The Emerald Handbook of Management and Organization Inquiry

David M. Boje, Mabel Sanchez, David M. Boje, Mabel Sanchez

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781787145528
• eBook ISBN: 9781787149724
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

This book provides new and innovative insights into the field of management and organization inquiry through theory, method, and research. It provides extensive coverage of the 7S structure that has been so transformational for the field: Storytelling, System, Sustainability, Science, Spirit, Spirals, and Sociomateriality, showing how they evolved, how they interact, and possible futures for this discipline. These themes emerged during the 25 years of the Standing Conference for Management and Organizational Inquiry (Sc'Moi). We realized that we have to make space and time to get off the path of 'business-as-usual' ways of working. We know how to make organizations more efficient, but we cannot steer them away from a short-term, quarterly return mindset. It takes a long temporal horizon to understand how we are depleting the resources that future generations will need to survive. The Emerald Handbook of Management and Organization Inquiry shines a light on a brighter way of working for the future: one that accommodates living and working within the limits of the world's resources.

PART I
THE HISTORY OF THE STANDING
CONFERENCE FOR MANAGEMENT
AND ORGANIZATION INQUIRY,
ITS TRANSITIONS AND
TRANSFORMATIONS

STORYTELLING

STANDING CONFERENCE FOR MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION INQUIRY: 1991–2016 EMBODIMENT ENLIVENS 25 YEARS OF A CRITICAL STORYTELLING CONFERENCE

Grace Ann Rosile and Robert F. Dennehy

ABSTRACT

This chapter covers the history of the Standing Conference for Management and Organizational Inquiry (sc’MOI). It develops insights into embodiment conference practices, how critical storytelling was part of our conference work from the beginning, and how the conference community used “ensemble leadership” rather than a hierarchical solo leader, or board-led approach. Sc’MOI existed for 25 years, and disbanded, while still solvent.

Keywords: Embodiment; critical storytelling; ensemble leadership; embodied story conference; conference design; self reflexivity

This is the story of a conference on the fringes of academia, and if not on the fringes, at least off the beaten path. This story is told by the two people closest to the conference’s founder David Boje: Grace Ann Rosile (David’s wife since 1995) and Robert F. (Bob) Dennehy, David’s longtime friend and best man at the Rosile–Boje wedding. While fond memories could take up volumes which could entertain those who were there, we are foregoing that selfish pleasure. Instead, we are highlighting features which we think might provide insights for other conference-goers and conference-organizers on ways to make professional conferences rich, embodied, memorable experiences, both personally and professionally.

We called our conference the Standing Conference for Management and Organizational Inquiry, partly because the acronym for another option that Grace Ann suggested was SCUM. Instead, the group preferred another of Grace Ann’s suggestions – with the acronym scmoi. Written sc’MOI, the acronym alludes to the French phrase c’moi (it’s me) and refers to our self-reflexive nature (highlighted by long-term members Sanjiv Dugal and Matt Erikson). It also alludes to our long-term ties with France and Dominique Besson, Slimane Haddadj, and Henri Savall’s ISEOR (Institut de socio-economic des entreprises et des organisations) group.

Our sc’MOI name also is embodied and reflected in the logo on our web page. The image is a person looking in the mirror, questioningly, “Is that me?” For us, critical-theory-based qualitative self-reflexivity is central to our scholarship. This scholarship has been nurtured through the years by our “embodied” conference. This chapter offers the following brief glimpses of our 25-year history: (1) What is an embodied conference? (2) What happened in the early years? (3) Who were our people? (4) What were our traditions? (5) What were meltdowns? (6) Some highlights, and a concluding Thank You and In Memoriam.

WHAT IS AN EMBODIED CONFERENCE?

We consider the sc’MOI conference as an “embodied” event because it offered at least nine features of embodiment as we see it. These features were explicitly practiced from the start. They are as follows:

(1) Listening: everyone attended all or most sessions, listening to each other and incorporating each person’s contribution into the growing conversation. Regularly, especially after the first day’s presentations, participants’ comments would find connections from one paper to another, from one session to another, and from one day to another day’s presentations. Such connections were sometimes attributed to Rosile, who would say that it was all already there in the contributions.

Related to the idea of listening was the early years practice of running overtime on sessions. In the early years, we would often be an hour behind schedule by the second day. In the past 10 years, however, Grace Ann became the timekeeper and then Carolyn took on this job. Sessions needed to run on time, because our program was so full.

