not avoiding but leveraging to some extent, the financial, leadership and structural challenges of the current HE sector and beyond. What place do/could the social sciences have within this political and cultural context? He has written extensively about this, but my take on Rick’s pivotal role in driving this initiative is one of perseverance in his love of making a difference (some people would frame it as impact) to societal, policy challenges, locally and globally. He wasn’t content to be a world leading researcher in his specific area of innovation policy and employment relations. Moreover, his talk reflects for me, an academic activism and tenacity which politically embraces and engages all relevant internal and external actors to set up a co-located space, with enough collective pulling power. This is no mean feat as bureaucratic HE barriers can easily stifle innovative practice. Building a £60 million physical space is one thing, but building a social space with hundreds of diverse academics of different disciplines, along with public, private and third sector actors is another. It thereby represents a hopeful provocation (within a road that must have seemed hopeless at times), for early career to senior academics and managers to embrace and love scholarship in all its forms…. It ultimately reminds us that building trust, transdisciplinarity and a new form of outward looking collegial environment is a task worth doing, if you’re willing to embrace a considerable amount of pain along the way. Welcome Rick to your Baltic Session…. your session is one in which provokes for me common HE concerns around institutional and individual learning, change, identity, engagement, trust, equality, leadership and care.
As per usual I would urge early career academics, doctoral students and more senior academics and senior managers to attend the session, not only for the specific subject covered, but the chance to hear from innovative and thought-provoking world leading scholars. For those people who work in the local universities or can get to Newcastle you are very welcome to come to the Baltic Centre to attend in person (20 places max).
Kind Regards, David
Abstract: Beyond the Theory Cave: Public Value, Innovation and the Creation of the World’s First Social Science Park
In this talk, Rick Delbridge will reflect on his experiences over the last 10 years as he has gradually embraced a more engaged and policy-oriented approach to research and scholarship. He will briefly touch on innovation as the process of creating value, the central importance of creating public value, particularly in universities, and then describe the development of sbarc|spark, the world’s first social science park. He will reflect on lessons learned through that process – including the navigation of university politics – and report on aspects of spark’s first two years in existence to the point where it is now home to several hundred people, both researchers working in social science-led interdisciplinary research groups and practitioners in external organizations from the private, public and third sectors.
Bio: Rick Delbridge
He is Professor of Organisational Analysis and co-convenor of the Centre for Innovation Policy Research, Cardiff University. While the university’s Dean of Research, Innovation and Enterprise, he led the development of sbarc|spark, the social science research park, which opened in 2022. He is now the university lead for the Cardiff Capital Region Challenge Fund, a partnership between Cardiff University and the south-east Wales city deal designed to address societal challenges and public sector problems through innovation in public procurement and the procurement of innovative solutions.
Speakers: Prof David Knights (Lancaster University) and Dr Guy Huber (Oxford Brookes University)
Chair: Prof. David R. Jones
Venue: First Floor, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (combined with Virtual Session for those further afield)
Hi folks,
Welcome back to the Baltic Sessions! I’m happy to say that the sessions are starting up again this semester. There is another amazing line up of world leading speakers and topics for your delight. They are predominantly taking place in the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, in Gateshead, U.K. As usual, I am broadcasting the session online from the in-person session taking place in the art gallery. All are welcome to listen and engage in the discussions, either if you come over to Newcastle/Gateshead to be there or if you would like to tune in online.
In order to kick the sessions off, I am delighted to announce that we have two external speakers. It is in fact the 5th year of this ‘love of scholarship’ series of events. Really excited that Prof. David Knights and Dr Guy Huber (their short bios are below) have agreed to speak. I’m sure Guy (an established critical scholar in his own right) will not mind if I just say a few words about David. It is David’s second Baltic Session – he was one of the first speakers when the Baltic Sessions were in their infancy. As I have mentioned before, David’s standing is internationally recognised in the field of critical scholarship and organization studies. He was described in a laudatio by Yiannis Gabriel in the following way – ‘David’s contribution to critical scholarship in organization studies, along with that of Mats Alvesson, Hugh Willmott (both Baltic Session alumni) and a few others was decisive and, without it, the course of our discipline would have been dramatically different’. Whilst David’s research has covered eclectic areas his common thread appears to be around unmasking oppression. Reflecting on what he has achieved institutionally, he founded the Labour Process Conference which was the prequel to the emergence of Critical Management Studies, and in 1994, he co-founded Gender, Work and Organization. Continuing with this unmasking oppression theme, this talk with David and Guy will focus on unmasking the unintended consequences of an uninformed embrace of AI. This draws on Guy’s pivotal research around identity. Guy’s work has attracted much international interest to the point where his specialist views are being sought from numerous sources. For anyone who knows Guy, his interest in humour, laughter and care is of no surprise as he himself exudes a much needed humanity within the scholarship community.
Here’s my take on their recent scholarship…inspired by an ongoing British Academy project, they turn their gaze to one of the fundamental challenges of our time, AI. They remind and warn us about the ways in which AI could perpetuate structural inequality (such as around race and gender for example), by drawing on what represents their distinctive contribution here, around the combined conceptual framing of both Mead (1934) and Foucault (1984). Their current project draws on their current conversations with AI developers around their thinking and values in relation to AI, to draw out the unexamined, unintended consequences of such framing. My reflections, based on a recent article in ‘The Conversation’ around their conceptual and empirical work here suggests a provocation to be more reflexive, creative and critically prudent in our blind embrace of AI. They remind us (myself) that any AI future requires an ethical, relational and corporeal foregrounding, remembering to keep our eyes wide open to institutional inequality. It is no surprise that their other work together tackles connected research areas such as around care, identity, humour and critical management education…. All areas which open us up to both the oppressive and liberating possibilities of ourselves, our organisations and the technologies we shape and which shape us. It seems to me that their Baltic Session offers a way to start to think about what and who we care for and care with, to temper the mad dash for what seems like an inevitable algorithmic future, with polarised utopian and dystopian reactions. David and Guy, with your love of scholarship and your drive to make a difference systemically, a warm welcome (back) to the Baltic Sessions!!
As per usual I would urge early career academics, doctoral students and more senior academics and senior managers to attend the session, not only for the specific subject covered, but the chance to hear from innovative and thought-provoking world leading scholars. For those people who work in the local universities or can get to Newcastle you are very welcome to come to the Baltic Centre to attend in person (20 places max).
Looking forward to seeing you either in personor virtually,
Kind Regards, David
Abstract: Problematizing the potentially dominant effects of artificial intelligence (AI) on subjectivities
We seek to develop Mead’s (1934) embryonic theory of identity, which has been unduly neglected in the literature, through a critical examination of a very postmodern phenomenon, machine learning (AI). In doing so, we aim to stimulate research on the potential impacts of AI on our subjectivities and identities in and around work. We argue that through its tendency to reinforce prevailing identities, AI reproduces the status quo, whereby social arrangements of power and inequality are further institutionalized. While there are many positive outcomes relating to AI, this negative impact on social relations is often ignored if not denied. Mead interrogates how the self is made possible only through interaction with the gestures of others, including discourses, yet tends to leave power under-theorized (Garner, 2006). We therefore supplement Mead’s analysis of the self by drawing on Foucault’s (1997) reflexive examination of the truth effects of power on identity to develop a critique of the hyperbole surrounding AI.
Biographies:
Guy Huber is a Senior Lecturer at the Oxford Brookes University Business School. He received his doctorate from the University of Bath having completed a discursive ethnographic study on humour and laughter. His primary research interests centre on power, subjectivity and identity. He has published in international scholarly journals and his work has appeared in Academy of Management Learning & Education, Human Relations, International Journal of Management Reviews, Management Learning, Organization and Organization Studies. [Email: ghuber@brookes.ac.uk]
David Knights is Professor Emeritus, at Lancaster University where he was until November 2020 a Distinguished Professor. He was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Gender, Work and Organization from 1994 to 2016. His most recent book is Leadership, Gender and Ethics: Embodied Reason in Challenging Masculinities (New York and London: Routledge, 2021). [Email: d.knights@lancaster.ac.uk
Hi folks,
As promised, just inviting you to what is the first of the summer Baltic Sessions. This Baltic Session represents the fifth of these hybrid Baltic Sessions this semester (the sessions have been running for over 3 years now). We have three more great speakers for you this time : Professors Chris Land and Dave Watson and James Wallace from Anglia Ruskin University, the University of East Anglia and Cardiff University respectively. They will be physically coming over to the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art here in Newcastle upon Tyne/Gateshead to speak. I hope you are now getting a feel for the sessions as a regular meeting place and the approach to build a collegiality and interdisciplinarity across the sector, from a particular love of scholarship ethos. Please refer to the bottom of this email for dates/times for further speakers and more general information about the Baltic Sessions: their history, ethos, past speakers, topics covered and international coverage. Back to this upcoming Baltic Session, Chris, David and James have kindly agreed to speak this time from 13.00-14.30 (U.K. time), on next Wednesday, 7th June. They are going to do a panel talk about another topical and pressing subject: Reorganising Well-being: Prospects, Pitfalls and Paradoxes. This talk will draw from their curation as editors of a recent special issue in the journal Organization, which makes them question the institutionalised ways of encouraging people to be well (I have asked the 3 speakers to invite all authors with papers appearing in this SI, including my fellow co-authors). Please refer to their abstract for more details of their talk. My own take on this is that they interrogate the current plethora of wellbeing initiatives as just another tool to make workers more productive and they ask whether the plea to think about ones’ wellbeing within the current structural inequities are wishful thinking at best and counter- productive. They do not leave it there though – they move on to think about the future of what they consider as a more meaningful way of helping people to be well - even with those who have an metric eye towards the latest KPIs etc., this talk offers some pathways for a more generative and inclusive turn. They take inspiration from the art world and philosophy to open up a conversation about wellbeing beyond the individual towards a collective human and non-human entanglement. They mention some intriguing points of refusal and revaluation in the process of reflecting on substantive values. I will leave it to them to tease these out in their talk. This of course opens up so many avenues of discussion for not only academics (early career to senior), but for middle and senior managers, who are dealing with current post-pandemic issues of the changing meaning of work, within a context of pay, inequality sectoral disputes. This resonates with the Baltic Sessions emerging conversations around thinking much more about care, space, place, identity, power, time and embodiment in the emerging workplace. This also has a resonance around other themes of the Baltic Sessions around exploring the future of HE, the public and private sector, alternative organising, management learning, alternative careers as well as people interested in tackling the societal challenges around this (climate change, equality, inclusion, diversity, AI etc.)
I hope this whets your appetite from whatever perspective, discipline and position you are currently working within - Welcome to the Baltic Sessions James, David and Chris- your subject also aligns nicely to the love of scholarship ethos of the Baltic Session – one in which moves beyond a labour of love, towards a different form of love of scholarship that critically contests current notions of wellbeing to embrace other relational, agape forms of love.
Just to remind you, for those people who work in Northumbria, Durham, Newcastle and York Universities (the Baltic Sessions are funded by the faculty of Business & Law here at Northumbria University) and, any academics/managers of the other local universities who can get to Newcastle you are very welcome to physically come to the Baltic Centre (Level 1 Meeting Room at the Baltic Centre - around 12-15 places). Just drop me an email to sign up (& make it clear you wish to physically attend). Again, first come first served. We sometimes get people travelling from further afield from Scotland and southern England – you are also very welcome. Otherwise, if you are interested, do accept the virtual meeting invitation, as everyone is welcome.…. the link for the Microsoft teams meeting is below. Looking forward to yet another pertinent and memorable discussion!!
Please do check out the speakers’ bios and their abstract (for their talk) below, to find out a bit more about them. As always, I would also appreciate it if you could pass this invitation on to any newer academics (ECAs & doctoral students are very welcome), who have inadvertently not been included in this invitation. If you could also forward to any academics who have left academia through voluntary or forced retirement/redundancy who would like to engage in the critical HE conversations which the Baltic Sessions address. The sessions endeavour to not shy away from the major issues in our sector internationally, giving voice to multiple actors.
Along with many speakers lined up in the Autumn semester (along with a special theme panel on the future of HE), future speakers for this current semester are as follows (please do put these in your diaries): Professor Todd Bridgman & Professor Stephen Cummings (Victoria University, New Zealand) – Solely virtual session (Topic TBA) 14th June – 9.00am -10.30am (UK time) I may squeeze in some others but that is what I have lined up so far.
