International Review of Management (IRM)
Call for Papers
The deadline for submissions has now expired, we wish to thank all authors who submitted papers
Special Issue of International Review of Management
Looking
Special Issue Editors:
Steve Brown, University of Leicester/The University for Humanistics at Utrecht
Lena Olaison, Copenhagen Business School/University of Essex, and
Bent M. Sørensen, Copenhagen Business School
Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something that he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.
Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History", 1940
Organisations are obsessed with looking ahead, forecasting, envisioning, strategizing. Organisations keep looking ahead into their fantasized future. Perspectivism, project work, future scenarios, framing, but also diagrams, statistical analysis; they all involve the sense of the eyes to improve a better grip on developments in organisations.
The angel in Paul Klee’s painting, which Benjamin calls the Angel of History, has on the contrary his back to the future. The angel looks at the present. The financial crisis confirmed the artist’s insight: a lot could have been learned, if the financial institutions had looked at history instead of gazing at the fantasy of unlimited future profit.
Looking is never a neutral activity. The struggle for vision raises high stakes – economic, strategic, moral and political. Not looking or looking in the wrong direction can be devastating, but so too can misplaced vision, the wrong kind of looking. For looks in themselves can be deceiving.
Looking objectifies. The subject of the gaze consumes the object it perceives. Looking constitutes images as objects. The male gaze calls forth and reifies particular versions of gender, the colonial gaze demands the exotic and the subaltern, the capitalist gaze sees commodities and calculations. When gaze is refined and extended through formal organisations it produces a fixed system of subjects and objects.
Contrary to vision, which is something you generally ‘have’; looking, like organising, is a verb. Looking is an act. You actively look, even if you don’t look for something in particular. This is why being looked at also becomes important: the act of looking implies – or creates – categories and divisions. When looking becomes formalised as an organisational practice it necessarily creates contrasts and comparison. We become objects caught up in the gaze of others. Unlike hearing, looking operates with a clearly defined field, a space of organising and ordering, points of reference and focus, but also blind spots, places for hiding and limits.
Compared to touch and taste which involve direct contact between perceived and perceived, looking may be said to operate with and reproduce distance. We can look at something from a distance: sometimes, in fact, being too close may be a hindrance to the sight. There is also a difference between looking-at, from a shorter or longer distance, and looking-into, in which case the spectator might go from being a passive observer to being a more active involved participant.
This call for papers invites contributions that interrogate ‘looking’ in an organisational context. How can we question the visual sense in order to find a ground for critical analysis of contemporary developments in organisations? What are the contours and limits of perceptual spaces driven by vision? How do they objectify, reify, categorise and classify? Is it possible to escape regimes of gaze, to make oneself invisible or imperceptible?
The following list should inspire contributors, but doesn’t exhaust the theme:
· The visual and non-visual in organisational life
· The imagery in/of organisation
· The visual arts and organisation
· Visual narratives
· The visual organisation
· Looking/understanding
· Looking/observing/inspecting
· Enlightenment, seeing with knowledge
· Image/imaginary/imagination
· Fantastic/fantasia
· Looking/wandering
· Blind, blinded, blindness
The deadline for submissions has now expired, we wish to thank all authors who submitted papers.
All contributions should be submitted to the special issue editors via email to Steve brown: sb343@leicester.ac.uk , Lena Olaison: lo.lpf@cbs.dk , or Bent M. Sørensen: bem.lpf@cbs.dk . The special issue is associated to the Aesthetics & Organization workshop on the senses, co-organised by UvH, the University for Humanistics at Utrecht, Essex Business School at University of Essex and the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School. The first workshop, organised by Prof Hugo Letiche, UvH, was on Listening in Burg Creuzburg 2005. The second workshop, on Taste, was organised by Prof. Heather Höpfl, University of Essex, in Southend-on-Sea 2008. A fourth workshop, on Touch, will take place during 2011.
The third workshop, on Looking, took place in Copenhagen 2009. The special issue is open for contributions also outside the workshop series network.
Please read the IRM's Submissions - Notes for Authors page, especially point 2, before submitting your work.
