31st EGOS Colloquium
Athens, July 2 – 4, 2015
2015
During his trial in classical Athens, Socrates famously stated: “An unexamined life is not worth living”. This statement is the most succinct advocacy of philosophy, science, and democracy ever since.
How are we to understand the Socratic statement in organizations and organization studies – namely in the world of praxis and in the world of theoria? Much of modern organizational life is carried out through structures, systems and routines, following norms and rules, within power structures. On the surface, it has the texture of unexamined life.
Yet, there are often occasions for organizational life to be interrupted: things do not turn out as planned, objects do not respond as expected, routines need to be adapted, authority is challenged or silently undermined, the environment is more unpredictable, uncertain or hostile than perceived, the past is no reliable guide for present problems, pathos always lurks beneath logos, and so on. The opportunities for 'normal' organizational life to take a different turn are countless.
Change, learning, and novelty cannot emerge without challenging unreflective (unexamined) practices. Organizational life may be lived unreflectively; but without ongoing reflexive re-constitution, it stagnates. Organizations may be understood as stable, but are experienced as dynamic, interactive nexuses of social and material arrangements. An important driver of change is the reflective, reflexive, and imaginative use of embodied reason, the opportunity of human agents to engage in feedback and "backtalk" with one another and the materials, and to be responsive while envisaging alternative futures.
How does reason become reflective, reflexive and imaginative? Traditionally, organizations were taken to be paragons of rationality. Weber's "iron cage" of bureaucracy was built with materials of instrumental rationality, cut off from values, emotions and the body. While such a "cold reason" still underlies the functioning of organizations, it is increasingly suffused with hitherto neglected features, such as emotions and values. The neo-Aristotelian insight that organizations are not merely iron cages, but also sociomaterial practices in which embodied human beings collaborate to realize goods that are "internal" to their practices and matter to them, while aiming to achieve "standards of excellence" that are appropriate to their practices, gains ground.
Conference Website: http://www.egosnet.org/2015_athens/general_theme
31st EGOS Colloquium, Athens, July 2 – 4, 2015
July 2, 2015
General theme, Athens 2015
Organizations and the Examined Life:
Reason, Reflexivity and Responsibility
European Group for Organizational Studies
The 2015 EGOS Colloquium will be a forum for discussion of the above-mentioned issues and questions. Its general theme transcends disciplinary boundaries, dualisms, and levels of analysis: philosophy/ethics and science, business and society, reason and values, rationality and emotions, means and ends, thinking and feeling, mind and body, theory and practice, structure and agency, routine and change, leaders and followers, micro and macro. We invite sub-theme proposals that inspire dialogue on, and even attempt transcending of, some of these dualisms, and cross-disciplinary boundaries by drawing on the social sciences and the humanities.
EGOS is a scholarly association which aims to further the theoretical and/or empirical advancement of knowledge about organizations, organizing and the contexts in which organizations operate. As a collective, one of its main aims is to maintain and provide a voice for the critical and analytical approaches of its members to the study of organization worldwide.