Best, David
Speakers: Chris Land, Anglia Ruskin University; David Watson, Norwich Business School, UEA; James Wallace, Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University
Abstract: Reorganising Well-being: Prospects, Pitfalls and Paradoxes
In this talk we will reflect on the limitations of ‘wellbeing’ as an organizational objective. Whilst it might seem absurd to be against wellbeing and health, we would like to invite a moment’s reflection on this very question. What does it mean to be against, or better ‘after’ wellbeing. In editing a recent issue of the journal Organization, we went after ‘wellbeing’ , in the sense of pursuing the topic to better understand what it is, why practices of ‘wellbeing’ seem, too often, to deliver the opposite – burnout and stress – and to examine if there might be another way to think about wellbeing that could avoid this perverse outcome. In this sense we wanted to think about being well, after the event of ‘wellbeing’: an explosion in novel management practices and theories promising to deliver the managerial dream of happy and productive workers. Our understanding, put simply, is that wellbeing at work is impossible in many of the kinds of organizations we currently have. Our organizations are structured to extract effort from employees, intensify work, and blame workers if they are unable to deliver the increasing expectations for innovation, change, and more productivity. In the session we will outline some of the reasons why institutionalized approaches to worker-wellbeing fail and consider some of the ways in which the imperative to wellbeing is precisely what stands in the way of actual wellbeing. We want to consider what kind of organisations might make wellbeing possible and what it means to pursue or go after wellbeing in a more meaningful way. Drawing inspiration from sources in the art-world and philosophy, we will consider some possible trajectories towards an alternative kind of wellbeing, anchored in refusal and revaluation, to consider the substantive values guiding our actions, and the need to take life – even that of a fly – seriously.
Bios:
Chris Land is a Professor of Work and Organization at Anglia Ruskin University and director of the Centre for Research into the Organization of Work and Consumption. His research has been published in several journals and edited books and is concerned primarily with work, how work is changing, and how it intersects with technology, consumption and culture. His current focus is on ‘the future of work’ as imagined in science-fiction, high-tech engineering and ‘Industry 5.0’ in academic and policy discourses. He is interested in how changes in work and technology impact on well-being and is wrapping up a project combining biometric data and qualitative interviews with emergency services workers, to better understand the contextual and interaction factors impacting on worker wellbeing in a context of datafication.
Dave Watson is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Norwich Business School, UEA. His work has been published in a number of journal articles, books and book chapters and focuses on the concept of well-being and its relationship with work. He is an interdisciplinary researcher with a particular interest in 'alternative' forms of organization and their role in supporting wellbeing. Other research interests include, but are not limited to: political economy of the food system, learning in relation to wellbeing, Marx’s concept of alienation, well-being theory – in particular the capabilities approach and the role of well-being in guiding policy.
James Wallace is lecturer within the Management, Employment and Organisation subject group at Cardiff Business School. Broadly speaking, his research interests relate to critical management and organisation studies, particularly regarding issues such as power and identity in the workplace. More specifically, he is interested in the issue of wellbeing in the workplace. He has recently been interested in thinking about how critical approaches to wellbeing may lead to arguments for alternative forms of organisation. James completed his PhD at Cardiff University in 2019. His thesis looked at workplace wellbeing programmes in terms of the power relations between employer and employee, considering what it means to be sick or healthy within the workplace. Since completing his thesis, he has been working on publications relating to this research.
Hi folks,
As promised, just inviting you to yet another Baltic Session. We have two more great speakers for you: Professor Mike Zundel and Dr Sam Horner from University of Liverpool. They will be physically coming over to the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art here in Newcastle upon Tyne to speak. This Baltic Session represents the fourth of these hybrid Baltic Sessions this semester (the sessions have been running for 3 years now). I hope you are now getting a feel for the sessions and the approach to build a collegiality and interdisciplinarity across the sector, from a love of scholarship ethos. Please refer to the bottom of this email for dates/times for further speakers and more general information about the Baltic Sessions: their history, ethos, past speakers, topics covered and international coverage.
Back to this upcoming Baltic Session, Mike and Sam have kindly agreed to speak this time from 13.00-14.30 (U.K. time), on next Tuesday (not Wednesday this time), 9th May. They are going to talk about such a topical and pressing subject: Deutero-learning and the future of management education. Of course, the subject is relevant for the broader HE Sector. Early career academics, senior academics and managers will be impacted by such a turn. They reflect on the way in which algorithmic systems, such as Chat GPT pose a threat to the standardised business model of management education that finances many universities in the UK and beyond. They ask the question of what exactly is our added value, where AI is busy doing its job of helping universities craft standardised, predictable and efficient organised futures? They turn to a possible way we can reinvent our purpose through entrepreneurship, geared to the production of novelty, the disorganised and attentive to the marginal and ephemeral. They draw on Bateson (1972/2000) to inform their alternative view of entrepreneurship education, to draw on the notion of deuteron-learning which draws out the epistemological, dynamic pathways of learning about the learning systemic context.
I hope this whets your appetite - Welcome to the Baltic Sessions Mike and Sam- your subject aligns nicely to the love of scholarship ethos of the Baltic Session as it attempts to offer a unique contribution to the future of HE, by looking through a particular entrepreneurship education lens, to cultivate the entrepreneurial imagination (Chia, 1996) for management education and may I add HE futures. We are of course in the space here of the power and beauty of ideas and the sensibility of relational patterns (relating to past Baltic Sessions).
Just to remind you, for those people who work in Northumbria, Durham, Newcastle and York Universities (the Baltic Sessions are funded by the faculty of Business & Law here at Northumbria University) and, any academics/managers of the other local universities who can get to Newcastle you are very welcome to physically come to the Baltic Centre (Level 3 Meeting Room at the Baltic Centre - around 15 places). Just drop me an email to sign up (& make it clear you wish to physically attend). Again, first come first served. Otherwise, if you are interested, do accept the virtual meeting invitation as everyone is welcome.…. the link for the Microsoft teams meeting is below. Looking forward to yet another pertinent and memorable discussion!!
Please do check out Mike and Sam’s bios and their extended abstract (for their talk) below, to find out a bit more about them.
As always, I would also appreciate it if you could pass this invitation on to any newer academics (ECAs & doctoral students are very welcome), who have inadvertently not been included in this invitation. If you could also forward to any academics who have left academia through voluntary or forced retirement/redundancy who would like to engage in the critical HE conversations which the Baltic Sessions address. The sessions endeavour to not shy away from the major issues in our sector internationally, giving voice to multiple actors.
Along with many speakers lined up in the Autumn semester (along with a special theme panel on the future of HE), future speakers for this current semester are as follows (please do put these in your diaries):
Professor Christopher Land (Anglia Ruskin University, UK), Professor David Watson (University of East Anglia, UK) & Professor James Wallace (Cardiff Business School, UK) - Themed hybrid session on Well-Being: 7th June: 13.00-14.30 (UK time)
Professor Todd Bridgman & Professor Stephen Cummings (Victoria University, New Zealand) - virtual session (Topic TBA) 14th June – 9.00am -10.30am (UK time)
I may squeeze in some others but that is what I have lined up so far.
Best, David
Abstract:
Deutero-learning and the future of management education We are interested in the ways in which management education may respond to the changes brought by algorithmic systems and, in particular, new (natural) language processing engines, such as Chat GPT . The latter poses a threat to the high volume, standardized business model of management education that finances to many universities in the UK and beyond. This model relies on large numbers of students being ‘taught’ abstract ideas and examined using the kinds of questions for which AI now provides plausibly sounding answers. Perhaps, in some cases, this just removes the middle-(wo)man by replacing manual cut and paste jobs with automated processes, and perhaps it is quite a timely struggle for an industry resembling a bit too much a proverbial herd of cash cows. But beyond such cynicism, the question is: What should management education be like that it is still relevant when those studying and practicing management no longer need to remember or process information themselves and when any attempt to do so seemingly pales into insignificance next to the speed and breadth of text that can be generated by artificially intelligent systems. But perhaps there is even more here: if managing and organizing is largely conceived an administrative task, concerned with problem solving (Chia, 1996). This involves, often implicitly, the task of reducing contingency (see Huy , 2019), for example by generating routines, devising processes, and designing organizational structures and boundaries that absorb as much variation as possible by including these in the habitual ‘functioning’ of an organizational form. Management is, put differently, a function that draws on feedback to continually re-adjust its form to make its dealings with the environment standardized, predictable and, therefore, efficient. But what is left of this task when feedback patterns can be adjusted at immense speeds and drawing on near ‘big data’ sources whose infinite data points and clandestine operations exceed human understanding; and what if the ‘environment’ to which any adaptation of systemic patterns is geared is also increasingly shaped by the same calculations, be that recommender systems or automatically/ autonomously acting agents (Holt & Zundel, 2023)?
Here we want to turn to entrepreneurhip because its vexing characteristics for education, namely , that it is geared towards the production of novelty , rather than the absorbtion of novelty into operational patterns; that it is sensitive to particular conditions, often requiring entrepreneurial actors to be fleet of foot, attentive to marginal or ephemeral aspects; that, in short, gains in being organized, routinized and efficient invokes a reciprocal loss of what it is to be entrepreneurial (see Chia, 1996: 415). Perhaps in these altered contexts, where the incorporation of contingency is no longer something that requires humans, entrepreneurship’s perceived vexation becomes an intriguing ‘opportunity ’ .
We want to think about entrepreneurship as a condition that involves learning on more than one levels and we draw on Bateson’s (1972/2000: 173) notion of deutero learning which he describes as ‘acquiring "insight" into the contexts of problem solving’ . Deutero learning provided the basis for Argyris and Schön’s double loop learning theory but, as Visser (2007) notes, this version did not consider the role of ‘context’ explicitly . Going back to Bateson’s original formulation, we find a concern for layers of context: any specific (inter-)action a may become part of explanations or narratives on a more abstract level. The transgression of a rule may , for example, turn into a story of resistance, freedom and democracy or, likewise, violation, crime, or abuse. There is no causal or corresponding link between the specific and the abstract: the same specific action can congeal into different abstract Gestalten which, in turn, imbue the act with different meanings. This has implicaitons for learing: simple learing involves if-then relations on the concrete level. Deutero learning, on the other hand, requires sensitivity to changing contexts in which the same actions (or responses) gain different meanings in relation to more abstract gestalten, which in turn affect the efficacy of that action. Learning therefore has (at least) this double function: acquisition of simple responsive patterns as a form of rote-learning (which Bateson calls ‘proto-learning’), but also the gradual developmet of a sensitivity towards more abstract gestalten: deutero learning. Bateson observes how, over time, learners not just get better because they amass more knowledge about subjects (proto-learning), but also that they get better at sitting exams as a progressive change in the rate of proto-learning. In learning something about the learning context, learners learn how to learn.
This brings us back to entrepreneurship education which we can now locate along this dual proto and deutero learning distinction which allows us to separate the idea of doing ‘new ’ things on a simple level from pursuing new epistemological pathways on a more abstract one. Setting up a shop in response to a market opportunity , developing an app that riffs off an identified element of curiosity or laziness in a customer segment, or inventing a device and marketing campaign that convinces shoppers of an itch that needs scratching, are forms of learning on a simple level. It is this form of learning that we often find in entrepreneurship education, involving the many case studies of entrepreneurial ventures that populate most curricula, and it is this provision of simple ‘if-then’ relations that can be so easily replaced with AI systems. What, then can deutero learning add? We suggest, following Bateson, that this entails not just a gradient in the progression of proto-learning but learning about the learning context. Here, too, some debate is required as Bateson’s notion of context is explicitly systemic and so contrasts with ‘middle-range’ ideas of context as espoused, for instance, by Nancy Cartwright (2019) and others focussing on mechanisms and causal pathways whch allow for prescriptive solutions to localized problems. It also contrasts with near decomposability assumtions in design thinking which, again, seek solutions to problems on a local, rather than systemic level (Simon, 1969). Bateson’s version is not just intriguing because it eschews linear (even long-chained) causality in favour of a language of dynamics (intensification and homeostatic balance, as well as stress and pathology), but also because his concrete/abstract layers allow for the possibility that new epistemological pathways (new Gestalten) can be found or pursued. Bateson’s version, we feel, is one inspirted by the idea of continual advance of novelty of the entire universe, rather than static or bounded relations.
In the session we want to speculate about the relevance and possibility of deutero learning in the context of management education going back to the challenges brought by new AI developments. We also consider the possibilities for entrepreneurship education, at least in the sense of cultivating the entrepreneurial imagination (Chia, 1996), as potentially important solution to the challenges posed to conventional management education by developments in AI.
Bios
Mike Zundel is Professor in Organization Studies in the Strategy, Entrepreneurship and International Business Group at the University of Liverpool Management School. He works across organization theory and strategy on questions of media and technology. With Robin Holt (Bristol) he has just completed a monograph on the epochal influence of technology on strategy.
