Joining this year’s AoMO conference comes with 4 unique treats:

• a Keynote Performer
• a Keynote Speaker
• a theatrical premiere,
• and 2 Keynote listeners

 

Keynote Performer: Miha Pogačnik

With violin blazing, world renowned musician Miha Pogačnik, opens up the intangible of organizational renewal, creativity and leadership.

Miha is Chief Inspiration Officer of IDRIART (Institute for the Development of Intercultural Relations through the Arts), Managing Director of Ecolculture, and Cultural Ambassador of Slovenia. Through music he explores parallels between musical and organizational identity and business processes. He taps the unexplored potential of art as a significant force for productivity, creativity and organizational renewal. You can find more about Miha’s unique practice at www.mihavision.com.

 

 

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Philip Mirvis

 

Few know the theatre of organizational change, and the value of arts and aesthetics to shape it, like Dr. Phil Mirvis.

 

Internationally acclaimed Organizational Psychologist, Dr. Mirvis’ academic and professional practice focuses on large-scale organizational change, the character of the workforce and workplace, as well as business leadership in society. Author of 10 books and numerous articles across top academic and practitioner outlets, he has served as adviser on CSR and sustainability to companies including Ben & Jerry’s, Mitsubishi, PepsiCo, Royal Dutch Shell, SK Group, Unilever and Wipro. An advocate for the arts in business, Phil brings his work and practice to AoMO 2016 discussing the intangible of organizational change and transformation.

 

Theatrical Premiere: Dr. Steven S. Taylor

 

This September you can join June, Yahweh, Satan, Market and Kapital for the premiere of Steve Taylor’s new play “The Age of Loneliness”.

 

Steve Taylor is professor of leadership and creativity at the WPI Foisie School of Business. His research is focused in two areas: organizational aesthetics and reflective practice. The former applies art-based scholarship and practice to management and organizations. The latter focuses on the ability to analyze our own actions and learn how to be more effective, ethical, and artful as managers and leaders. Founding editor of Organizational Aesthetics his research has been published across a number of top journals and he is the author of Leadership Craft, Leadership Art and You’re a Genius: Using Reflective Practice to Master the Craft of Leadership. As a playwright, his work has been performed in England, France, Poland, Canada, Denmark, New Zealand, Italy, Australia, and the United States.

 

Keynote Listeners: Dr. Mary Jo Hatch & Prof. Stephen Linstead

 

Mixing it up a little at this year’s AoMO will be our Keynote Listeners. Throughout the conference we will have 2 “flies on the wall” – Mary Jo Hatch and Stephen Linstead. As they navigate their way through the conference, attending sessions and engaging in conversations with participants, they will weave together a tapestry of the emerging dialogue and debate.

Dr. Mary Jo Hatch is C. Coleman McGehee Eminent Scholars Research Professor, Emerita, of Banking and Commerce at the University of Virginia (USA) and adjunct and visiting professor at a number of eminent institutions around the globe, such as the School of Management of Boston College, Gothenburg University, Copenhagen Business School, IEDC-Bled School of Management and the Singapore Management University. The author of numerous books and more than 75 articles, her current research focuses on branding; organizational culture and identity; art, design and organization. Mary Jo is an avid and accomplished painter and visual artist.

Prof. Stephen Linstead is Professor of Critical Management at York Management School (University of York, UK). With undergraduate and masters degrees in English Literature from Keele and Leeds, he holds a Masters in Organization Development and a PhD from Sheffield Hallam University and a D.Litt from Durham University. Author and co-author of numerous article, chapters and books, his research falls into five main areas: organization theory and philosophy; aesthetic approaches to organization; language based approaches to organization; gender and sexuality in organizations; qualitative methods, ethnography and culture. Most recently he has been developing research out of these foci into aspects of globalization and post-colonialism; the ontology and practice of play – especially in organizational and social intervention – and the use of music and song as a form of ethnographic representation.

 

Registration is now open. To book your place please go to:

http://www.iedc.si/about-iedc/centres/conferences/8th-aomo-conference/registration-form

Register before 1st April 2016 to take advantage of the great Early bird fee of 395euro

After the 1st April the full delegate fee of 450euro will apply.

Guests (ONLY for registered conference participants): 250euros

The fees include attendance of the selected conference sessions, conference materials, coffee breaks, lunches, receptions and gala dinner for 1 person as specified in the conference program. The fee does NOT cover travel, airport shuttle, and accommodation.

Payment of participation fee should be settled by August 15, 2016 at the latest by bank transfer upon the receipt of the proforma invoice from IEDC. Unfortunately, we cannot accept credit cards.

