Executive Board David Boje, Chair Donna Carlon, Program Co-Chair Carolyn Gardner, Program Co-Chair Kenneth Ehrensal, Treasurer and Local Arrangements Chair Grace Ann Rosile, Member at Large Alexis Downs, Member at Large Advisory Board Dariusz Jemielniak, Webmaster and all things Virtual Rita Durant, Critical Cultural Perspective Marja Flory and Lorraine Warren, In a Different Voice Robin Matthews and Frits Schipper, Philosophical Guidance Helene Fine, from Theory to Action and Activism Kenneth Jorgensen, International Perspectives Slawek Magala, associated journal editors

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sc'MOI 2010

Theme: Academic Reflexivity

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Stephen Linstead

University of York (UK)

Dates: Thursday 25 March through Saturday 27 March Place: Embassy Suites Old Town, Alexandria, Virginia

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Hotel Reservation Information

the rates for the group are as follows:
King non-smoking single or double $169/night
Two Double beds single or double $189/night

there is also 11.5% tax on top of that.

For those of you in the States, you can make a reservation by calling the hotel at either:

1-800-EMBASSY or 703-684-5900 and ask for the "Standing Conference for Management and Organization Inquiry" rate

Anyone who wants to book online go to the Embassy Suites homepage and when you start booking and it asks for Group/Convention Code use SIM

Please note two things about hotels in the Washington DC area -- on weeknights the occupancy rates pass 90% and all of the hotels in the area of our conference (including our hotel) are currently charging rates that are in excess of $100/night higher than our group rate. PLEASE BOOK YOUR ROOM AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. If our block books out we may be able to get a few more rooms at this rate, but we would need to be able to do this well in advance of the conference.
Learn more about historical Alexandria, Virginia

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Registration Information

Fees: Full Rate -- $300 (if paid by 1 March 2010)
$350 (after 1 March 2010)

Graduate Students -- $150

Contact Ken Ehrensal -- k.ehrensal@mac.com -- for a registration form

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Call for Papers

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This year’s Standing Conference for Management and Organizational Inquiry will ask participants to explore the idea of “academic reflexivity”. Some possible topics might include: • What do we really mean by “academic reflexivity”? • Are we really serious about “academic reflexivity”? • Disciplinarity and reflexivity. • The administered order indoctrination of academics’ permissible reflexivity • Intentions aside, can academics be reflexive? • How do institutional constraints limit “academic reflexivity”? • What is the relationship of story-ing and story-telling to “academic reflexivity”? Academic Reflexivity – possible definitions: (1) The act of an academic in examining one’s assumptions on one’s scholarly activity within the standpoint of the political economy and its material conditions. (2) Sensemaking that is skewed toward a managerialist orientation by rewards and other institutional disciplinary apparatus. (3) Communities of practice that have included or excluded answerability ethics of one’s own complicity in what gets made sensible.

The program chairs invite papers on any and all of these possible topics, or invite you to be reflexive and define your own topic around this year’s theme (see David Boje’s position paper below).

Abstracts of 500-1000 words should be sent to the program co-chairs Donna Carlon (dcarlon@uco.edu) and Carolyn Gardner (carolyn.gardner@mac.com) by November 15, 2009. Letters of acceptance will be sent by December 15, 2009.

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ACADEMIC REFLEXIVITY: Oxymoron and Vertigo
Position paper by David M. Boje October 13, 2009