Sam Horner is a lecturer in innovation in the Strategy, Entrepreneurship and International Business Group at the University of Liverpool Management School. His work focuses on the functions of strategy in university technology commercialization. His more recent work focuses on the incorporation of Whiteheadian metaphysics into theories of organization and technology
Marianna is going to talk about – first of all, I think it is relevant to multiple audiences as it is really quite relevant to the future of our own sector and across the public (& private) sector (so pertinent at the present time)!!….. Marianna problematises how our organisations, under neoliberal ideology, perpetuate a view of care which is more about compliance and public relations, as they are politically overlayed by the fantasy of excellence, invulnerability and the rational disembodied worker. She argues that we are left ambivalently and desperately needing care, but at the same time rejecting care as our vulnerability is seen as a sign of weakness, dependency and neediness. Using a feminist psychoanalytical approach Marianna offers a provocation to us all to not be entrapped and diminished by this view of care, with its tendency to individualise and pay lip-service to caring about rather than caring for or with. Alternatively, what she makes us think about is the existential nature of how significant an embodied, social form of care is for the future of our organisations and the way in which a holistic care framework, including an embrace of our shared, ontological and epistemological vulnerability could be placed more centrally as a core strength in our organisations; to fundamental tackle issues such as (in)equality, diversity, climate change and ‘othering’ in a post-pandemic world. Now you can see why I’m excited about her doing the talk! This talk is based on a recent paper she has written for Organization Theory Journal and please feel free to look at this prior to the session…… https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/26317877231159683
So, I certainly hope you can now see why I asked her to deliver this Baltic Session, as her talk tackles head on what it means to embody a love of scholarship which touches on each aspect of this…. Love of research area, love of research engagement, love of research communication, love of research theorist and love of making a difference. It is all in here and just by looking at Marianna’s biography and her interests and writing around intersectional marginalisation, gender, (in)equalities, and marketization you can see the relevance of such a perspective on the Public Sector and Higher Education and the way in which people and institutions are treated. Her academic projects, numerous books and wider publishing focus on such areas of gender (in)equality, business ethics, whistleblowing, diversity, affect and tend to give voice to the marginalised and dispossessed through her own practice of care as an academic. Notably she does not shy away from the more recent challenges of our time – such as….Covid-19 and the impact on our care homes and why care is not forthcoming for the carers! I must also mention what I see as the significance of her interests in taking a psychoanalytical perspective (in this instance a feminist lens), to be able to unpick and delve headfirst into why we are in this neo-liberal predicament and how we could take steps to do something about it. Marianna welcome to the Baltic Sessions. As per usual I would urge early career academics, doctoral students and more senior academics and managers to attend the session not only for the specific subject covered, but the chance to hear from an innovative and thought-provoking world leading scholar. I am hoping that you see the relevance of Marianna’s research to all disciplines above beyond what I would consider as considerably eclectic and resonant to current societal challenges…. She has a wealth of experience in academia and beyond which could be invaluable to early career academics as well as more senior academics. I also see many invaluable highlights for senior managers in HE and from across the public sector – this is crucial to move forward beyond the polarisation of positions. Please feel free to share the link for this session to academics and practitioners who you feel would benefit from Marianna’s talk. Please do check out Marianna’s bio/picture and presentation abstract below, for those people who are not aware of her past and present roles and her academic engagement in HE and the public sector.
Professor Marianna Fotaki holds degrees in medicine, public health and health economics, and obtained her Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2001. She has published over 100 articles on gender, inequalities, and the marketization of public services appearing in leading international journals. Her recent books include Gender and the Organization. Women at Work in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2017, co-authored with Nancy Harding, shortlisted for the EGOS Best Book Award in 2019), Diversity, Affect and Embodiment in Organizing (Palgrave 2019, co-edited with Alison Pullen), The Whistleblowing Guide: Speak-up Arrangements, Challenges and Best Practices (Wiley Finance, 2019 co-authored with Kate Kenny and Wim Vandekerckhove), Business Ethics, and Care in Organizations (Routledge 2020, co-edited with Gazi Islam and Anne Antoni) and Working Life and Gender Inequality. Intersectional Perspectives and the Spatial Practices of Peripheralization (Routledge 2021, co-edited with Angelika Sjöstedt and Katarina Giritli Nygren). Marianna was recently a Primary Investigator (2020-22) on a UKRI-funded COVID scheme project, ‘Understanding the financial impact of COVID-19 on the UK care home sector – implications for businesses and the workforce’.Hi folks,
Welcome back to the Baltic Sessions!! There was a brief period of silence as I was on sabbatical, but the sessions are starting up again- this time in hybrid form (and some still in purely virtual form). I would like to invite you to the first of these hybrid Baltic Sessions this semester, taking place back where the sessions started - from the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art here in Newcastle in the U.K.
For those people who work in the local universities or can get to Newcastle you are very welcome to come to the Baltic Centre (30 places max). Just drop me an email to sign up.
Otherwise, please do accept the virtual meeting invitation as everyone is welcome. The sessions have become an interdisciplinary & collegiate space for international academic critical engagement & provocation offering a distinctive research development series of events driven and funded by the faculty of Business & Law at Northumbria University, UK. With a love of research/scholarship theme, the Baltic Sessions have expanded internationally (to include academics from across the U.K., US, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Greece, UAE). The sessions speak to a wide audience as they focus on the critical future of universities, the management discipline and navigating alternative academic careers that make a difference individually, institutionally and societally. Space, place, identity, power, equality, time and embodiment are entangled within this confessional conversation resonating across national boundaries, disciplinary specialisms and career levels.
I am really delighted to announce that we have a really special speaker to restart the sessions welcoming Professor Damian O’Doherty, from Liverpool University, who has kindly agreed to speak virtually from 14.00 (U.K. time), on next Wednesday, 15th February. From being the founder of the Manchester Ethnography Network to his current role as Director of of the Organizational and Employee Well-Being Centre at the University of Liverpool Management School and Senior Editor of the Organization Studies journal, Damian has much to offer the Baltic Sessions around love of research and scholarship.
For anyone who knows Damian well it is no surprise that he has chosen the following provocative title for his Baltic Session - ‘Towards Fermenting Revolt/Revolting Ferment for New Business Practices in the Anthropocene’ - this will draw on Damian’s vast experience of conducting ethnography (from eclectic contexts such as Manchester Airport, Haute Cuisine chefs to an ethnogeomorphology of sound), with all its political, ontological and epistemological nuances, challenges and potential to disrupt. His talk comes at a time which demands that we look at our own responsibility as academics, managers and as citizens in crafting a social equitable and ecologically future.
Please do check out his bio and presentation abstract below, for those people who are not aware of his past and present roles and his academic engagement in HE and beyond.
As per usual I would urge early career academics, doctoral students and more senior academics and managers to attend the session not only for the specific subject covered, but the chance to hear from an innovative and thought-provoking scholar who clearly sees their love research and scholarship as an entangled adventure of loving life, learning and the poetic. A precious quality to uphold if we are serious about working across disciplines in relational pursuits that mean something way beyond what can be measured.
This essence is very much in the spirit of the Baltic Sessions as they aim to develop an open, informal, interactive research discussion around the topic in question. The Baltic Sessions’ have a levelling ethos, which attempts to create a regular, non-judgmental meeting space and culture to boost collegiality, above and beyond specific research specialisms and groups. They aim to move beyond interdisciplinary rhetoric and aspiration towards a more processual meeting space for generative ideas and agency. The current session follows on from past Baltic Sessions from many of the world's leading academics who have something to say about individual and organizational futures in HE and beyond.... such as Mats Alvesson, David Knights, Mark Learmonth, Kevin Morrell, Paul Hibbert, Martin Parker, Gibson Burrell, Steffen Boehm, Chris Grey, Sarah Robinson, Dennis Tourish, Roy Suddaby, Stewart Clegg, Jean Mills, Albert Mills, Andrew Hoffman and Kathy Lund Dean, Jean Bartunek, Robert Macintosh, Katy Mason and Nic Beech. I have invited many of these past speakers to this talk, along with future (and potential) speakers as well. It has been great to see many of you are still tuning into the Baltic Sessions.
If you would like to attend virtually, I would appreciate it if you could accept the invitation, so I can get a feel for the numbers please and the link for the Microsoft teams meeting is below. As previously mentioned if you would like to physically attend please email myself directly. Looking forward to yet another pertinent and memorable discussion!! Finally, in the spirit of an interdisciplinary ethos, please feel free to pass this invitation on to any academics and senior managers across other universities, faculties etc. that would find this session valuable.
I would also appreciate it if you could pass this invitation on to any newer academics (ECAs & doctoral students are very welcome), who have inadvertently not been included in this invitation. I would also appreciate it if you could forward to any academics who have left academia through voluntary or forced retirement/redundancy who would like to engage in the critical HE conversations which the Baltic Sessions address. The sessions endeavour to not shy away from the major issues in our sector internationally, giving voice to multiple actors.
Best,
David
Abstract: A Workshop Towards Fermenting Revolt/Revolting Ferment for New Business Practices in the Anthropocene
What is ethnography and what is the value of ethnography to the study of management and organization? In recent years there has been a marked change in the way ethnography is understood and deployed in management and organization studies and we must take stock of these changes to understand what is at stake in the shifting fortunes of different forms of organization analysis. In this session I will introduce ethnography and confess the struggles of many working with ethnography. Indeed, this paper might have been titled 'Some disciplinary problems that precede an ethnography of fermentation that suspects a 'serpentine line' from Haute Cuisine chefs to an ethnogeomorphology of sound'. Come and share your tales of the field and I will explain the terms of this problem. For some ethnography is a methodology that can be learnt like any other scientific or social scientific method. For others it is more akin to a craft, an art, or even a way of life. In this workshop we will study and draw out these differences by way of comparing and contrasting two very different ethnographies: Michael Rosen's (1989) now classic 'You asked for it: Christmas at the bosses' expense', and Michael Smets, Tim Morris and Royston Greenwood's (2012) paper 'From Practice to Field: A Multilevel model of Practice-Driven Institutional Change'. Participants might find the attached two papers interesting and you are free to read both papers prior to this workshop where we will be addressing the following questions: What are the various ways in which ethnographic writing can achieve rigour and persuasion? What are the politics at stake in these different conceptions of ethnography? In what specific ways do struggles around ethnography register wider contemporary geopolitical struggles in which we are entangled? What role business, economy and society, state, corporations and citizen? What are our responsibilities as an academic?
Join Professor Damian O'Doherty who will lead this workshop and develop these questions at the next Baltic Session to be held on February 15th from 14.00-16.00 (U.K. time) at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art .... Damian O'Doherty is Professor of Management and Organization at the University of Liverpool where is Director of the Organizational and Employee Well-Being Centre. He was formerly Professor in Management and Organization at the University of Manchester where he established the Manchester Ethnography network and where he retains an honorary chair. Damian is an experienced ethnographer with over 25 years research experience. HIs most recent book 'Reconstructing Organization: The Loungification of Society' is based on 2½ years full time ethnography at Manchester Airport and is published by Palgrave. He is now working to complete an ongoing ethnography project that has involved a study of elite chefs at work a restaurant in Manchester. Damian is Senior Editor at Organization Studies and former Otto Mønsted Fellow at Copenhagen Business School.
Hi folks,
I would like to invite you the final Virtual Baltic Session this semester, representing a distinctive research development series of events at the faculty of Business & Law at Northumbria University, UK. With a love of research theme, the Baltic Sessions have expanded internationally (to include academics from across the U.K., US, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Greece, UAE). The sessions speak to a wide audience as they focus on the critical future of universities, the management discipline and navigating alternative academic careers that make a difference individually, institutionally and societally. Space, place, identity, power, equality, time and embodiment are entangled within this confessional conversation resonating across national boundaries, disciplinary specialism and career levels.
I am really delighted to announce that we have an international panel of 4 scholars this time around welcoming Professor Jean Bartunek (Boston College), Professor, Nic Beech (Middlesex University), Professor Katy Mason (Lancaster University) and Professor Robert MacIntosh (Northumbria University), who have kindly agreed to speak virtually from 14.00 (U.K. time) on Wednesday, 29th June.
Drawing from the vast experience of the panel’s HE leadership experience, their talk will centrally focus on the ‘impact’ agenda and they will each offer a different lens to view this challenge, not only focusing on practical implications, but potential ethical and methodological issues and tensions as well. This is significant as they are all academics who appear to not have shied away from these issues and in fact have embraced diverse organisational and institutional leadership roles to craft ‘impact’ . Organisational leadership roles range from a UK vice chancellor (Nic), a UK faculty pro-vice chancellor (Robert) and an associate dean for research (Katy). Furthermore, they embrace institutional leadership roles of President of the British Academy of Management (Nic) and Chair of the British Academy of Management (Katy), past President of the US Academy of Management (Jean), past Dean of the Fellows of the US Academy of Management (Jean) and Chair of the Chartered Association of Business Schools (Robert). Do check out their book which offers more meat on the bones of their talk (Delivering Impact in Management Research: When Does it Really Happen? (routledge.com) Please do check out their bios and presentation abstract below, for those people who are not aware of their many other past and present roles and their academic engagement and leadership in HE.
