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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Save these dates: 14 - 16 April 2011

sc'MOI 2011 (20th Anniversary) Theme: Storytelling, Narrative and Antenarrative: A Celebration of the Contributions of David Boje

Details to Follow in Early April 2010

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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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Registration Information

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

Graduate Students -- $150

Visa, Mastercard and American Express accepted

Contact Ken Ehrensal -- k.ehrensal@mac.com -- for a registration form and/or a credit card authorization form.

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Traveling to sc’MOI

Please note that the Embassy Suites Old Town Alexandria (Virginia) is immediately across the street from the ‘King Street’ station (blue or yellow lines) of the Washington DC Metro system (map: http://www.wmata.com/rail/maps/map.cfm).

By Amtrak from points north: If you are on the NE Corridor Line from Boston or NY, exit the train at “New Carrollton” (Maryland) and change to the Metro Orange Line (this is the end of the line and it only runs towards the District from here). Take the Orange Line to “L’Enfant Plaza” and change for a Yellow line train towards “Huntington”. Exit the train at the “King Street” station. This route is easier than taking the train all the way into the District to Union Station and then traveling out to Alexandria.

By Amtrak from points south: The Alexandria Amtrak station is adjacent to the “King Street” Metro station. Exit the station to the right, turn right on King Street, walk one block and you will see the Embassy Suites across the road to the right (sorry about all the right turns for all you political liberals).

By Air: The Best of the Best: Fly into Washington National Airport (DCA); take the Metro Blue Line (towards Franconia-Springfield) or Yellow Line (towards Huntington) two (2) stops to “King Street”.

Flying into Baltimore-Washington International (BWI): BWI is about 50 miles north of Alexandria. BWI is serviced by both Amtrak and MARC (commuter train). Take the train towards DC. You want to exit at New Carrollton (this is one stop on Amtrak and a short ride on MARC) and change for the Metro. See instructions above for Amtrak from points north.

Flying into Dulles (IAD): Dulles is about 30 miles south of Alexandria. There are several options to get to Alexandria. You can take the Super Shuttle door-to-door at $35 each way. (http://www.washfly.com/super_shuttle.htm) Alternatively, you can take the Washington Flyer coach to the end of the Metro Orange line (“West Falls Church” station) and take the Orange line to “Rosslyn” station and transfer to the Blue line (towards Franconia-Springfield) and exit at King Street. (http://www.metwashairports.com/dulles/809.htm) Alternatively you can take the Metrobus Route 5A to Rosslyn Metro station and change to the Blue line (towards Franconia-Springfield) and exit at King Street. (http://www.metwashairports.com/dulles/809.htm)

Driving and Parking:

The Embassy Suites has a garage that is $24/day with in and out privileges. There are other garages in the area that are a couple of blocks away that may be cheaper. We are checking on that.

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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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