(2) Wholeness: the whole person, with personal and professional personas, participated in the meetings, often bringing a spouse, child, parent, or friend along. We also incorporated, at Terence Krell’s suggestion, usually one afternoon (typically Friday afternoon or evening) for a “field trip” or special event. This activity would get us off our seats, out of our chairs and our heads, and into movement, fresh air, art, etc.

Some participants connected nonacademic sides of their lives with conference topics/themes. Wanda Cousar taught us West African dance. Paul Shrivastava broke our normal sequence of trying things out at sc’MOI before taking them to the Academy or elsewhere. He brought us his Tango session, after it had been featured prominently (perhaps as an all-academy session?) at the official Academy of Management annual “big show.” Of course, our group was used to dancing as Rosile and Debra Summers had led freestyle salsa dancing in Washington, DC, in the early years, and Tai chi another year.

(3) Celebrating our old: many participated after retirement, and also, we honored, remembered, and recounted stories about our missing friends.

(4) Nurturing our young: we introduced students and first-time participants with rounds of applause, and celebrated those who defended in that year.

(5) Protecting our own: hurtful comments were not tolerated, and this played a part in the “meltdowns” (described elsewhere).

(6) Ensemble leadership: many took leadership roles in the spirit of service rather than status.

(7) Disagreements: two particularly legendary disagreements each resulted in a year of passionate emails and the coining of the term “meltdown” to describe this phenomena.

(8) Hospitality: most meals were shared with other conference-goers, often in groups of 20–30. Also, in the early days, Abbass Alkhafargi would add unexpected speakers to our schedule regardless of topic, simply because Abbass knew we would always have a full and receptive audience.

(9) Nontraditional topics and presentations: from salsa dancing (Grace Ann) to West African dancing (Wanda Cousar) and Argentinian Tango (Paul Shrivastava), from architecture to accounting, from postmodern philosophy to Sufi spirituality, we sought out and welcomed the unusual.

Sc’Moi participants all know and understand implicitly that gathering together at our sc’MOI conferences allows a different experience of shared ideas from merely reading someone else’s paper, or worse, having that someone else read their paper to you from the podium of a conference. We veteran sc’MOI-goers have long understood this. This is why we all have made such efforts over these 25 years to attend sc’MOI: for those once-occurrent unique, irreproducible, moments in time when we personally share our ideas and co-create meaning together. This is embodied storytelling.

WHAT HAPPENED IN THE EARLY YEARS?

Our conference was born when Abbass Alkhafaji asked David Boje to take over the organization behavior/organizational theory track for his fledgling conference the International Academy of Business Disciplines (IABD). David and Abbass became good friends until Alkhafaji’s death in 2007. David’s growing reputation was based on storytelling and qualitative research with a critical-theory slant, all fairly new and radical in the United States in those days. With this invitation from Abbass in 1990, David saw his chance to create a conference in 1991 that was both more radical conceptually and more friendly interpersonally.

From the beginning, under David Boje’s direction, our group had adopted the practice of everyone in the track staying together for the full 2.5 or 3 days of the conference. We read and reviewed (anonymously) each other’s papers, and we all sat together for the entire conference time. During the first few years our sessions were scheduled in various rooms. However, one year in Orlando (1997 most likely) one of our rooms was changed after the program was printed, and our special guest Walter Nord could not find our room! Subsequently, we asked for, and Alkhafaji instructed the program folks to accommodate, our wish to have one room assigned to our group throughout the entire conference. Further, it needed to be a large room – as our group quickly grew to between 35 and 45 each year, with as many as 60 some years.

This physical separation from the IABD made our differentness even more apparent. Already, our attendees rarely wore business suits, our rooms rarely were dominated by PowerPoint and statistics, and we never had rooms where the presenters outnumbered the audience, as frequently happens at other conferences. Instead, our room was always lively with discussion; PowerPoints included photos, art, and music; and sessions sometimes incorporated movement, song, and dance to tell their story.

And so we lived happily, a conference-within-a-conference, under the IABD umbrella for many years. Then David somehow got elected to be President of the whole IABD. He was due to be installed as President at the end of the San Antonio meeting in March 1994. We found out later from friends that the IABD traditionalists had been up in arms, telephoning each other all that previous year. They did not want a radical like Boje to be their president.

A scheduling glitch on the first day of the 1994 meeting moved David’s presentation from a shared session to the featured spot for the all-conference opening banquet. When Boje appeared dressed like Ronald McDonald in full-clown suit and make-up to present his critique of McDonald’s, his critics saw their chance. How could someone who dressed like a clown be their President? There were whispered hallway conversations. There were secret midnight board meetings. We heard of the plot to depose Boje from sympathizers on the “other side.” Grace Ann made emergency 6-a.m. calls to our jet-lagged international colleagues to request them to show up at 7 a.m. for the board meeting. Bleary-eyed, they were there and spoke eloquently on David’s behalf. We had to leave the meeting while they cast a secret ballot.