As per usual I would urge early career academics and doctoral students to attend the session not only for the specific subject covered, but the chance to hear from four scholars who clearly see their academic purpose as entangled with their love of making a difference and engagement of multiple actors beyond the academic community. Even if you are an academic who does not share in this wider ‘impact’ perspective, this session offers a chance to engage in a meaningful conversation around what seems like an institutional inevitability. For the more experienced academics and managers, I would also recommend the session as it offers invaluable insights into what could be critically seen as a performative, judgemental and auditable trail, in which other academics may not wish to follow, requiring a developmental and cultural sensibility which has implications around the above issues of identity, equality, time, space, well-being etc. You may feel that the need for an evidential trail for impact diminishes the love of making a difference – one of the core strands of the Baltic Sessions. Sharing such doubts, concerns and challenges are core to what the Baltic Sessions are all about.
I again would stress that these sessions aim to be an open, informal, interactive research discussion around the topic in question. The Baltic Sessions’ have a levelling ethos, which attempts to create a regular, non-judgmental meeting space and culture to boost collegiality, above and beyond specific research specialisms and groups. It aims to move beyond multidisciplinary rhetoric and aspiration towards a more processual meeting space for generative ideas and agency (the Baltic Sessions were originally set up with an eye to space and place in a contemporary art gallery in Newcastle, U.K., looking over the Tyne River). It follows on from past Baltic Sessions from many of the world's leading academics who have something to say about individual and organizational futures in HE and beyond.... such as Mats Alvesson, David Knights, Mark Learmonth, Kevin Morrell, Paul Hibbert, Martin Parker, Gibson Burrell, Steffen Boehm, Chris Grey, Sarah Robinson, Dennis Tourish, Roy Suddaby, Stewart Clegg, Jean Mills, Albert Mills, Andrew Hoffman and Kathy Lund Dean. I have invited many of these past speakers to this talk, along with future (and potential) speakers as well. It has been great to see many of you are still tuning into the Baltic Sessions.
If you would like to attend, I would appreciate it if you could accept the invitation, so I can get a feel for the numbers please and the link for the Microsoft teams meeting is below. Looking forward to yet another interesting and pertinent discussion!! Finally, in the spirit of an interdisciplinary ethos, please feel free to pass this invitation on to any academics and senior managers across other universities, faculties etc. that would find this session valuable. I would also appreciate it if you could pass this invitation on to any newer academics (ECAs & doctoral students are very welcome), who have inadvertently not been included in this invitation.
I would also appreciate it if you could forward to any academics who have left academia through voluntary or forced retirement/redundancy who would like to engage in the critical HE conversations which Baltic Sessions address. One final request is to ask if you could forward any academic names that you feel would be suitable as speakers for future Baltic Sessions.
Best,
David
Abstract: Impactful Management Research
A Panel Discussion: Jean Bartunek, Nic Beech, Katy Mason and Robert MacIntosh
Overview Research assessment at national level is not unique to the UK but the 2014 and 2021 REF exercises have heightened the focus on the so- called ‘impact agenda’ because it now materially influences public funding of research whilst enhancing/eroding the reputations of individuals, research groups and universities. More broadly, a concern with the relationship between management researchers and managers has been a recurring theme of discussions of relevance and engaged scholarship. In this contribution to the Baltic Seminar series, we will set out our definition of impact as “evidenced change occurring as a result of the purposeful application of co-developed knowledge” and will tease out some of the practical, ethical and methodological challenges of delivering impactful management research. Each panellist will speak for no more than 5 minutes before opening the floor to a discussion about the challenges and opportunities that the impact agenda represents for management researchers.
Bios:
Jean M. Bartunek holds the Robert A., and Evelyn J. Ferris chair and is Professor of Management and Organization at Boston College. She is a past president of the Academy of Management, from which she won the career distinguished service award. She is also a past Dean of the Fellows of the Academy of management, as well as a Fellow of the British Academy of Management and the Center for Evidence-Based Management. She has served as an associate editor of the Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Learning and Education, and the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science. Her primary interests center on academic-practitioner relationships and organizational change. Her most recent edited book is entitled Social Scientists Confronting Global Crises (Routledge, 2022).
Nic Beech is Vice-Chancellor of Middlesex University having previously been a Vice-Principal of the University of St Andrews, Provost of the University of Dundee and Lead Fellow of the ESRC Advanced Institute of Management. He is President of the British Academy of Management, Hon. Treasurer of the Academy of Social Sciences, Chair of the UK Standing Committee for Quality Assessment, Chair of AccessHE and on the board of the UK Quality Assurance Agency, London Higher and the Chartered Management Institute Race Network. He has particular interests in mental wellbeing, addressing the issues of student drug use, the role of education in social mobility and in inclusive innovation. His research focused on identity, diversity, change leadership and learning and he has held visiting chairs in the UK, Europe and Australia. Nic has been awarded fellowships or companionships of the British Academy of Management, the Academy of Social Sciences, the Royal Society of Arts, the Chartered Management Institute, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and the Australia and New Zealand Academy of Management.
Katy Mason is a Professor of Markets, and Management, Associate Dean for Research at Lancaster University Management School, Chair of the British Academy of Management (BAM), and on Council for International Federation of Scholarly Associations in Management (IFSAM). Katy's research focuses on how managers collectively make and shape markets, and the devices they use to enroll, cross and create boundaries with others. Her current work looks at the materials and practices of complex collaborative research project that perform market experiments and catalyze innovation. She is particularly interested in how managers make good or moral markets that are inclusive, good for society and protect the planet. Katy's work has been published in Journal Management Studies, Organisation Studies, Industrial Marketing Management, Marketing Theory and Long Range Planning.
Robert MacIntosh trained as an engineer and is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, the Academy of Social Sciences and the British Academy of Management. He has published over 100 outputs including books on strategy, organisational change and research impact. His background reflects a long-standing interest in multidisciplinary research that makes a difference in the world. He is an advocate of the transformative power of universities both in their learning and teaching and in their research and knowledge exchange. He has held leadership roles in business schools at Strathclyde, Glasgow and Heriot-Watt and is currently Pro Vice-Chancellor for Business and Law at Northumbria University. He is also Chair of the Chartered Association of Business Schools and sits on the Council of the British Academy of Management. He has extensive experience working with, facilitating and researching strategy in a range of publicly traded firms, large public organisations and third sector organisations and has supervised a number of senior leaders from the US, Canada, Europe and the UK to doctoral completion. He is an experienced boardroom practitioner having served on the board of the social care charity Turning Point Scotland (2013 to 2021, and chair from 2019-2021) and the board of Heriot-Watt University Malaysia (2014-2021). He publishes regularly on academic life in the Times Higher Education and on doctoral study through ThePhDBlog.com. His status as a shareholder in Aberdeen Football Club demonstrates his innate optimism.
Hi folks,
I would like to invite you to another Virtual Baltic Session, representing a distinctive research development series of events at the faculty of Business & Law at Northumbria University, UK. With a love of research theme, the Baltic Sessions have expanded internationally (to not only include academics from across the U.K. but also from countries such as the US, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Greece, UAE). The sessions speak to a wide audience as they focus on the critical future of universities, the management discipline and navigating alternative academic careers that make a difference individually, institutionally and societally. Space, place, identity, power, equality, time, embodiment are entangled within this confessional conversation.
I am really delighted to announce that we are staying in the US this time around, to welcome Professor Kathy Lund Dean from Gustavus Adolphus College, Minnesota, who has kindly agreed to speak virtually from 13.00 (U.K. time) on Wednesday, 4th May. Kathy exemplifies the spirit of love of scholarship more broadly as her career and interests illustrate the significance of building a highly successful academic career embracing a crossover of research, teaching and citizenship. This is illustrated by one of her recent co- authored books entitled, "The Ethical Professor: A Practical Guide to Research, Teaching and Professional Life” (Routledge/Taylor & Francis press, 2018). Kathy holds professorships in the US, U.K. and New Zealand with interests which span HE futures, academic careers, cooperative infrastructures and experiential pedagogy. Her career illustrates a strong leadership in many different ways, from editorial board member roles in several leading journals, as a longstanding past co- editor in the Journal of Management Education, as a past division chair in the US Academy of Management, to co-founding/co- editing Management Teaching Review.
Her talk will focus on her love of a particular research theorist, Philip Selznick’s Sociology of Organisations and the way this body of work inspired and informed her own research and scholarship. This love of a research theorist follows other past Baltic Session speakers who have chosen to frame their love of research through this perspective. It thereby opens up a reflexive pathway for others to ponder in their own career and research journeys.
Please do check out her bio and presentation info below, for those people who are not aware of Kathy’s research.
As per usual I would urge early career academics and doctoral students to attend the session not only for the specific subject covered, but the chance to hear another founding figure in their field/s talk about love of research and how this has impacted upon their scholarship. Whether you are an academic who identifies with being a teacher, a researcher or practitioner, Kathy offers an invaluable insight into how to enrich your journey. It is not surprising to hear that Kathy holds a Fulbright position, with the particular remit of developing doctoral students and early career academics. For the more experienced academics and managers, I would also recommend the session as it offers an insight into an academic who has forged a highly successful career based upon a fusion of teaching, research and citizenship. She embodies the ethics and leadership focus of her Distinguished Chair position through an active citizenship in developing academics in countries that are currently under- represented in mainstream academic scholarship.
I again would stress that these sessions aim to be an open, informal, interactive research discussion around the topic in question. The Baltic Sessions’ have a leveling ethos, which attempts to create a regular, non-judgmental meeting space and culture to boost collegiality, above and beyond specific research specialisms and groups. It aims to move beyond multidisciplinary rhetoric and aspiration towards a more processual meeting space for generative ideas and agency (the Baltic Sessions were originally set up with an eye to space and place in a contemporary art gallery in Newcastle, U.K., looking over the Tyne River). It follows on from past Baltic Sessions from many of the world's leading academics who have something to say about individual and organizational futures in HE and beyond.... such as Mats Alvesson, David Knights, Mark Learmonth, Paul Hibbert, Martin Parker, Gibson Burrell, Steffen Boehm, Chris Grey, Sarah Robinson, Dennis Tourish, Roy Suddaby, Stewart Clegg, Jean Mills, Albert Mills and Andrew Hoffman. I have invited many of these past speakers to this talk, along with future (and potential) speakers as well. It has been great to see many of you are still tuning into the Baltic Sessions. Again, in order to pick up on the informal feel of the Baltic Sessions, can I suggest to all of the audience that you come prepared with a cake/biscuit &/or drink and maybe some thoughts of your own!! If you would like to attend, I would appreciate it if you could accept the invitation, so I can get a feel for the numbers please and the link for the Microsoft teams meeting is below.
Looking forward to yet another interesting and pertinent discussion!! Finally, in the spirit of an interdisciplinary ethos, please feel free to pass this invitation on to any academics and senior managers across other universities, faculties etc. that would find this session valuable. I would also appreciate it if you could pass this invitation on to any newer academics (ECAs & doctoral students are very welcome), who have inadvertently not been included in this invitation. I would also appreciate it if you could forward to any academics who have left academia through voluntary or forced retirement/redundancy who would like to engage in the critical HE conversations which Baltic Sessions address.
One final request is to ask if you could forward any academic names that you feel would be suitable as speakers for future Baltic Sessions. Just to let you know that we have one last session this semester (last but not least so to speak), a panel session, as follows: Professor Jean Bartunek (Boston College), Professor Nic Beech (Middlesex University), Professor Katy Mason (Lancaster University) and Professor Robert MacIntosh (Northumbria University) - 14.00 (U.K. time) 29th June.
Kind Regards, David
Abstract: Who Could Have Predicted? Selznick, That’s Who. Re-Engaging with Selznick’s Sociology of Organizations
Baltic Sessions, Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University
Love of a theorist : Philip Selznick
Session facilitator: Kathy Lund Dean
Have you ever worked on several different research projects and discovered an organizational theorist whose insights seem to inform all of them in unique and interesting ways? Have you ever read a seminal book or article in our business and organizational studies domain and admired the clarity of the writing and accessibility of insights made? In this Baltic Session, Kathy shares her love for and applications of organizational sociologist Philip Selznick’s work, drawing from three main contributions (Selznick, 1943, 1957, 1992). Moving seamlessly between theory and practice with a trenchant writing style, Selznick’s deep understanding of the ways people, contexts, and processes intermingle in organizational settings is as relevant today as it was almost 80 years ago. After sharing some Selznick’s essential contributions, Kathy shares some of the gems that are her personal favourites, and how they have informed her own research. The session will be structured to allow maximum discussion time among participants.
