INTERCONNECTING THE PRACTICE TURN AND COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH TO ORGANIZING.
A NEW CHALLENGE FOR COLLECTIVE ACTION?
Call for Papers – Special Issue of M@n@gement
Special Issue Guest editors
Nicolas ARNAUD (Audencia School of Management, France)
François COOREN (Université de Montréal, Canada)
Bertrand FAURE (Université de Toulouse, France)
Jeanne MENGIS (Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland)
Deadline : 30th September 2016
In this special issue, we want to advance knowledge on collective action – one of the most challenging issues for contemporary business and organizations – by inviting theoretical and empirical contributions at the intersection between the practice turn (Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina and Von Savigny, 2001; Rouleau, 2013) and communicative approaches to organizing (Putnam and Nicotera, 2008; Cooren, 2010).
Scholars from various disciplines (e.g., sociology, management, psychology, communication, economics and ergonomic studies) have long been interested in the ongoing transformation and enactment of collective action at work in relation to wider organizational transformations. Interpretive (Putnam and Pacanowsky, 1983) or process theories (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002) have proposed to see collective (or co-oriented) action as relying upon heedful care for mutual interdependencies (Weick and Roberts, 1993) rather than on the establishment of shared organizational knowledge or culture. Current trends of thought put forward that collective action is nowadays more than ever a distributed and hybrid performance, a polyphonic dance of human and non-human agency (Latour, 1996; Cooren, 2010). How can this diversity of practices across time and space achieve unity of discourse? How can multiple voices become the one voice of the organization (Taylor and Cooren, 1997), thus doing the same thing while remaining different? This is what collective action is about in modern organizing: something in between situated communities of practice (Brown and Duguid, 2002) and dislocated communicational processes (Taylor and Van Every, 1993; Fauré and Arnaud, 2014).
This call for papers suggests exploring further the hypothesis according to which collective action is about how people work within a social and organizational setting to construct and mobilize interests and resources as well as about how people create the conditions under which social action occurs (Quinn and Worline, 2008). As such, collective action can be seen as the capacity of a collective to generate a performance by constantly producing and reproducing the meaning of its action, in a singular situation that mobilizes cultural and historical experience leading to a collective competence (Arnaud and Mills, 2012).
Papers for the special issue should be prepared according to M@n@gement’s guidelines for authors and must be submitted to the online submission system of M@n@gement, before September 30th, 2016 http://aims.bepress.com/management_submission/
When submitting your full paper, please include a cover letter that explicitly states that you would like your paper to be considered for this special issue.
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