While they were voting, our folks gathered in a lounge. We were all agreed. We decided we were strong enough to be our own conference and came up with the sc’MOI name on the spot. Before we broke up, one of our group had gone for coffee and bumped into a board member. The board had voted that David not be permitted to be installed as President. This board member then asked our guy if he would like to take over Boje’s track. Our guy was incredulous as he told us the story – to think they did not realize that our track all only showed up for Boje and what he had created!

Dear friend and conference veteran Eduardo Barrera took David and some others of our group to a sweat lodge that night to help cleanse any negativity from this transition. Abbass Alkhafaji remained our dear friend until his death. We discovered we were happy and free! On our own, we lost the feeling of being the “black sheep” and the vague sense of apology for not being more mainstream. And also, we were financially solvent in the first year, and for the 12 years thereafter.

WHO WERE OUR PEOPLE?

Ken Ehrensal was our foremost skeptic/critic/pessimist. He established himself in this role by stating in one of our beginning years that David Boje’s work (back in the 1990s) on “postmodernism” was “not only wrong, but dangerous.” These early clashes were lively and could be intense. Still, over time, the group’s familiarity and acceptance of the others’ viewpoints would lead sometimes to laughter as each played out predictable roles which, over many years, became almost ritual opposition.

Ken Ehrensal coined the term “Boj-fest” as our conference nickname because so many people were drawn to us because of David Boje (internationally known for storytelling and qualitative research). However, over the years, there have been many who brought in others. As a group, we avoided the status-star-system of many academic groups. Doctoral students were as welcome as faculty. Some students were surprised to find themselves becoming friends and/or co-authors with the many well-known journal editors and authors who attended our meetings. Typically, there were editors of four journals among our 50 attendees. Our inter- and cross-disciplinarity also obscured status hierarchies and fostered a more egalitarian feeling at our meetings. In other words, despite having important scholars at our meetings, we felt at home, and we had fun.

Adding to our feminine voices, Carolyn Gardner went from being a doctoral student of David Boje’s to being an essential organizer and Editor of our Proceedings. She and Ken ended up both at Kutztown, and their partnership and organizing skills really kept sc’MOI going through its last decade.

Our most memorable stories have been of deeply personal accounts that help us to understand who this scholar is, and why and how their experiences have informed their scholarship. We have had a tradition of autoethnography long before this term became fashionable. As a compliment to the whole-person embodied-scholar approach, we have had an illustrious tradition of disagreements. Extreme disagreements were called “meltdowns” (term coined by Ken Ehrensal and explained below).

WHAT WERE OUR TRADITIONS?

A hallowed tradition of “ghost presenters” began at our 1994 Pittsburgh conference. David had persuaded noted sociologist Stewart Clegg to be our keynote speaker. However, since in those early days we were still under the umbrella of the IABD conference, we were expected to follow the standard conference format. A 90-minute session would have three presenters, each having about 20 minutes to present, with the balance being discussion led by formally designated “session chairs” or “discussants.”

David Boje knew this would not work for Stewart’s keynote. So we made up a program, which was duly submitted to the IABD leadership, showing a session with three presenters: Stewart Clegg, Willard Robinson, and Bob Dennehy. Robinson was one of my colleagues who knew he could not attend the conference. Bob was our co-conspirator who knew he would never present the topic listed in that session. David printed a new schedule showing Stewart’s keynote talk as 90 minutes of prime time in the schedule. Stewart’s spectacular 90-minute presentation, delivered to standing-room-only in a double-size conference room, kept people afterward in discussion through 30 minutes of what the “official” program had designated as “Coffee Break” and beyond.

Thus was born our tradition of scheduling “ghost” presenters, and also of looking at the schedule as more of a suggestion than a law. Eventually, as the conference grew, Grace Ann and then Carolyn took on the job of timekeeper to assure that everyone had their time.

We developed a tradition of including family members and partner-presenters. Many spouses/partners were brought to our meetings, as individual presenters, co-authors, discussion participants, and/or observers. Heather Hopfl’s husband Haro began to see how sc’MOI’s wor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Introduction
• Part I The History of the Standing Conference for Management and Organization Inquiry, Its Transitions and Transformations
• Part II Explorers of the Future of Management and Organizational Inquiry
• Index