Source materials for the session:
Selznick, P. (1943). An Approach to a Theory of Bureaucracy. American Sociological Review, 8(1), 47-54. doi:10.2307/2085448
Selznick, P. (1957). Leadership in Administration. New York: Harper & Row.
Selznick, P. (1992). The Moral Commonwealth: Social Theory and the Promise of Community. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Bio:
Kathy Lund Dean holds the Board of Trustees Distinguished Chair in Leadership & Ethics at Gustavus Adolphus College, Minnesota, USA. She is also Honorary Professor in the School of Management at University of St Andrews, UK and Adjunct Professor at University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
She earned her Ph.D. from Saint Louis University in Organizational Behavior, minoring in Philosophy & Ethics. Kathy’s scholarship activities include re-imagining post-COVID institutions and academic career trajectories, cooperative infrastructures among municipal leaders, and the ethics of experiential pedagogy. Her ethics scholarship extends to those in faculty positions with a book (Routledge/Taylor & Francis press, 2018) entitled, "The Ethical Professor: A Practical Guide to Research, Teaching and Professional Life. " With her co- authors Lorraine Eden (Texas A&M) and Paul Vaaler (University of Minnesota) she collated many of the ethical pitfalls common to those in academe, creating a resource for reflection and best practices. Her co-authored book with Nancy Niemi (University of Maryland) and Charles Fornaciari (La Salle University) “Course Design and Assessment” in engaged learning will be available in April 2022, from Edward Elgar press.
Kathy has been a leader in the Academy of Management as former division chair and ethics blogger for The Ethicist. Her editorial work has spanned more than two decades, holding an editorial role at the Journal of Management Education and co-founding/co- editing Management Teaching Review. Kathy is delighted to serve as an editorial board member of the Academy of Management Learning & Education as well as the Journal of Management Inquiry. Keen to continue assisting colleagues in academic publishing, she holds a Fulbright Specialist position, helping faculty develop their scholarly profiles and publishing skills, especially doctoral students, newer faculty, and those in countries that are currently under-represented in mainstream academic scholarship.
Hi folks,
I would like to invite you to yet another Virtual Baltic Session, representing a distinctive research development series of events at the faculty of Business & Law at Northumbria University, UK. With a love of research theme, the Baltic Sessions have expanded internationally (to include countries such as the US, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, France, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Greece, UAE). The sessions speak to a wide audience as they focus on the critical future of universities, the management discipline and navigating alternative academic careers that make a difference individually, institutionally and societally. Space, place, identity, power, equality, time, embodiment are entangled within this confessional conversation.
I am really delighted to announce that we are moving from Canada to the USA this time around, to welcome Professor Andrew Hoffman from Michigan University, who has kindly agreed to speak virtually from 13.00 (U.K. time) on Wednesday, 13th April. Quite frankly, I can’t think of anyone more suited to the themes of love of research, interdisciplinary and collegiality which the Baltic Sessions endeavor to uphold. Amongst his 18 books, recent books of ‘Management as a Calling’ and the book which is linked to this talk, The Engaged Scholar (published by Stanford University Press - please do check this out) speak of issues he sees as crucial for the future of HE and our own working lives as academics. He calls academics out for their academic insularity and lack of relevance to tackle what he sees as truth decay and corruption in society and democracy. He places a responsibility on academics to rise to this challenge and argues for a more publicly and politically engaged academic underpinned by an academy, which places a greater legitimacy and acceptability to such practices. What is inspiring about Andrew is that he has embodies such a call in his own practices and he will reflect on his own experiences as well as framing his arguments from existing literature. Just looking more closely at Andy’s achievements, from being both a professor of a business school and a school for environment and sustainability, he has forged a career which does not preach to the converted and tries to open up a dialogue with multiple audiences. This has led to an eclectic output as an author and editor of over 100 articles/book chapters as well as 18 books, which have been translated into 5 languages. In recognition of his service to what could be viewed as making a societal difference in academia and beyond, he has been awarded The Page Prize for Sustainability Issues in Business (2020) and the 2020 ONE Teaching Award.
Please do check out his short bio and presentation info below, for those people who are not aware of Andrew’s research.
As per usual I would urge early career academics and doctoral students to attend the session not only for the specific subject covered, but the chance to hear another founding figure in their field/s talk about love of research and how this has impacted upon their scholarship. For the more experienced academics and managers, I would also recommend the session as it offers such a rich reflection on why we work in HE and the responsibilities and development which need to be taken seriously for us to collectively move forward within and beyond academic walls.
I again would stress that these sessions aim to be an open, informal, interactive research discussion around the topic in question. The Baltic Sessions’ have a leveling ethos, which attempts to create a regular, non-judgmental meeting space and culture to boost collegiality, above and beyond specific research specialisms and groups. It aims to move beyond multidisciplinary rhetoric and aspiration towards a more processual meeting space for generative ideas and agency (the Baltic Sessions were originally set up with an eye to space and place in a contemporary arts gallery in Newcastle looking over the Tyne River). It follows on from Baltic Sessions from many of the world's leading academics who have something to say about individual and organizational futures in HE and beyond.... such as Mats Alvesson, David Knights, Mark Learmonth, Paul Hibbert, Martin Parker, Gibson Burrell, Steffen Boehm, Chris Grey, Sarah Robinson, Dennis Tourish, Roy Suddaby, Stewart Clegg, Jean Mills and Albert Mills. I have invited many of these past speakers to this talk, along with future (and potential) speakers as well. It has been great to see many of you are still tuning into the Baltic Sessions.
Again, in order to pick up on the informal feel of the Baltic Sessions, can I suggest to all of the audience that you come prepared with a cake/biscuit &/or drink and maybe some thoughts of your own!! If you would like to attend I would appreciate it if you could accept the invitation, so I can get a feel for the numbers please and the link for the Microsoft teams meeting is below. Looking forward to yet another interesting and pertinent discussion!! Finally, in the spirit of an interdisciplinary ethos, please feel free to pass this invitation on to any academics and senior managers across other universities, faculties etc. that would find this session valuable.
I would also appreciate it if you could pass this invitation on to any newer academics (ECAs & doctoral students are very welcome), who have inadvertently not been included in this invitation. I would also appreciate it if you could forward to any academics who have left academia through voluntary or forced retirement/redundancy who would like to engage in the critical HE conversations which Baltic Sessions address. One final request is to ask if you could forward any academic names that you feel would be suitable as speakers for future Baltic Sessions.
Kind Regards,
David
Bio:
Andrew J. Hoffman (Andy) is the Holcim (US) Professor of Sustainable Enterprise with appointments in the Ross School of Business and the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. He is the author and editor of over 100 articles/book chapters as well as 18 books, which have been translated into 5 languages. Among his list of honors, he has been awarded The Page Prize for Sustainability Issues in Business (2020) and the 2020 ONE Teaching Award.
Abstract: The Engaged Scholar:
Society and democracy are ever threatened by the fall of fact. Rigorous analysis of facts, the hard boundary between truth and opinion, and fidelity to reputable sources of factual information are all in alarming decline. A 2018 report published by the RAND Corporation labeled this problem "truth decay" and I lay the challenge of fixing it at the door of the academy. But academia is prevented from carrying this out due to its own existential crisis—a crisis of relevance. Scholarship rarely moves very far beyond the walls of the academy and is certainly not accessing the primarily civic spaces it needs to reach to mitigate truth corruption. In this session, I will draw upon existing literature and personal experience to bring attention to the problem of academic insularity—where it comes from and where, if left to grow unchecked, it will go—and argue for the emergence of a more publicly and politically engaged scholar. My call is to make that path toward public engagement more acceptable and legitimate for those who do it; to enlarge the tent to be inclusive of multiple ways that one enacts the role of academic scholar in today's world.
Hi folks,
I would like to invite you to yet another Virtual Baltic Session, representing a distinctive research development series of events at the faculty of Business & Law at Northumbria University, UK. With a love of research theme, the Baltic Sessions have expanded internationally (to include countries such as the US, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, France, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, UAE). The sessions speak to a wide audience as they focus on the critical future of universities, the management discipline and navigating alternative academic careers that make a difference individually, institutionally, and societally. Space, place, identity, power, equality, time, embodiment is entangled within this confessional conversation.
I am really delighted to announce that we are moving back to Canada to welcome both Professor Jean Mills and Professor Albert Mills from St Mary’s University, Nova Scotia, who have kindly agreed to speak virtually from 14.00 (U.K. time) on Wednesday, 30th March. Reflecting on the love of research theme of the Baltic Sessions, they are going to speak of their life-long love of research areas of gender and intersectionality, through insights drawn from international airline cultures. There are many invaluable lessons here as Jean and Albert have been able to carve out illustrious careers- both have published hundreds of peer reviewed articles, books and journal special issues, keeping their love of research on gender and intersectionality alive and well, whilst crafting and being responsible for a whole range of broader academic citizenship and leadership initiatives. Albert is the co-chair of the Academy of Management’s CMS Division, President of the Atlantic Schools of Business and President of the Administrative Science Association of Canada. He is currently an Associate Editor/editorial board member of the Academy of Management Learning and Education; Organization; the Journal of Management and Management Decision. Likewise, Jean is Co- Editor of Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, and she is past Associate Editor for Gender, Work and Organization and past Division Chair of the Academy of Management, CMS Division.
Please do check out their short bios and presentation info below, for those people who are not aware of Jean and Albert and their research.
As per usual I would urge early career academics and doctoral students to attend the session not only for the specific subject covered, but the chance to hear other founding figures in their field talk about how they have developed a love of their research area over their whole career. For the more experienced academics and managers, I would also recommend the session as it offers such a rich reflection on crafting and supporting academic careers from two highly successful academics, who have managed to secure a long-term future together in academia.
I again would stress that these sessions aim to be an open, informal, interactive research discussion around the topic in question. The Baltic Sessions’ have a levelling ethos, which attempts to create a regular, non-judgmental meeting space and culture to boost collegiality, above and beyond specific research specialisms and groups. It aims to move beyond multidisciplinary rhetoric and aspiration towards a more processual meeting space for generative ideas and agency (the Baltic Sessions were originally set up with an eye to space and place in a contemporary arts gallery in Newcastle looking over the Tyne River). It follows on from Baltic Sessions from many of the world's leading academics who have something to say about individual and organizational futures in HE and beyond.... such as Mats Alvesson, David Knights, Mark Learmonth, Paul Hibbert, Martin Parker, Gibson Burrell, Steffen Boehm, Chris Grey, Sarah Robinson, Dennis Tourish, Roy Suddaby, Stewart Clegg. I have invited many of these past speakers to this talk, along with future (and potential) speakers as well. It has been great to see many of you are still tuning into the Baltic Sessions.
Again, to pick up on the informal feel of the Baltic Sessions, can I suggest to all of the audience that they come prepared with a cake/biscuit &/or drink and maybe some thoughts of their own!! If you would like to attend, I would appreciate it if you could accept the invitation, so I can get a feel for the numbers please and the link for the Microsoft teams meeting is below. Looking forward to yet another interesting and pertinent discussion!! Finally, in the spirit of an interdisciplinary ethos, please feel free to pass this invitation on to any academics and senior managers across other universities, faculties etc. that would find this session valuable. I would also appreciate it if you could pass this invitation on to any newer academics (ECAs & doctoral students are very welcome), who have inadvertently not been included in this invitation.
I would also appreciate it if you could forward to any academics who have left academia through voluntary or forced retirement/redundancy who would like to engage in the critical HE conversations which Baltic Sessions address.
One final request is to ask if you could forward any academic names that you feel would be suitable as speakers for future Baltic Sessions.
Kind Regards, David
Proposed `talk’:
We’d like to discuss our life-long research around Insights and Research on the study of Gender and Intersectionality in International Airline Cultures. We hope the event will be interactive where we discuss our lessons learned and other participants ask questions, provide observations and say something about their own research.
Bios……
Jean Helms Mills is Professor Emerita in The Department of Management, Saint Mary's University, Visiting Professor at The Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki and Docent at Jyväskylä University and University of Easter Finland. Jean was a Senior Research Fellow at Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, from 2008 - 2019. Her research focusses on critical sensemaking, gender, culture, intersectionality and historiography. She has over 235 publications and presentations, including books, edited collections, peer reviewed articles, chapters in edited collections, referred conference proceedings, conference presentations and invited talks. Jean is Co- Editor of Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, past Associate Editor for Gender, Work and Organization and past Division Chair of The Academy of Management, Critical Management Studies Division.
