Call for papers for special issue of Organization Spaces and places of remembering and commemoration

Deadline 1 June 2014

Guest Editors:

Leanne Cutcher, School of Business, University of Sydney, Australia

Karen Dale, Department of Organisation, Work and Technology, Lancaster University,UK

Philip Hancock, Essex Business School, University of Essex, UK

Melissa Tyler, Essex Business School, University of Essex, UK

Introduction

Exploring the spaces and places in which we remember and commemorate the past can tell us much about power, identity and material relations within organizations (Dale and Burrell 2008). With this in mind, we invite contributions to this special issue that look to embrace both the temporal and spatial organization of commemoration and remembrance, connecting to recent research that has attempted to bring space back into critical organizational theory (Beyes and Steyeart, 2012; Dale, 2005; Dale and Burrell, 2008; Zhang et al., 2008). Particular theoretical influences on this work include Lefebvre’s (1991) emphasis on space as simultaneously socially produced and producing and Soja’s (1996) concern with the trialectics of space. Theoretical ideas that might also help to inform an organizational understanding of commemoration and remembrance include phenomenological accounts emphasizing the poetic resonances and lived experiences of place (Bachelard, 1964) and Foucault’s (1986) concept of heterotopic spaces. While the latter focuses on cemeteries as ‘quasi-eternal’ and culturally ubiquitous spaces of commemoration and remembrance–and the ways in which they are transformed into places of meaning and agency–they can, of course, take many different forms. They range from spaces designed specifically to foreground the past (and its implications for the future) such as museums or memorial gardens, to those that more subtly integrate the past into the living present in order to construct particular narratives of organizational legacy or progress, such as galleries of past leaders or single monuments to organizational heroes. We therefore invite authors to explore what is perhaps a myriad of ways in which we live in and through spaces and places of recognition and recollection, thereby contributing to an understanding of these spaces as embodied and embedded, and as fundamentally organized.

Themes for consideration

We welcome papers that move beyond outlining the character of different spaces of commemoration and remembrance and contribute to our understanding of the way in which these spaces are organized and organizing. This will ensure a concern with consideration of the relations of power and control that determine who and what is commemorated and remembered. This relates to what Judith Butler has referred to as the ‘the politics of mourning’; a politics that calls into question who and what ‘counts’ as a life worth remembering (Butler, 2004), and is deeply embedded in the organization of recognition and negation. Such a perspective could, for example, explain, amongst other things, why commemorative sites are so often highly gendered, or racialized both within the sphere of formal organizations and beyond.

The question of how such spaces are orientated towards the production of purposive memories and, by virtue particular regimes of reflection and agency, is also an important consideration. In order for such spaces to become meaningful places that might promote particular ways of thinking and doing they themselves must be produced, consumed and performed; processes that are mediated in and through relations of socio-materiality and those affective and aesthetic experiences they engender. This also brings to the fore the need to consider the role of objects in shaping what Bell (2012: 4) has termed ‘the social construction of organizational memory’. Here focus might be on how the material commemoration of death–through artefacts such as corporate memorabilia, named or dedicated buildings and institutions or even the broader spatial organization of historical artefacts–is socially produced and embedded within relations of power and control (Willmott, 2000).

Finally, but by no means exhaustively, potential authors might also consider where commemorative spaces are predominantly and less predominantly found. Thus we would encourage prospective contributors to incorporate setting and scale into their analysis: extending the scope of their focus beyond the local, to explore national or global sites of commemoration and collective identity work (Bell and Taylor, 2011; Robertson and White, 2005) particularly through an exploration of non-Western perspectives on commemoration and remembrance (Spivak, 2008).

We invite original, imaginative and thoughtful paper submissions that explore the who, what, how and where of spaces and places of commemoration and remembrance. We welcome empirical and theoretical contributions from a broad range of perspectives and disciplines that might explore (but are not limited to):

• the relationship between spaces of organizational commemoration and remembrance and the production of memory and place

• the spatial organization of commemoration and its relationship to reflection and agency

• socio-materiality and artefacts of commemoration

• embodiment and the production of memory within/through spaces

• identity, belonging and commemoration

• relations of remembrance to place and placelessness

• organized spaces and places of tradition and ritual in the social construction of collective national, local or regional identity

• the art and aesthetics of commemorating and remembering

• visual representations of collective memory and semiotic analyses of commemoration

• metaphors and narrations of death, loss, grief and commemoration

• history, place and collective guilt

• gendered and/or racialized spaces and places of commemoration and remembering