3rd Conference of Practical Criticism in the Managerial Soci

[P Armstrong]

3rd Conference of Practical Criticism in the Managerial Social Sciences
University of Leicester, 21st-22nd April, 2010

Call for Papers – Deadline Extending to 26th February 2010

Background

Occasioned by a sense that there has occurred an atrophy of the critical function in the academic study of management, two Conferences of Practical Criticism in the Social Sciences of Management (PC Conferences) have so far been held at the University of Leicester School of Management. Both gatherings were considered very useful and enjoyable by those who attended; the presentations and debate being of a high standard. A selection of the papers from the 2007 conference was published in ephemera, 8, 4 (Dec. 2008) and a further selection from the 2008 conference is to appear early in 2010, published by Mayfly Press. Thus encouraged, we invite submissions for a Third PC Conference which will be held on the 21st and 22nd April 2010, also at University of Leicester School of Management.

Rationale

As the strong programme in the sociology of science reminds us, there are centripetal tendencies at work in any formally-open field of enquiry. Where careers are made on the basis of ‘becoming an authority’, that authority is routinely exercised through the various modalities of what Bourdieu called ‘professorial power’. So it is that examinerships, appointments committees, editorships and the advisory boards of grant-giving bodies become instruments of patronage through which loyalists are infiltrated into positions of influence. Thus consolidated through networks of alliances, professorial power is in a strong position to suppress any interrogation of its academic basis.

Coexisting with these authoritarian tendencies, the social sciences of management have also undergone a kind of Balkanisation. The uncertain and contested relationship between management research and practice, has made it possible for the energetic and determined scholar to fashion ‘new’ fields of knowledge as an alternative to an apprenticeship of conformity and deference. Once institutionalised, academic authority in these new fields is able to consolidate itself through the mechanisms of censorship and self-censorship already described.

The result of this dialectic of differentiation and conformity is a deformation of the critical process in management research. There is criticism a-plenty between the quasi-independent fiefdoms into which the field has fragmented but little of it within them. Between academic regimes, there are exchanges of critical position-statements but there is little detailed re-appraisal of particular pieces of research except insofar as they embody the approach of a particular school. Experience suggests that criticism of this first type (‘paradigm wars’) is largely ignored, possibly because it poses no threat to authority relationships within the academic regimes at which it is directed. Criticism of the second type, on the other hand – that which concerns the quality of research within a particular idiom - is fundamental to academic production because what stands in the literature can be legitimately cited in argument. Such criticism, however, remains very much the exception, because of the obvious threat which it poses to academic authority. On the assumption that their refereeing and editorial procedures are a sufficient guarantee of what they publish, journals appear to operate a kind of double jeopardy rule, wherein that which has survived the refereeing process is normally exempt from subsequent re-evaluation. The notes of dissent which occasionally accompany some articles are only an apparent exception since these ordinarily originate in the refereeing process itself. Thus insulated from criticism, the standing of the authority-figures within particular academic regimes becomes both self-confirming and self-perpetuating. Their standing as academics is attested by a mass of citing publications certified by a refereeing process which simultaneously refracts their own authority and protects it.

Observing similar processes of collusion around the manufacture of reputations in the literary London of the 1920s, the literary critic F.R. Leavis coined the evocative term ‘flank-rubbing’. In these terms, the Leicester Conference of Practical Criticism is directed against flank-rubbing and its consequences in the social sciences of management. Its principle means of doing so have been loosely modelled on the close-reading techniques of practical criticism pioneered by Leavis’ mentor I.A. Richards. Particular works by academics who are prominent within their fields of study have been subject to a detailed examination in respect of the arguments they make, the evidence and the representations of previous scholarship on which they are based and the validity of their claims to have made important and original contributions. What is to be scrutinised, in other words, are the standards of scholarship which are being implicitly promulgated through the influence-networks of managerial social science.

That said, the form which contributions might take is flexible. Some contributions to the first two conferences have examined the processes of refereeing and reputation-building in themselves, sometimes in general terms, sometimes with reference to particular cases. Others have been aimed at a revision of our view of the corpus of scholarship on management, seeking to resuscitate scholarly contributions which have been obliterated by the contemporary noise of reputation-building. What matters is that contributions should be aimed at opening up the process of academic production to critical scrutiny where presently it is closed. The ultimate aim, perhaps a long-term one in the current circumstances, is to encourage a culture of critical reading in management academia, one in which the validity-claims of what is represented as the production of knowledge are subjected to a closer scrutiny than is presently the case.

Submission and Selection of Papers

Papers will be selected by a committee which includes Peter Armstrong, Stephen Dunne, Simon Lilley, Geoff Lightfoot and Campbell Jones of Leicester University and Cliff Oswick of Queen Mary, University of London.

Please send abstracts of 400-800 words, via e-mail to p.armstrong@le.ac.uk or sd142@leicester.ac.uk by 26th February 2010. The abstracts should include details, where appropriate, of the work(s) to be criticised and the grounds of criticism.

Successful submissions will be notified by 28th February 2010. Complete papers should be received by 31st March 2010.

Publication

As has been the case with the previous PC Conferences, a selection of the papers will be published either in the form of a special issue of a journal or a volume of readings.