Albert J. Mills is Professor Emeritus in Management at Saint Mary’s University (Canada); 02 Professor of Management Innovation at the University of Finland, and Docent in Critical Management Studies at Jyväskylä University (Finland). He is currently the co-chair of the international Board for Critical Management Studies and co-editor of the journal Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management. He previously served as Co-Chair of the Academy of Management’s CMS Division; President of the Atlantic Schools of Business; and President of the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada. He is currently an Associate Editor/editorial board member of several journals, including the Academy of Management Learning & Education; Organization; Gender, Work and Organization; the Journal of Management; and Management Decision. Albert’s research focusses on programs of resistance and emancipation that includes Equality, Diversity and Inclusion; historiography; Critical Sensemaking; ANTi-History and gender and organizations. He is the author of 250 journal articles and book chapters, as well as 50 books and journal Special Issues. His recent books include History and Business Storytelling, in press (World Scientific); Management and Organizational History: A Research Overview, 2020 (London: Routledge), and Insights and Research on the study of Gender and Intersectionality in International Airline Cultures. (Bingley: Emerald).
Hi folks,
I would like to invite you to another Virtual Baltic Session, representing a distinctive research development series of events at the faculty of Business & Law at Northumbria University, UK. With a love of research theme, the Baltic Sessions have expanded regionally, nationally and increasingly internationally (to include countries such as the US, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, France, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, UAE). They speak to a wide audience as they focus on the critical future of universities, the management discipline and navigating alternative academic careers that make a difference individually, institutionally and societally. Space, place, identity, power, equality, time, embodiment are entangled within this conversation. This of course cannot be divorced from the historical, political, ecological and social environment around us – this is what this talk will be about.
I am really delighted to announce that Professor Stewart Clegg from Sydney University has kindly agreed to speak virtually from 9.00 am (U.K. time) on Wednesday, 16th March. He is going to speak of the implications of the Corona pandemic and the lessons learnt to respond to climate change and the Ukrainian crisis. This will be a marvellous opportunity to hear the views from a world leading academic recognised for his work in sociology, politics and power relations, organisation studies and project management talking about his what he sees as 3 current sociological crises – the Corona pandemic, climate change and the Ukrainian crisis - certainly engaging us all at the moment. His honours include being an EGOS Honorary Member, a EURAM Distinguished Fellow, Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences, Fellow of the Academy of Management, Distinguished Fellow ANZAM, Fellow of the British Academy of the Social Sciences and Aston Fellow.
Please do check out his short bio and presentation info below, for those people who are not aware of Stewart and his research.
As per usual I would urge early career academics and doctoral students to attend the session not only for the world leading subject covered, but the chance to hear another founding figure in his field. For the more experienced academics and managers, I would also recommend the session as it tackles crucial lessons around implications to social practices from crises of our times.
I again would stress that these sessions aim to be an open, informal research discussion around the topic in question. The Baltic Sessions’ have a levelling ethos, which attempts to create a regular, non-judgmental meeting space and culture to boost collegiality, above and beyond specific research specialisms and groups. It aims to move beyond multidisciplinary rhetoric and aspiration towards a more processual meeting space for generative ideas and agency (the Baltic Sessions were originally set up with an eye to space and place in a contemporary arts gallery in Newcastle looking over the Tyne River). It follows on from Baltic Sessions from many of the world's leading academics who have something to say about individual and organizational futures in HE and beyond.... such as Mats Alvesson, David Knights, Mark Learmonth, Paul Hibbert, Martin Parker, Gibson Burrell, Steffen Boehm, Chris Grey, Sarah Robinson, Dennis Tourish, Roy Suddaby. I have invited many of these past speakers to this talk, along with future (and potential) speakers as well. It has been great to see many of you tuning into the Baltic Sessions. Again, in order to pick up on the informal feel of the Baltic Sessions, can I suggest to all of the audience that they come prepared with a cake/biscuit &/or drink and maybe some thoughts of their own!! If you would like to attend I would appreciate it if you could accept the invitation, so I can get a feel for the numbers please and the link for the Microsoft teams meeting is below. Looking forward to yet another interesting and pertinent discussion!! Finally, in the spirit of an interdisciplinary ethos, please feel free to pass this invitation on to any academics and senior managers across other universities, faculties etc. that would find this session valuable. I would also appreciate it if you could pass this invitation on to any newer academics (ECAs & doctoral students are very welcome), who have inadvertently not been included in this invitation.
I would also appreciate it if you could forward to any academics who have left academia through voluntary or forced retirement/redundancy who would like to engage in the critical HE conversations which Baltic Sessions address. One final request is to ask if you could forward any academic names that you feel would be suitable as speakers for future Baltic Sessions.
Kind Regards,
David
Abstract:
The world is facing three global threats, one possibly receding, another certainly advancing and one whose trajectory is at present unclear. Receding is the present pandemic though the virus spreading it will continue to mutate and new variants will emerge. Viral pandemics never die; at best, they just fade away. Advancing is the threat of climate change. What is unclear is the outcome of events in Russia and Ukraine. I will present a narrative that focuses on these three events, the most significant happenings of contemporary times. While my major emphasis will be on the pandemic, my conclusions will also be relevant for climate change, and I shall recall a paper that I published in 2014, one which was, I venture, prescient in relation to current events concerning Russia. The paper that will be referred to is Clegg, S. R. (2014) Circuits of power/knowledge, Journal of Political Power, 7:3, 383-392.
Bio:
Stewart Clegg (stewart.clegg@syndey.edu.au) is Professor at the University of Sydney in the School of Project Management and the John Grill Institute for Project Leadership. He is recognised for his work in sociology, politics and power relations, organisation studies and project management to which he has contributed substantially over his career.
Recent awards:
Edith Penrose Award (INSEAD/EURAM) 2020 for Trail Blazing Research
Best paper award EURAM 2020 for “Research movements and theorizing dynamics in management and organization studies, ”
Winner of Association of Project Management Paper of the Year Award 2020: “Branding and governmentality for infrastructure megaprojects: The role of social media. ” International Journal of Project Management, 37(1), 59-72.
Winner of the Paper of the Year Award 2019: “Organizational Creativity as Idea Work: Intertextual Placing and Legitimating Imaginings in Media Development and Oil Exploration” , Human Relations.
Outstanding Paper in the 2019 EmeraldLiterati Awards: “Megaprojects redefined- complexity versus cost- and social imperatives” International Journal of Managing Projects in Business.
Outstanding Paper in the 2019 EmeraldLiterati Awards: “Why doesn't performance management perform?” International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management.
Recent books:
Pina e Cunha, M., Clegg, S.R., Rego, A. & Berti, M. (2021) Paradoxes of Power and Leadership. London: Routledge.
Berti, M., Simpson, A., Pina e Cunha, M. & Clegg, S.R., (2021) Elgar Introduction to Organizational Paradox Theory. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Maclean, M., Clegg, S. R., Suddaby, R. & Harvey, C. (2021) Historical Organization Studies: Theory and Applications. London: Routledge.
Clegg, S. R., Skyttermoen, T. and Vaagaasar, A. L. (2021) Project Management: A Value Creation Approach. London: Sage.
Clegg, S. R., Schweitzer, J., Pitelis, C., and Whittle, A. (2020) Strategy: Theory & Practice, London: Sage. (Wholly new rewritten edition with new authorial team). Cunha, M. P. e, Rego, A., Simpson, A and Clegg, S. R., (2020) Positive Organizational Behaviour, London: Routledge.
Giustiniano, L., Clegg, S. R., Cunha, M. P., and Rego, A. (2019) Elgar introduction to Theories of Organizational Resilience, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
Bygdås, A. L., Clegg, S. R and Hagen, A. L. (2019) Media Management and Digital Transformation, London: Routledge.
Clegg, S. R & Pina e Cunha, M. (2019) Management, Organizations and Contemporary Social Theory. London: Routledge.
Clegg, S. R., Kornberger, M., Pitsis, T, and Mount, M. (2019) Managing and Organizations: an introduction to theory and practice, London: Sage, Fifth edition.
Forthcoming books
Clegg, S. R., Ke, Y., Devkar, G, Mangione, G, Shankar, S. (2022) Infrastructure Development: A Critical International Perspective on Value in Public-Private Partnerships. Cheltenham: Elgar.
Hi folks,
I would like to invite you to the next Virtual Baltic Session, representing a distinctive research development series of events at the faculty of Business & Law at Northumbria University. With a love of research theme, the Baltic Sessions have expanded regionally, nationally and increasingly internationally (to include academics from countries such as the US, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, France, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, UAE). They speak to a wide audience as they focus on the critical future of universities, the management discipline and navigating alternative academic careers that make a difference individually, institutionally, and societally.
I am really delighted to announce that Professor Roy Suddaby (University of Victoria, Canada; Washington State University, USA and University of Liverpool Management School, UK) has agreed to speak virtually from 15.30-17.00 (U.K. time) on Thursday, 3rd March.
With a vast editorial and publishing experience in the world’s major management journals, Roy will provide a confessional tale around the lessons he has learnt from his career and how he has developed a love of his research area - exploring institutional legitimacy, authenticity, identity and history as sources of change and innovation. He will share his ensuing views around research success and impact.
The above focus is particularly significant when we reflect on Roy’s career and his achievements - Thompson Reuters identified Roy as one of the world’s most highly cited researchers in business and economics in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017. He is a past editor of the Academy of Management Review and is or has been an editorial board member of the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, and the Journal of Business Venturing.
Please do check out his short bio, presentation info and picture attached, for those people who are not aware of Roy and his research.
As per usual I would urge early career academics and doctoral students to attend the session not only for the world leading subject covered, but the chance to hear another founding figure in the management field. For the more experienced academics and managers, I would also recommend the session as it tackles crucial questions around the career, research success and impact.
I again would stress that these sessions aim to be an open, informal research discussion around the topic in question. The Baltic Sessions’ have a levelling ethos, which attempts to create a regular, non-judgmental meeting space and culture to boost collegiality, above and beyond specific research specialisms and groups. It aims to move beyond multidisciplinary rhetoric and aspiration towards a more processual meeting space for generative ideas and agency. It follows on from Baltic Sessions from many of the world's leading academics who have something to say about individual and organizational futures in HE.... such as Mats Alvesson, David Knights, Mark Learmonth, Paul Hibbert, Martin Parker, Gibson Burrell, Steffen Boehm, Chris Grey, Sarah Robinson, Dennis Tourish. 21/07/2024, 10:43 Baltic Session: Enactment and the Boundary-less Career: Making Sense of the Love of Research (Professor Roy Suddaby, Univ. of Victoria…
Again, in order to pick up on the informal feel of the Baltic Sessions, can I suggest to all of the participants that they come prepared with a cake/biscuit &/or drink and maybe some thoughts of their own!! If you would like to attend, I would appreciate it if you could accept the invitation, so I can get a feel for the numbers please and the link for the Microsoft teams meeting is below. Looking forward to yet another interesting and pertinent discussion!! Finally, in the spirit of an interdisciplinary ethos, please feel free to pass this invitation on to any academics and senior managers across other universities, faculties etc. that would find this session valuable. I would also appreciate it if you could pass this invitation on to any newer academics, who have inadvertently not been included in this invitation. One final request is to ask if you could forward any academic names that you feel would be suitable as speakers for future Baltic Sessions.
Kind Regards, David
Abstract
Many of you will recognize that I have ‘borrowed’ part of the title of this talk from Karl Weick, whose massive contribution to management theory appears to be premised on Sorin Kierkegaard’s famous observation that we live life forward, but only understand it backwards. In this talk, I describe my personal pursuit of the boundaryless career and reflect on how this pursuit has informed my research. My overall conclusion is that academic research often works best when we study those phenomena in which we are personally deficient. I elaborate how my focal interest in time and change arises from my personal neglect of time and resistance to change. I extend this reasoning - let’s call it oppositional discourse - to my current interest in the critical role of institutions and their associated social symbolic resources – legitimacy, authenticity, identity and history – as sources of change and innovation, rather than their assumptive role as sources of stability and continuity. I conclude with some reflections on how we might redefine research success and impact in the context of a boundary-less career.
Biography:
Roy Suddaby is the Winspear Chair of Management at the Peter B. Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria, Canada, Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Carson College of Business at Washington State University, USA and Professor of Organizational Theory at the University of Liverpool Management School, UK. Professor.
Roy is a past editor of the Academy of Management Review and is or has been an editorial board member of the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, and the Journal of Business Venturing. He has won best-paper awards from the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, and the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada as well as the Greif Research Impact Award from the Academy of Management and the University of Southern California.
Roy was recently named a Fellow of the Academy of Management, a JMI Scholar by the Western Academy of Management and a Member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada. Thompson Reuters identified Roy as one of the world’s most highly cited researchers in business and economics in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017.