Academic Reflexivity is an oxymoron. Academics are not expected to be reflexive. We are indoctrinated into a non-reflexivity. Yes, there is a reflexive praxis, since Socrates, reinvented by Argyris and Schon, then again by Cunliffe and Shotter.
Our keynote speaker Steven Linstead will have something to say about the ethos of Academic Reflexivity, perhaps its genealogy, and its refusal to stare into the abyss.
Academic Reflexivity has been reinvented by the Academy of Management (AOM) and the AASCB. Their project is to colonize the planet with a set of American academic standards, a normalized global managerialism. Once upon a time, AACSB switched from laundry lists to mission, and now it has morphed again into AOL (Assurance of Learning). The Brits have their version of accreditation, one that results in musical academic chairs, and ever-changing addresses of faculty recruited elsewhere to influence the research stats. And in Australia, its all about doing research the government approves. Each nation does it differently. But AACSB and AOM seek to rule all with AOL.
If ever an academic did ‘reflexivity,’ we would be staring into such an abyss, that vertigo would surely result. I used to teach at UCLA and every dissertation was reflexivity done according to Argyris and Schon, and somehow it has been absorbed by managerialism is one more community of practice. I think it all has to do with too much AACSB, to much AOM.
AACSB is a group of deans turned towards software and hard-core curriculum consulting. Each year I enter everything I write, do, and teach, every event of my life into some AACSB dean’s software for my annual performance review. It spits out a standardized resume of my work for my department head, the necessary review committees, and tabulates all my work and life into the requisite AACSB metrics.
One of their consultants gave us instruction on how to do AOL so AACSB would sign our reaccreditation. When we raise the issue that Heidegger as well as all those in Critical Pedagogy (from Freire to Schor) do not believe that learning is measureable, that outcome assessment displacing input assessment (test scores & such) was weak enough education theory, but to do AOL was preposterous and foolish. What were we told? “To resist AACSB is futile.” Of course, AOL is ridiculous. Just do it! Just create assessments that do not measure anything, and then change the curriculum to reflect the celebration of continuous improvement. And we ask, “Does that lead to standardized pedagogy, with standardized modules.” And the answer is shorter, not really even a word, “dahh!”
If we actually did Academic Reflexivity, then we would be face to face with a mirror. We would look into the mirror, and the mirror would crack, or is it our self that is fragmented into a million pieces.
Ethos, pathos, and logos have collapsed, so that reflexivity is just rhetorical maneuvering to get to the ‘yes’ from the master, AACSB. To be of good character is to be accredited. To be emotionally passionate is OK here and there. To have one logos fits all is a guaranteed ‘yes’ to re-accreditation.
The voice of the academic storyteller has switched off. All reflexivity has been banished by the administrative regime of AACSB and AOL. We are now practicing a pathos well known at Disney, just faculty being smiling robots, saying ‘yes master.’
And Critical Academic Reflexivity would introduce such vertigo, such a horrid image as to crack the mirror and us. We would see Kafka’s cockroach staring back at us in the fragments. Such a metamorphosis, that Academic Reflexivity could never happen anymore.
There is of course Managerial Reflexivity. We can enter a world of fiction, a world where consensus rules, where the administered order is the only logic, the emotional pathos, and the ethos is so very instrumental while appearing at surface to be so magnanimous.
I would offer Dorothy Smith, her standpoint theory as a way of Academic Reflexivity. She follows Marx in looking to material conditions and Garfinkel in developing an ethnomethodology, but this time for academics and their theorizing. See, Myers’ application of Smith’s work to how academic women frame success, and are framed by higher education processes. Academic reflexivity could be about being answerable (in Bakhtinian ethical sense) for ones standpoint. As Nietzsche declares, there is no neutral place to stand.
If our Academic Reflexivity standpoint is on the edge of the abyss, or falling into the abyss while staring back at those who pushed us, or even at our own leap, then we have a vertigo experience. We are dizzy, unsteady, and lightheaded.
I have said that there is some kind of difference between retrospective sensemaking and reflexivity on our now-ness and presentness. I think this has to do with noticing non-linear time shapes, and non-flat spatialities.
I join a long list of scholars who admit to multiple chronicities, simultaneous and interactive to one another (Bakhtin, Bennett, de Certeau, Derrida, Heise, Prigogine & Stengers, and so forth).
Antenarrating means noticing multiple bets on the future, and multiple now-choices before the narrative managerial, administered order of a standardized mechanical time, and a global spatial colonizing occurs as the only antenarrative potentiality. If there is a multiplicity of temporalities interacting with a multiplicity of specialties, then we get more vertigo from such Academic Reflexivity.
