"Crises, Corruption, Character and Change," 9th International Conference on Organizational Discourse (ICOD), Amsterdam, July 14-16, 2010.

Contemporary organizing is confronted by seemingly endless ‘crises’ which are routinely projected through apocalyptic metaphor. Over coffee, we can skip-read through today’s ‘ecological catastrophe’, the ‘global financial meltdown’ and ‘the collapse of capitalism’ before ‘getting down to work’. The global financial system appears to be littered with a variety of corrosive mechanisms in the banks, the housing markets and their institutions, the pensions industry and the short-termism of stock-markets. And these ‘crises’ are of such magnitude that we are threatened with recession if not the more ominous possibility of economic depression. Meanwhile, it seems, global warming and its attendant climate change proceed unabated. We are threatened with the inundation of all low-lying land, the collapse of food production across several continents and the fundamental transformation of ocean currents promising flood and drought in equal measure. Fish and bees are disappearing while feel-good eco-friendly products proliferate within a flourishing carbon-offset ‘market’. And the poverty of our political response is breath-taking – the only tangible outcome of the G8 meeting in L'Aquila (July, 2009) was that world leaders were presented with made-to-measure Belstaff parka jackets individually signed by Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. Crises? What crises? All of which suggests that the distance between our discursive projections of the future and our inability to confront those possibilities has, perhaps, never been greater. In the post-whatever world we now inhabit, all appears to be simultaneously terminal and – bizarrely – transient. We can frame this apparent dissociation of human action from its consequences through the analyses of ‘flexible capitalism’ (Sennett) or ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman) which have charted the disorienting and destabilising effects of – in its broadest sense – the emergent ‘post-modern’ social reality. However, the persuasiveness of such abstract analyses apparently remains beyond periphery of policy-makers’ thinking. Hence, the theme for the 9th Conference has a narrative focus on the discursive construction and re-construction of crises, corruption, character and change. At the meta-level, the conference theme is intended to elicit papers which address the discursive construction and re-construction of ‘crises’. In our view, linguistic framing is a fundamental aspect of how ‘crises’ are being manufactured, constituted, projected, perceived and addressed (or finessed) at all levels of organization. Despite the apocalyptic metaphors, it appears that any given ‘crisis’ can re-emerge as a ‘manageable risk’, a ‘market opportunity’ or a case for ‘re-regulation’. Perhaps most problematic is how we have depicted the character of these various crises for their technical and global complexity invariably engenders over-simplified description. In parallel, we appear to be experiencing a persistent growth in corruption. This is manifest in at least two spheres. First, we have seen an increasing prevalence of dissociated institutional practices across organizations which have directly undermined the presumed core processes of those organizations – a phenomenon which has occurred not only in financial institutions but also in the political sphere and across public sector organizing. Secondly, in accounting for and representing such seemingly corrupt behaviour, the first resort is invariably to one or other variety of rhetorical dissimulation – a deeply corrosive process which corrupts the conventional meanings of language. These issues raise further questions regarding the problems of continuity and the scope for change. Is socio-political and institutional change desirable or even feasible? If so, what particular forms of change might be instigated? Should change processes be radical and transformational or orthodox and incremental in nature? What is the role for, and status of, discourse(s) in relation to change (or non-change). How does discourse shape ‘character-formation’ and possible responses to crises and corruption? In keeping with past conferences, we also invite papers which engage with the constructs of character, corruption and change in a more specific sense. Hence, character – corrupt or otherwise – could, for example, be considered as an attribute of individuals ‘getting into character’, of organizations (e.g. culture), or as a loaded social phenomena (i.e. with moral, spiritual and/or ethical overtones). Similarly, we welcome submissions which address corruption in the wider etymological sense of contaminating or altering meaning (e.g. relation to a text). Alternative readings of change which apply to discursive aspects of organizing or organizations are also encouraged (i.e. as socially embedded processes of substitution, conversion, disruption or improvement). Given the Conference theme deliberately constitutes a broad discursive canvas, we expect the precise conference streams to emerge from the papers themselves. However, we also anticipate papers that will organize themselves within the following topics: Sensemaking, Stories and Narrative; Corruption, Disruption and Rhetoric; Discourse, Identity and Temporality; Language, Culture and Ideology; Management Philosophy; Professions, Practices and Ethics; Ethnography and Organizational Life; Crisis, Continuity and Change; Reflexivity in Organizing; Critical Discursive Approaches; Metaphor, Tropes and Symbolism; Text, Talk and Technology; Organizational Identities; Management Discourse; Structures, Networks and Agency; Consumption, Brands and Images; Dramaturgy and Aesthetics; Spirituality and Diversity; Conversation Analytic Approaches Papers are invited on talk and text which address issues of social representation, social construction and social interaction in relation to any aspect of organization or organizing in relation to these themes. Contributions may adopt any epistemological perspective but we are concerned to achieve a balance between empirical studies and conceptual/theoretical contributions. Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/carbs/conferences/icod10/index.html.