Hi folks,
I would like to invite you to the first of several Virtual Baltic Sessions of this academic year (there is also an intention to run some face to face sessions as well), as part of the faculty-wide research development sessions at the faculty of Business & Law at Northumbria University with networking opportunities regionally, nationally and internationally (to include countries such as the US, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel). I am really delighted to announce that Professor Dennis Tourish (University of Sussex) has agreed to speak virtually from 13.00 -14.30 on Wednesday, 3rd November. I would encourage all academics across disciplines to attend this session as he will directly tackle the core of the Baltic Session’s ethos of love of research, particularly focusing on how to make a responsible difference in management research. As a world leading authority in the leadership research area, he is editor of the journal Leadership and has recently published insightful work around what he sees as a research crisis in the management field, proposing ways to make research more meaningful and responsible. Please do check out his short bio, presentation info and picture below, for those people who are not aware of Dennis and his research. He has many recent plaudits including best paper of the year around this subject in the Academy of Management Learning & Education journal. His session will draw from this paper and his recent thought-provoking book, Management Studies in Crisis: Fraud Deception and Meaningless Research, published in 2019. His interests, expertise and outputs span the dark side of leadership, leadership and organizational effectiveness, hubris in leadership, research misconduct and cults.
As per usual I would urge early career academics and doctoral students to attend the session not only for the subject covered, but the chance to hear another founding figure in the management field. Dennis has an infectious personality and engages his audience from a standpoint of passionate provocation combined with a humanity, much needed in the management discipline at this unprecedented time. For the more experienced academics and managers, I would also recommend the session as it tackles crucial questions around the importance of impact of research for business school futures. Dennis’s work has key relevance to research leadership, career support and development for academics’ staff, planning and organizing research that matters and putting research exercises, league tables and accreditations in perspective to a more critically reflexive, responsible strategy.
I again would stress that these sessions aim to be an open, informal research discussion around the topic in question. The Baltic Sessions’ have a levelling ethos, which attempts to create a regular, non- judgmental meeting space and culture to boost collegiality across the faculty, above and beyond specific research specialisms and groups. It aims to move beyond multidisciplinary rhetoric and aspiration towards a more processual meeting space for generative ideas and agency. It follows on from Baltic Sessions from many of the world's leading academics who have something to say about individual and organizational futures in HE.... such as Ma ts Alvesson, David Knights, Mark Learmonth, Paul Hibbert, Martin Parker, Gibson Burrell, Steffen Boehm, Chris Grey, Sarah Robinson.
Again, in order to pick up on the informal feel of the Baltic Sessions, can I suggest to all of the participants that they come prepared with a cake/biscuit &/or drink and maybe some thoughts of their own!! If you would like to attend, I would appreciate it if you could accept the invitation, so I can get a feel for the numbers please and the link for the Microsoft teams meeting is below. Looking forward to yet another interesting and pertinent discussion!! Finally, in the spirit of an interdisciplinary ethos, please feel free to pass this invitation on to any academics and senior managers across other faculties that would find this session valuable. As per usual now, I would also encourage you to pass this invitation on to any academics and senior managers in Durham, Newcastle, Teesside, Sunderland Universities (and beyond the region) who you think would find this session of interest. Just to reiterate, the sessions are increasingly inclusive of external people from the region and beyond, as it is hoped that the sessions could provide an opportunity, particularly at this time, for our academics (& for other faculties & institutions) to craft a wider meaningful community of practice. I would also appreciate it if you could pass this invitation on to any newer academics, who have inadvertently not been included in this invitation. One final request is to ask if you could forward any academic names that you feel would be suitable as speakers for future Baltic Sessions.
Kind Regards, David
Bio:
Dennis Tourish is Professor of Leadership and Organization Studies at the University of Sussex Business School. He is the editor the journal Leadership, and author of the book Management Studies in Crisis: Fraud Deception and Meaningless Research, published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. It is now being translated into Japanese. He is editor of the journal Leadership. His 2020 paper ‘The triumph of nonsense in management studies’ was published in Academy of Management Learning & Education in 2020 and won its best paper of the year award.
Abstract: Management Studies in Crisis: The importance of doing meaningful research
More management research than ever is being published. However, very little of it is read by anyone, and even less of it makes a difference. Much of it is formulaic and dull, produced purely to advance people’s careers and satisfy the requires of various assessment exercises. The fetishization of ‘developing theory’ by our top journals also encourages much writing that is pretentious, impenetrable, and frankly nonsense. In addition, more journal papers in our field are being retracted for a variety of reasons, including fraud. This presentation will explore what drives these problems. It will suggest steps we can take to promote responsible research and restore a deeper sense of genuine purpose to our academic lives.
Hi folks,
I would like to invite you to the next Virtual Baltic Session, as part of the faculty-wide research development sessions. I am really delighted to announce that Professor Mats Alvesson (University of Lund, University of Queensland Business School, and at City, University of London) has agreed to speak from 13.30 -15.00 on Wednesday, 9th June. I would urge you to attend this session as his contribution to critical scholarship in organization studies and the management discipline as a whole is second to none. Please do check out his his most impressive short bio below, for those people who are not aware of Mats's research.
His session will draw from his 2017 book, written with Yiannis Gabriel and Roland Paulsen (Return to Meaning. For a Social Science with Something to Say (Oxford University Press 2017, w Y Gabriel & R Paulsen). Following on from other prestigious speakers which have presented at the Baltic Sessions, the talk by Mats is very relevant to the ‘love of research’ ethos of the Baltic Sessions, particularly around the theme of love of making a difference. Just reflecting upon other research by Mats, with other book titles such as ‘The stupidity paradox’ and ‘The triumph of emptiness’, the nature of Mats’s research offers a timely contestation to tempting, yet damaging pathways in business and management, social science and universities in general (not to mention publishers, politicians etc.).
As per usual I would urge early career academics and doctoral students to attend the session not only for the subject covered, but the chance to hear another founding figure in the organisation studies field. For the more experienced academics and managers, I would also recommend the session as it tackles crucial questions around meaningful individual and institutional futures.
I again would stress that these sessions aim to be an open, informal research discussion around the topic in question. The Baltic Sessions’ have a levelling ethos, which attempts to create a regular, non-judgemental meeting space and culture to boost collegiality across the faculty, above and beyond specific research specialisms and groups. It aims to move beyond multidisciplinary rhetoric and aspiration towards a more processual meeting space for generative ideas and agency.
Again, in order to pick up on the informal feel of the Baltic Sessions, can I suggest to all of the participants that they come prepared with a cake/biscuit &/or drink and maybe some thoughts of their own!! If you would like to attend I would appreciate it if you could accept the invitation, so I can get a feel for the numbers please and the link for the Microsoft teams meeting is below. Looking forward to yet another interesting and pertinent discussion!! Finally, in the spirit of an interdisciplinary ethos, please feel free to pass this invitation on to any academics and senior managers across other faculties within Northumbria University that would find this session valuable.
As per usual now, I would also encourage you to pass this invitation on to any academics and senior managers in Durham, Newcastle, Teesside, Sunderland Universities (and beyond the region) who you think would find this session of interest. Just to reiterate, the sessions are increasingly inclusive of external people from the region, as it is hoped that the sessions could provide an opportunity, particularly at this time, for our academics (& for other faculties & institutions) to craft a wider meaningful community of practice. I would also appreciate it if you could pass this invitation on to any newer academics, who have inadvertently not been included in this invitation.
Kind Regards, David
Abstract: ‘Return to meaning. For a social science with something to say’
There are many complaints about most research having little of real value to offer in terms of new ideas or important empirical studies. Research seems increasingly to be about CV and metrics improvement, becoming employ- and promotable and increasing the position legitimacy of institutions. Can we do something to change the situation, i.e.create socially and academically relevant and meaningfulresearch? And, if so, how?
Short Bio for Mats:
Mats Alvesson is Professor of Business Administration at the University of Lund, Sweden, at University of Queensland Business School, Australia and at City, University of London. Research interests include critical theory, gender, power, management of professional service (knowledge intensive) organizations, leadership, identity, organizational image, organizational culture and symbolism, qualitative methods and philosophy of science. He has published Return to Meaning. For a Social Science with Something to Say (Oxford University Press 2017, w Y Gabriel & R Paulsen).
Other books include Reflexive Methodology ((Sage 2017, w K Sköldberg), Reflexive Leadership (Sage 2017, w M Blom & S Sveningsson), The Stupidity Paradox (Profile 2016, w André Spicer), Managerial Lives(Cambridge University Press 2016, w Stefan Sveningsson), The Triumph of Emptiness (Oxford University Press 2013), Qualitative Research and Theory Development (Sage 2011, with Dan Kärreman), Constructing Research Questions. (Sage 2013, w J Sandberg)
Hi folks,
I would like to invite you to the next Virtual Baltic Session, as part of the faculty-wide research development sessions. I am delighted to announce that again we have not one but two external speakers for this session. Really excited that Prof. David Knights and Dr Caroline Clarke (their short bios are below) have agreed to speak from 13.00-14.30 on Wednesday, 7th April. I hope Caroline will forgive me if I just said a few extra words about David. I am sure that all the eminent speakers that have gone before would acknowledge David’s gravitas and legacy in critical scholarship and organization studies. He was described in a recent laudatio by Yiannis Gabriel in the following way – ‘David’s contribution to critical scholarship in organization studies, along with that of Mats Alvesson, Hugh Willmott and a few others was decisive and, without it, the course of our discipline would have been dramatically different’. Whilst David’s research has covered eclectic areas his common thread appears to be around unmasking oppression. Reflecting on what he has achieved institutionally, he founded the Labour Process Conference which was the prequel to the emergence of Critical Management Studies, and in 1994, he co-founded Gender, Work and Organization. In order to provide a flavour of David’s massive impact in critical scholarship, just a list of some of his past PhD students offer some insight: Jo Brewis, David Collinson, Chris Grey, Deborah Kerfoot, Anita Mangan, Pam Odih, John Roberts, Andrew Sturdy, Emma Surman, Theo Vurdubakis, and Hugh Willmott.
Caroline and David have been working together for several years, producing much acclaimed research. Their session will draw from their recent book chapter of the same name as the title of this session (The Killing Fields of Identity Politics In: The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Edited by: Andrew D. Brown, Oxford University Press) and a recent journal article – (Pushing the Boundaries of Amnesia and Myopia: A Critical Review of the Literature on Identity in Management and Organization Studies, International Journal of Management Reviews, Special Issue: Exploring the Registers of Identity Research, 19, 3, 2017, pp. 337-356). Although the session represents a warning around unexamined assumptions around attachments to identity, Caroline and David acknowledge that an informed, reflexive, nuanced and theoretically challenging focus, which has more positive potential effects, with a capacity to create new social movements. They point out the magnitude of the challenge around discrimination, prejudice, aggressive masculine competition, conquest and control and the growing identity politics of nationalist, if not xenophobic and racist, constructions of boundaries and borders.
It is very relevant to the ‘love of research’ ethos of the Baltic Sessions, particularly around the theme of love of making a difference- quite a common topic within the Baltic Sessions!... Furthermore, with their breadth of research and interests this session with Caroline and David has much to offer many different audiences. As per usual I would urge early career academics and doctoral students to attend the session not only for the subject covered, but the chance to hear a founding figure in the organisation studies field. For the more experienced academics and managers, I would also recommend the session as it tackles crucial questions around the I have included an abstract below.
I again would stress that these sessions aim to be an open, informal research discussion around the topic in question. The Baltic Sessions’ have a levelling ethos, which attempts to create a regular, non-judgemental meeting space and culture to boost collegiality across the faculty, above and beyond specific research specialisms and groups. It aims to move beyond multidisciplinary rhetoric and aspiration towards a more processual meeting space for generative ideas and agency.
Again, in order to pick up on the informal feel of the Baltic Sessions, can I suggest to all of the participants that they come prepared with a cake/biscuit &/or drink and maybe some thoughts of their own!! If you would like to attend, I would appreciate it if you could accept the invitation, so I can get a feel for the numbers please and the link for the Microsoft teams meeting is below. Looking forward to yet another interesting and particularly pertinent discussion!! Finally, in the spirit of an interdisciplinary ethos, please feel free to pass this invitation on to any academics and senior managers across other faculties within Northumbria University that would find this session valuable.
As per usual now, I would also encourage you to pass this invitation on to any academics and senior managers in Durham, Newcastle, Teeside, Sunderland Universities who you think would find this session of interest. Just to reiterate, the sessions are increasingly inclusive of external people from the region, as it is hoped that the sessions could provide an opportunity, particularly at this time, for our academics (& for other faculties & institutions) to craft a wider community of practice. I would also appreciate it if you could pass this invitation on to any newer academics, who have inadvertently not been included in this invitation.
