Professor Gazi Islam gave an invited presentation entitled “Ritual, Communitas and Critique: Theorizing Events as Moments of Organizing” to the HEC Montréal Department of Management, on the 26th of November, 2020. Details can be found here.
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Margaret Archer joint-recipient of the International Oreste Benzi Award 2020
Professor Margaret Archer has been jointly awarded the 2020 International Oreste Benzi Award for her work against human trafficking. Archer’s ‘Housing, Help and Hospitality’ charity for trafficked women and their children was particularly lauded in the award announcement. A detailed account of the work of this charity can be found here.
The Father Oreste Benzi Foundation “promotes research, studies and opportunities for analysis and discussion on the needs of suffering, marginalised and disadvantaged people,” inspired by the work of Father Oreste Benzi, priest of the Diocese of Rimini.
Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility as Buzzwords? – Ismael Al-Amoudi, Grenoble Ecole de Management
In autumn of 2020, professor Ismael Al-Amoudi gave an inaugural lecture to Masters students of Energy Management and Purchasing Management at the Grenoble Ecole de Management, entitled “Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility as Buzzwords?” The presentation slides are available upon request.
Leadership, Organizations and COVID-19 – Gazi Islam, NUI Galway
Professor Gazi Islam gave an invited presentation on “Leadership, Organizations and COVID-19” to the Whitaker Institute at NUI Galway, on the 12th of October, 2020. The below recording and summary of the event are taken from the event page.
On 12 October, the Whitaker Institute hosted a live webinar titled Leadership, Organizations and COVID-19. The webinar discussed the challenges of being a leader against a backdrop of radical uncertainty including the need to make rapid decisions. Available information changes fast, and is often based on contested evidence. Meanwhile anxious employees and stakeholders seek guidance and some sense of certainty amid the challenges.
These challenges have impacts on people’s lives. In politics, the ambiguity accompanying Covid-19 continues to be exploited by populist leaders worldwide. In business, the corporate social responsibility initiatives that many have celebrated over the past ten years, are now being tested to their limits. Demands of those with short-term, profit-driven interests are pitted against longer-term concerns including the health and well-being of employees, customers and other stakeholders. In the public sector including education, the implicit contract of public service is likewise being challenged, as traditional funding sources dry up.
In the event, established leadership theories were also questioned. For some, the pandemic marks the end of the traditional, masculine model of leadership in which power ought to be centralized, and decision-making unilateral. Instead, we see examples of strong feminine leaders coming to the fore, with collaborative and empathetic approaches winning out. For others, such claims of a paradigm shift are premature.
Image via Derek Bruff, CC BY 2.0
Place-Based Economic Recovery Network (PERN) Webinar Series and BEIS Submission
Professor Jamie Morgan, together with Dr. Thomas Haines-Doran, Professor Andrew Brown, and Professor Gary Dymski (all University of Leeds), and Dr. Richard Whittle (Manchester Metropolitan University), recently submitted an inquiry into post-pandemic economic growth to the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Select Committee. This submission is reproduced on the Yorkshire Universities Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEP) network site here.
These scholars offer expert guidance to local authorities as part of the West Yorkshire ‘Place-Based Economic Recovery Network’ (PERN), with the aim of shaping the economic recovery strategy for the region. Initial webinar discussions and presentations took place in July 2020. Details of these webinars can be found here.
Image via Frank Pickavant, CC BY 2.0
Electric cars won’t save us if the numbers don’t add up – Jamie Morgan
Professor Jamie Morgan recently published an article in The Conversation entitled ‘Electric cars won’t save us if the numbers don’t add up.’ The full text can be found here.
Image via Karen Vardazaryan, FAL
Tracing and merging: The danger of enriching social network databases – Emmanuel Lazega
Professor Emmanuel Lazega recently published an article in La Vie des Idées entitled ‘Traçages et fusions: Du danger d’enrichir les bases de données de réseaux sociaux‘ (Tracing and merging: The danger of enriching social network databases). The full text can be found here.
Common good in a world of social distancing – Gazi Islam, Research Group on Collaborative Spaces
Professor Gazi Islam gave an invited presentation on “Common good in a world of social distancing” to the Research Group on Collaborative Spaces (RGCS), on the 19th of May, 2020.
Here is the abstract taken from the event page:
What is the space enacted in the covid world? What are our new gestures? What does our workspace look like? What will it look like in the post-covid world? What in the spacing of our security we produce collectively?
In the context of this third RGCS Open Seminar coordinated by Albane Grandazzi (GEM & Ecole Polytechnique), a presentation about space and spacing of the covid and post-covid world will be offered.
Pandemic Aware Economies, Public Health Business Models and (Im)possible futures – Jamie Morgan
Professor Jamie Morgan has reproduced his Retail Review article ‘‘Pandemic Aware Economies, Public Health Business Models and (Im)possible futures: What happens to a Cortisol community?’ as a series of blog posts on the Real-World Economics Review Blog. This work is also summarized on the website of Leeds Beckett University. The full text of the article can be found on Professor Morgan’s ResearchGate profile here.
Ritual, Communitas and Institution: Theorizing Events as Moments of Organizing – Gazi Islam, University of Milan
Professor Gazi Islam gave an invited seminar entitled “Ritual, Communitas and Institution: Theorizing Events as Moments of Organizing” to the Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at the University of Milan, on the 22nd of January, 2020. Here is the abstract taken from the event page:
Organized events such as rituals, conferences, summits, and festivals have become an increasingly examined topic in organizational scholarship. At the same time as scholarship has noted the fragmentation and fluidity of organizational life, attention has shifted to forms of “partial” organization, of which events form an important example. Such events can be singular or repeated, turned toward social reproduction or change, and emphasized socio-affective aspects of community or the structuration of formal institutions and rules. This heterogeneity has provided a challenge for organizational scholars, especially when aspects of change and transformation, uniqueness and history, informality and formality, alternate as moments within such events, making it difficult to theorize both events’ external diversity and internal heterogeneity. In this talk, I will outline an emergent research agenda around organizational events. I will draw upon my own theoretical and empirical work, while couching this work in the broader literature, to argue that attention to events reveals tensions occurring in organizational life more generally. On this basis, I venture some potential pathways for scholars to build upon in understanding events in terms of their psychological, relational, and social implications.
Centre for Social Ontology 