CFP: Relational Theories of Organization

Call for Papers—Special Issue on

Towards a Relational Understanding of Organization and Value:
For Whom? For What? To What Effect?

Guest Editors:
Craig Prichard, Massey University, New Zealand
Sarah Stookey, Central Connecticut State University, USA
Stefano Harney, Queen Mary, University of London, UK

Deadline for submissions: 2 March 2009

This special issue is posed as a challenge to critical organizational scholars to (re)engage with the problem of how value relations constitute organizational processes and make organizations possible.

Recently, concern with ‘value’ has been on the rise in various organization and management publications. For scholars, ‘value’ is a core conceptual and empirical puzzle but, when associated with ‘management’, value tends to be is either taken for granted or understood narrowly as a problem of how economic value is created, appropriated and distributed in organizations. Outside academic circles, however, questions of ‘value’ have received more contested attention.

On the one hand, a broad neo-liberal movement has swept the western economies, bringing an increased financialization of social and political life. This new liberalism includes shareholder activism, the development of the personal finance industry, new financial tools and modes of assessment for organizations, and State-sponsored marketization and consumerization of most social and political issues. All this has extended the centrality of the consumer and the individual as the primary locus of responsibility over health, happiness, and wellbeing. How to ‘add value’ to one’s life, to one’s relationships, to one’s enterprise, and to one’s nation, has become standardized vernacular.

On the other hand, the new liberalism has not gone unopposed. Counter movements have sprung up under the banners of ‘fair trade’, ‘anti-globalization’ and more recently ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’. Under such banners, multiple groups and constituencies including farmers, small business people, and consumers have confronted world leaders, corporations, and supra-national bureaucrats. Alongside direct action, such movements are also contributing to a debate on ‘value’, raising popular consciousness about the social, political, economic, and environmental genealogies of food, clothing, shelter, technologies, and energy use. In some cases, they have forced states, firms, and individuals to reconsider narrow definitions that simply identify value in terms of prices, things, and monetary units. For instance, they propose redefining value to incorporate political, social, and ecological relationships between people and between people and their environments. Some of this work challenges institutionalized ‘governance’ structures that organize the distribution of economic surplus in the family, the firm, and the economy.

While these contested concerns over ‘value’ seem to be pointing at a need to move away from absolute or even relativist theories of value and towards more relational understandings, management scholars’ response to relational definitions has been at best mixed. For many the liberal definition of value goes unquestioned. The global sourcing of profits, the intensive factory regimes in cheap labor locations, and disparities of wealth between those at various points in the global value chains are understood, for example, as global strategic choices based on competitive resources and capabilities, or as workplace cultural dynamics, or (when things don’t go as planned) as issues of organizational trust and commitment. Meanwhile, despite obvious connections between notions of value and concerns of critical organizational scholars with issues such as exploitation and justice, theoretical and empirical analyses around ‘value’ have been largely left to mainstream scholars.

This special issue is a response to such imbalance. It aims to advance discussion, thinking and particularly conceptualizations and writing that both revisits existing critical approaches to value in organization studies, and extends these in new and engaging directions. In this vein submitted papers might revitalize a political economy of organizations, offer creative new approaches to the analysis of organizational value relations or offer critiques of mainstream forms of value analysis. Expected contributions include, among many other possibilities:

· New and existing approaches to understanding labor as this relates to the production, appropriation, and distribution of value in organizational processes. For example, papers might critically address the problematics of immaterial, affective, or emotional labor.

· New and existing forms of ‘value’, ‘rent’ and ‘class’ analysis as this relates to management and organizational processes. For example, papers might critically address from a value or class perspective the tensions and struggles between family and work relations (the so-called ‘work-life balance’ issue).

· Works that explore the transfer and distribution of value as part of the cultural, political, and symbolic dynamics of organizations. For example, papers might focus on the articulation and organization of gender, race, ethnic, disable-bodied relations and identities.

Works that critically analyze mainstream organizational knowledge and practice concerned with ‘value management’, ‘value creation’, and other conventional notions in this literature. For example, papers might critically refocus the problematics of value chains or commodity chains encompassing multiple locations and multiple forms of organizing.

· Works that develop new categories or forms of value analysis promoting equitable and stable forms of wealth distribution in organizations, industries, and economies.

Submission: Papers must be submitted electronically by 2 March 2009 (but not before 2 February 2009) to Sagetrack at http://org.sagepub.com/ Manuscripts should be prepared according to the guidelines published in Organization and on the journal’s website: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsProdDesc.nav?level1=600&currTree=Subjects&catLevel1=&prodId=Journal200981 Papers should be no more than 8,000 words, excluding references, and will be blind reviewed following the journal’s standard review process. For further information, please contact one of the following guest editors: Craig Prichard (c.prichard@massey.ac.nz), Sarah Stookey (stookeysab@ccsu.edu) or Stefano Harney (s.harney@qmul.ac.uk).

Craig Prichard
Tari Whakahaere Kaipakihi ,
Te Kunenga Ki Purehuroa
Pouaka Motuhake 11-222
Papaioea, Aotearoa
Department of Management 214
Massey University, Private Bag 11-222
Palmerston North, New Zealand
Skype: Craig.Prichard.kiwi
Phone: 0064 (0) 6 356-9099 ext. 2244
Fax: 0064 (0) 6 350 5661
Email: [c.prichard@massey.ac.nz]