It’s not about communities of reflexive practice. I follow Walter Benjamin in declaring the death of the storyteller. Its the end of competencies in sensemaking because the communities where we learned such practices of reflexivity have been splintered by division of labor, by hierarchy, by the administrative order of complies to non-sense reaccreditation. We have communities of reflective practice that are more and more about ‘all resistance is futile.’
If Socrates, Aristotle, Newton or Einstein would engage in Academic Reflexivity after years of regiment in AACSB and AOM table of instructions, they would achieve greatness. It’s not about greatness anymore.
We claim to teach our students reflexive practice, without engaging in it ourselves. I think that is because if we stared in the mirror, our complicity in the university turned into an asylum, into a prison, would be so overwhelming, we would just fall into such an endless abyss, we could not recover.
We who claim to be against the administered order, to be critical management scholars, live a dual life. We work in flatland, in linear time shapes, and develop our illusion we are bringing about some kind of dynamic time-space, some alternate chronotope that is all about non-linear dynamics, about far-from-equilibrium. Perhaps we just repeat standard pedagogical programs, and standard review cycles for our manuscripts, and standard recitals at the podium. We spin the wheel, in the rat’s cage, expecting the cheese to come soon.
As a critical postmodern storyteller, there are multiple plots lines, some plot cycles, and some alternative times shapes. I am wondering about spirals and rhizomes. We are at the mercy of AACSB accreditation and reaccreditation cycles, and cycles of classroom schedules, and cycles conference presenting, and cycles of rejection, and sometimes get into revise and resubmit cycles. Our life is so cyclic, just stage after stage of standard cycles, so fit for training students in the corporate life of quarterly returns.
Multiple spatialities would include Tamara, web, maze, labyrinth, rhizomatic assemblage, cyberspace, and some networks the morph.
There could be a revival of a storytelling practice that admits to multiplicity of chronotopes, to multiple temporal and spatial frames that interplay. This would pull cause and effect apart, making it only relevant in near-to-equilibrium situations. The more complexity and chaos situations of far-from-equilibrium would necessitate this storytelling of multiplicities where chance, coincident and accident are commonplace. Such Academic Reflexivity would crack our time-space consciousness.
For me, I like to contemplate the spiral. I make spiral pens, and art object out of baling wire, off the hay bales, that accumulate in our small horse ranch. A spiral puts ethos, pathos, and logos in different relationship. Deleuze looks at spirals in Differences and Repetition. The spiral repetition is not a cycle. It makes what Bennett calls a ‘swerve.’ For me, swerves are those ‘wow moments’ when our living story twists and turns away from linearity and away from recurrent cycles. A spiral is a non-recursive antenarrative time-space shape…As Heise puts it “the cyclical or spiral patterns of history and the recurrence of archetypes that many modernist texts foreground are designed to resist the linearity and mechanicity of standardized time” (1997: 36).
When Academic Reflexivity can storytell the spirals, we will leave normalization of AOM and AACSB to their linear obsession.
References
Argyris, Chris; & Schon, Donald. 1974. Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional effectiveness. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The dialogical Imagination: Four Essays. M. Holquiest (ed), trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bennett, Jane. 2001. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics.
Cunliffe, Ann L. 2002.Reflexive dialogical practice in management learning. Management Learning, 33 (1): 35-61.
de Certeau, Michel. 1984. Practices in Everyday Life. Translated by Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley/London: University of California Press
Deleuze, Giles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. NY: Columbia University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and DifferAnce. London: Routledge & Kean Paul.
Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: The Seabury Press.
Heise, Ursula K. 1997. Chronoschims: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism. Literature, Culture, Theory 23. Mass: Cambridge University Press.
Linstead, Steven. 2006. The comedy of ethics: The New York fout, the du of care and organizational bystanding. In R. Westwood and C. Rhodes (Eds.) Humour, Work, and Organizaiton. London: Routledge, pp. 203-31.
Morin, E. (2008). On complexity. Translated by Robin Postel. Hampton Press, Inc. Cresskill, NJ.
Myers, Martina H. 2009. Institutional Ethnography: How Tenured Academic Women Talk about Success. University of New Mexico doctoral dissertation.
Prigogine, Ilya; & Stengers, Isabelle. 1984. Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with nature. Shambhala/Boulder & London: New Science Library.
Shotter, John. 1993. Conversational Realities: Constructing Life through language. London: Sage.
Shotter, John; & Cunliffe, Ann L. 2002. Managersa as practical authors: Everyday conversations for action. In D. Holman and R. Thorpe (Eds.), Management and Language: The manager as Practical author. London: sage, pp. 15-37.
Smith, Dorothy. E. 1990. The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press.

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