Abstract: ‘The Killing Fields of Identity Politics’
Ideas about identity have a comparatively long and diverse history that contemporary management and organization studies (MOS) ignore at their peril, and a principal aim of this article is to examine some of the implications of doing so. One implication is the tendency for a perpetual reinvention of the wheel, and invariably one that is expected to run on the firm foundations of a clear and smooth road ahead. In matters of identity, however, paths are strewn with debris, roads full of potholes, numerous back streets turn into blind alleys and often there is not even a road on which to travel or a destination that is anything more than ephemeral. Staying with the same metaphor, the literature on identity in MOS often seems blinded by the oncoming headlights, thus losing the capacity to look back at what has gone before or sideways to alternative literatures.
The obsession with securing recognition through identity pervades organisational, institutional, political and everyday life. As academics, our culpability in promulgating this fascination, or idée fixee is indisputable, for as a collective body we are responsible for a proliferation of articles, books and conference streams on identity. However, apart from a few exceptions, the majority of texts fail to interrogate the concept to uncover its dangers, but instead reproduce the everyday common-sense fascination, indeed addictive, preoccupation with seeking order, stability and security through identity. In this chapter, we expose this neglect within the organization studies literature and argue that it contributes to, rather than challenges, some of the major social ills surrounding identity – discrimination and prejudice, aggressive masculine competition, conquest and control and the growing identity politics of nationalist, if not xenophobic and racist, constructions of boundaries and borders.
Caroline’s Short Bio:
Caroline Clarke is a Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies at the Open University Business School. She has a variety of research interests located within Organization Studies, with a particular emphasis on identity, anxiety, insecurity and power. Caroline’s research includes a focus on academics in business schools, first-opinion veterinary surgeons, and more recently, post humanism and critical animal studies.
David’s Short Bio:
David Knights is a Professor at Lancaster University Management School and at Oxford Brookes Business School. His interests include the body and ethics, gender and diversity, identity and power, and management and leadership. He was co-founder and editor of Gender, Work and Organization from 1994-2016. His most recent book is Leadership, Gender and Ethics: Embodied Reason in challenging Masculinities, New York and London: Routledge, 2021.
Hi folks,
I would like to invite you to the next Virtual Baltic Session, as part of the faculty-wide research development sessions. I am delighted to announce that we have not one but two more prestigious external speakers for this session, Prof. Mark Learmonth (newly appointed editor in chief of the Human Relations journal from Jan 2020 and past editor for Organisation Studies journal) and Prof. Kevin Morrell (known globally for his work on ‘evidence-based’ approach to business research and on understanding change & careers along with other research around CSR, sustainability & strategy), from down the road at Durham University and it will take place from 12.00-13.30 on Wednesday, 10th February. Their session will explore ‘Critical Perspectives on Leadership and Making a Difference’, drawn from their recent book ‘Critical Perspectives on Leadership: The Language of Corporate Power’. It is very relevant to the ‘love of research’ ethos of the Baltic Sessions, as they have chosen the theme of love of making a difference. I am particularly interested in their views of how leadership needs to change in a post-Covid-19/ ecologically sustainable world for HE, the NHS, policing (areas I know they have an interest in) and right across the public and private sector.…So again something to be gained for many different audiences.
As per usual I would urge early career academics and doctoral students to attend the session not only for the subject covered but the way it is covered. For the more experienced academics and managers, I would also recommend the session as it tackles crucial questions around the changing nature of leadership – a crucial area which impacts on working lives across disciplines.
I have included an abstract explaining what Mark and Kevin are going to talk about and their bios are below. I again would stress that these sessions aim to be an open, informal research discussion around the topic in question. The Baltic Sessions’ have a levelling ethos, which attempts to create a regular, non-judgemental meeting space and culture to boost collegiality across the faculty, above and beyond specific research specialisms and RIG focus. It aims to move beyond multidisciplinary rhetoric and aspiration towards a more processual meeting space for generative ideas and agency.
Again, in order to pick up on the informal feel of the Baltic Sessions, can I suggest to all of the participants that they come prepared with a cake/biscuit &/or drink and maybe some thoughts of their own!!
If you would like to attend, I would appreciate it if you could accept the invitation, so I can get a feel for the numbers please and the link for the Microsoft teams meeting is below. Looking forward to yet another interesting and particularly pertinent discussion!! Finally, in the spirit of an interdisciplinary ethos, please feel free to pass this invitation on to any academics and senior managers across other faculties within Northumbria University that would find this session valuable.
As Mark and Kevin are from Durham University, I would also encourage you to pass this invitation on to any academics and senior managers in Durham, Newcastle, Teeside, Sunderland Universities who you think would find this session of interest. By doing so this could make the attendance much more inclusive of external people from the region, as it is hoped that the sessions could provide an opportunity, particularly at this time, for our academics (& for other faculties & institutions) to craft a wider community of practice. Finally, I would appreciate it if you could pass this invitation on to any newer academics, who have inadvertently not been included in this invitation.
Kind Regards,
David
Short Bios for Mark & Kevin….
Kevin Morrell is a Professor of Strategy at Durham University. He is interested in how corporations and public sector organisations can contribute to the public good.
Mark Learmonth is a Professor of Organization Studies at Durham University. He spent 17 years as a health care administrator prior to academic life.
Recent joint book which the session is based upon….
Learmonth, M. & Morrell,K. (2019). Critical Perspectives on Leadership:The Language of Corporate Power. Routledge.
Abstract:
Within contemporary culture, ‘leadership’ is seen in ways that appeal to celebrated societal values and norms. As a result, it is becoming difficult to use the language of leadership without at the same time assuming its essentially positive, intrinsically affirmative nature. Within organizations, routinely referring to bosses as ‘leaders’ has, therefore, become both a symptom and a cause of a deep, largely unexamined new conceptual architecture. This architecture underpins how we think about authority and power at work. Capitalism, and its turbo-charged offspring neo-liberalism, have effectively captured ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ to serve their own purposes. In other words, organizational leadership today is so often a particular kind of insidious conservativism dressed up in radical adjectives. Our presentation seeks to make visible the work that the language of leadership does in perpetuating fictions that are useful for bosses of work organizations. We do this so that we can make a start in unravelling the fiction.
Internal Panel:
Prof. Joyce Liddle
Professor John Wilson
Prof David Charles
Prof James Cunningham
Dr Alex Hope
Professor David Jones (myself)
Hi folks,
I do hope everyone is well. Just to provide an update on the faculty’s research development Baltic Sessions. Although I had several prestigious speakers lined up for the faculty at the Baltic Centre, I have been able to postpone these, until we eventually physically return to the university.
In the meantime, as a way of maintaining a continuity with the ethos of the Baltic Sessions, within this time of virtual communication, I would like to draw your attention to the following virtual Baltic Session internal session to take place at 13.00-14.30 on Monday, 13th May:
The topic is a pertinent one!!!
‘Crafting Business Schools & Higher Education within a Post-Coronavirus (COVID19) Pandemic Future’
It is anticipated that the discussion will include the following tensions:
*Tweaked social mission vs. New Social Purpose
*Streamlined virtual space with add on physical space vs. Meaningful Physical space + add on virtual space
*Crafting slack vs. Optimal efficiency
*Self care vs. Collective care
*Excellence vs. Vulnerability
*Local vs. National vs. Global university
*Management ethos of measurement/metrics vs. Collegial ethos of judgement
*Eco efficiency vs. Bio-cultural connection
*Interdisciplinary vs. Disciplinary focus
To kick the research discussion off, we have a panel comprising a few people who will provide their opinions (just a few minutes each), based on their research area and invaluable experience.. See above list.
Most crucially, we will open this discussion up to everyone then. I hope you will find the session useful, as I think no matter what subject area you specialise in, the Coronavirus opens up not only challenges but opportunities to reassess research priorities as well. Please remember that these sessions, like the Baltic Sessions, aim to be inclusive - they are equally as important for early career academics, PhD students as they are for more senior academics. This session aims to be an open, informal research discussion around the HE future in the context of the crisis we are living through and hopefully be applicable to everyone.
In order to pick up on the informal feel of the Baltic Sessions, can I suggest all of the participants to come prepared with a cake/biscuit &/or drink and maybe some thoughts of their own!!
If you could accept the invitation (either by accepting this invitation or emailing me) so I can get a feel for the numbers please and the link for the Microsoft teams meeting is below. Looking forward to an interesting and pertinent discussion!!
Kind Regards,
David
Hi folks,
I would like to invite you to the next Virtual Baltic Session, as part of the faculty-wide research development sessions. I am delighted to announce that we have another prestigious external speaker for this session, Prof. Martin Parker from Bristol University and it will take place from 12.30-14.00 on Wednesday, 2nd December. I can highly recommend Martin as a speaker as he always strikes me as someone who really embodies the Baltic Session’s brief of love of research. As you can see the title of his presentation is very relevant to working out our collective future as a management and law faculty in forging a love of making a difference. Following on from his much acclaimed and provocative book ‘Shut down the business school’, he has just published a book around life after Covid-19, which tackles many different areas which I am sure he will reflect on his session…So something to be gained for many different audiences. I have included an abstract explaining what Martin is going to talk about and his bio below.
As per usual I would urge early career academics and doctoral students to attend the session not only for the subject covered but the way it is covered. For the more experienced academics and managers, I would highly recommend the session as it tackles crucial questions around the place of a business school/management & law faculty within the wider university to meet future challenges.
I would stress that these sessions aim to be an open, informal research discussion around the topic in question. The Baltic Sessions’ overall have a levelling ethos, which attempts to create a regular, non-judgemental meeting space and culture to boost collegiality across the faculty, above and beyond specific research specialisms and RIG focus. It aims to move beyond multidisciplinary rhetoric and aspiration towards a more processual meeting space for generative ideas and agency. Again, in order to pick up on the informal feel of the Baltic Sessions, can I suggest to all of the participants that they come prepared with a cake/biscuit &/or drink and maybe some thoughts of their own!!
If you would like to attend I would appreciate it if you could accept the invitation, so I can get a feel for the numbers please and the link for the Microsoft teams meeting is below. Looking forward to another interesting and particularly pertinent discussion!! Finally, in the spirit of an interdisciplinary ethos, please feel free to pass this invitation on to any academics and senior managers across other faculties within Northumbria University that would find this session valuable. As the session looks at the future of universities as well as business/ management in a post-Covid world this may be of interest to them.
As a new idea, I would also encourage you to pass this invitation on to any academics and senior managers in Newcastle, Durham, Teeside universities who you think would find this session of interest. This has been driven from the increased visibility of the Baltic Sessions and the growing external demand to attend. Most crucially, by making the attendance much more inclusive of external people, it is hoped that the sessions could provide an opportunity, particularly at this time, for our academics to craft a wider community of practice. Finally, I would appreciate it if you could pass this invitation on to any newer academics, who have inadvertently not been included in this invitation.
Kind Regards, David
Associate Editor for Management Learning - ' Journal for Critical, Reflexive Scholarship on Organisation and Learning'
Some selected recent publications….
Jones DR, Visser M, Stokes P, et al. (2020) The Performative University: ‘Targets’, ‘Terror’ and ‘Taking Back Freedom’ in Academia. Management Learning. 51(4):363-377. doi:10.1177/1350507620927554
Friedman VJ, Robinson S, Egan M, Jones DR, Rhew ND, Sama LM. (2020) Meandering as Method for Conversational Learning and Collaborative Inquiry. Journal of Management Education. 44(5):635-650. doi:10.1177/1052562920934151
Rhew ND, Jones DR, Sama LM, Robinson S, Friedman VJ, Egan M. (2020) Shedding Light on Restorative Spaces and Faculty Well-Being. Journal of Management Education. October 2020. doi:10.1177/1052562920953456
Abstract:
The challenge of covid is a dress rehearsal for the system changes that we need to see to address climate change. In this presentation, I will summarise my discontent with business school education and research, and then propose some ways in which we might collectively reinvent the business school in order to make a difference, rather than just reproducing the same. At the end of the session, I hope to provoke a conversation around the following questions.
What role can a university play in a place, an economy?
Can a business school help to produce a new economy?
What knowledge do we have that is useful?
What techniques should we use?
What are the incentives, for ‘us’ and for ‘them’?
What are the dangers, for ‘us’ and for ‘them’?
Can we imagine a different world, after covid?
Bio:
Martin Parker is Professor of Organization Studies and lead for the Inclusive Economy Initiative at the University of Bristol. His recent books are 'Shut Down the Business School' (Pluto 2018), 'Anarchism, Organization and Management' (Routledge 2020) and 'Life After COVID-19' (Bristol University Press 2020).
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