Call for papers

An Autumn Workshop, sponsored by ‘Organization’ on ‘Licence to kill: The organization of destruction in the 21st century’ Lancaster University, 15 September 2014

Convenors

Brian Bloomfield, Lancaster University Management School

Gibson Burrell, School of Management, University of Leicester

Theo Vurdubakis, Lancaster University Management School

Keynote Speaker: Sinisa Malesevic, UC Dublin; author of ‘The Sociology of War and Violence’ CUP 2010

Overview

War, the intentional destruction of human beings, of human lifeworlds and modes of livelihood, may appear far from the usual preoccupations of organization studies but nevertheless constitutes a prominent manifestation of the organized character of the contemporary world. The relationship between the organization of production (as exemplified by the factory) and the organization of destruction (as exemplified by the battlefield) is of course as longstanding as it is well-known. Weber saw violence and its monopolisation as crucial to the development of state bureaucracies and it might also be argued that the institutional form of the ‘arsenal’ has been the site of many organisational innovations such as Eli Whitney’s development of the ‘American System of Manufacture’ or the rejection of Taylorism at the Watertown Arsenal. More recently, the RAND Corporation came to be seen as synonymous with the development of military-managerial techniques which aspired to be as applicable to the organization of destruction as they were to the organization of production. Yet, important and well-documented as such histories may be, what we wish to encourage in this workshop is a more direct engagement with contemporary forms of organized destruction such as ‘war’, ‘terror’ or ‘insurgency’ and with the apparatuses through which they are enacted. We therefore seek to understand the links between organization and destruction by military/para-military forces within the very circumscribed time frame of the still young (but already quite bloody) 21st Century.

Topics

We would like to invite theoretical and empirical papers addressing areas of interest including, but not restricted, to the following:

1. Who or what are the agencies of organized destruction (whether military, terrorist, political or other) and how are they enacted? What role do these agencies play within contemporary democracies?

2. How can we best understand the processes through which destruction is conceptualised and organized by such agencies?

3. What are the spaces of organized destruction and how are they produced?

4. What are the technologies of organized destruction and what is their role in the 21st Century? What role do state actors play in facilitating or impeding such technological developments?

5. What are the ethics of organized destruction and are they changing compared to those in the past?

In summary, the Workshop will seek to engage with the issue of how organized destruction in the form of warfare and related forms of violent conflict can be better understood and theorised, and with the consequences such an understanding might have for organization studies as a whole.