HOTELS

For hotel booking, please follow the link: http://www.iedc.si/about-iedc/centres/conferences/8th-aomo-conference/hotels-logistics

 

As always, AoMO is a conference like no other, and this year you have the opportunity to join a Dérive! If you are interested in participating in this workshop, please let the conveners know as space will be limited. Further information, including convener contact information is all detailed below.

A dérive in Bled: Talking the walk in management and organization
Damian Ruth, Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand d.w.ruth@massey.ac.nz
Deborah Knowles, Westminster Business School, University of Westminster, UK d.s.knowles@wmin.ac.uk
Clare Hindley, IUBH School of Business and Management, Germany, c.hindley@iubh.de

You are invited to a workshop on dérives in which we will adopt the flaneur as a ‘methodological persona’ (Castro, 2003). There are many ways to wander (Qualmann and Hind, 2015) and many histories of walking (Solnit, 2000) but our focus is on how dérive opens up novel ways to think about management and organization. We will also push the methodological boundaries of expression to explore diverse ways of knowing, ‘personal, narrative, embodied, artistic, aesthetic – that stand outside sanctioned intellectual framworks’ (Cole and Knowlees, 2008: 55). We want to explore the experience of space and movement and the aesthetic expression of that experience relative to management and organization.
We have one ½ day (more or less depending on the response) to offer, listen and dérive. There will be a place for peer reviewed papers. We also welcome non-standard presentations, accompanied by a ‘score’ or alternative ‘texts’. You may ask what your organization or its type sounds like (Phipps, 2007) or what does an organization in flux taste like. The main process of the workshop is a dérive followed by our personal post-dérive Reports on Knowledge. We will be psychogeographers, flaneurs, ethnographers bringing back stuff; noise, colours, fragments of conversation, bits of paper, photos, brochures, litter, new friends. These will be our Reports on Knowledge. We come back from the field as scientists (Latour, 1999) to tell tales (Van Maanen, 1988) about our investigations into business and organization. There is a rich body of work to which we can relate.
The dérive is a concept coined by the French situationists and is described by Debord (1958) as “a rapid passage through various ambiences [involving] playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of psychological effects”. The point is to drop usual motivations for movement and actions and let oneself be “drawn in by the attractions of the terrain“, or simply “drift“, which is how Nicholson (2011:26) translates the term (see also Smith, 2014). It is associated with psychogeography in which psychology and geography meet, or “collide” (Coverley, 2010:13; Debord, 1955), recently used most notably by Self (2007; 2008; 2009) and Sinclair (2002; 2003), and which has been synthesised as a research approach in the business and management field (Knowles, 2008; 2009). This method constitutes ‘strolling’ along a route in order to observe (choosing or being open to sensual data) the environment and to construct meanings and explicitly includes the search for new methods of “apprehending our urban environment” (Coverley, 2010:1).
You may wish to draw on de Certeau’s thinking in his Walking in the City (1984) and link this to how organizations are spaces of physical, mental and political pollutants, evidencing Turnbull’s (2003) ‘messy’ knowledge and space creation and Ingold’s (2013) exploration of perceiving space. We wish to explore how new ideas need new spaces in between, and how
random objects, moments, voids, gaps can be found or created. We will “[push] on the methodological boundaries” (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2008) of organizational research.
We will explore collage because in collage, a single coherent notion “gives way to relations of juxtaposition and differences” (Rainey, 1998:124, in Butler-Kisber, p.268) and these fragments “work against one another so hard, the mind is sparked” (Steinberg, 1972, cited by Butler-Kisber, 2008:.268). This resonates with Ingold’s (2012:49) idea of reality as a quilt, with ill-fitting elements and irregular edges.

In this call for contributions we have the following flexible ‘shape’ in mind. We will limit participation to 18.

Introduction: Damian, Deborah and Clare 10mins
Six ten-minute slots for required formal paper presentations 60mins
One hour for everyone to dérive 60mins
One hour for everyone to create their Report on Knowledge 60mins

There will then be a time slot later in the conference for each participant to stand by their ‘Report’ and report, a bit like a poster presentation period. We aim to have several informal ‘happenings’ over a couple of days and then a collective artwork that entails sound, theatre, re-enactments, exhibits and whatever else people can think of; a sort of huge collage of experience.
Most of all, we will wallow with relish in the sensuousness of knowledge creation!

Please email your contributions in the form of a 500 word abstract to all of the following convenors and please feel free to raise any queries or offer suggestions. We would like to receive your contributions by February 1st, 2016.