The Informal Economy (Boston, Massachusetts August 3-7)

An expanding set of economic activity is taking place outside countries’ legal boundaries. Indeed, the proliferation of organizations being formed and operating in the informal economy is an important aspect of today’s world. For some, working in the informal economy is a choice. For example, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development suggests that in some countries, individuals choose to supplement their income from a job in the formal economy with the income generated by a second job in the informal economy. But for others, perhaps those living in conditions of desperate poverty, to work in the informal economy isn’t a choice—it’s a necessity.

Program Chair: R. Duane Ireland, Texas A&M University

Call for Submissions

First date for submissions: November 2, 2011

Submission deadline: January 10, 2012

http://meetings.aomonline.org/2012/ 

There will be a Critical Management Studies Interest Group to be organized at the event. The CMS call for papers, both as PDW's and in the Scholary program are: -

CRITICAL MANAGEMENT STUDIES (CMS)

PDW Chair: Raza Mir, William Paterson University, mirr@wpunj.edu

2012 CMS Professional Development Workshops: Call for Proposals

The Critical Management Studies (CMS) Division invites the submission of proposals for PDWs to be offered at the Annual AOM Meetings in Boston in August 2012. PDWs are designed to be more interactive than standard symposia and paper sessions. They are also often edgier, more combative, and generate more discussions, debates and arguments. In the CMS case, they also involve explicit commitments to praxis, to the subversion of the current regimes of accumulation, the theorizing of rebellions and insurgencies within the corporate world, and a commitment to speak on behalf of the dispossessed. In this version of the PDW program, we explicitly invite PDWs that challenge the status quo that has been normalized through corporate behavior, and through the behavior of mainstream organizational researchers and academics. Topics should be consistent with the domain of CMS, and may address the following issues:

· Engaging “The Informal Economy”: A critical engagement with the 2012 conference theme would be a great idea. How can we bring critical issues relating to the informal economy to the AOM? Issues relating to the reserve army of labor and of accumulation by dispossession come to mind, as do issues of organizing from below and alternatives to capitalist forms of accumulation.

· Theorizing Resistance to the Corporate Status Quo: How do groups of working people organize against powerful organizations in an atmosphere where traditional forms of labor organizing have been delegitimized, and all forms of resistance are subject to caricature? The responsible academic researcher needs to find alternative ways to theorize resistance, in language that makes sense in the world of academia and policy.

· Decentering Current Business Practices and Business Research: The ideological power of mainstream organizational research has legitimized a lot of unethical, fraudulent and exploitative business practices. A principled research agenda would be to reframe such practices not only as illegitimate, but also as irrational, much in the same way that dominant colonial powers represented non-Western cultures as infantile and ritualbound. Such acts of theorizing have powerful resonances with issues of organizational justice and equity.

· Critically Engaging the Hegemony of Rich Nations in the Arena of Organizational Research and Management Pedagogy: Much of the received wisdom in pedagogy and knowledge in management emerges from a small group of nations. Alternative perspectives from different parts of the world need to be honored and highlighted.

· Alternative Philosophies of Organizing, Pedagogy and Accumulation: We particularly welcome proposals that address social and political issues that have hitherto been underexplored by CMS scholars. These include issues of alternative sexualities, postcolonial approaches to organizing, alternative theorizations of race, ethnicity, age, disability, and issues of war/violence.

· Critiques of CMS: We must be relentlessly self-critical to avoid excessive cooptation into the status quo.

What are the ways in which CMS implicitly fosters the very structures of exclusion and privilege that it explicitly decries? How can it avoid these pitfalls in the future?

· The CMS PDW Program includes the Dark Side Case Competition and the Doctoral Consortium. Please consider submitting a case to the competition and encourage your doctoral students to get involved in the consortium.

The above are mere guidelines; PDWs that address other issues are welcome too, as long as they are consistent with the CMS domain. Please ensure that you read the PDW Guidelines for Submission.

Also, if you wish to run a preliminary idea for a PDW by someone, feel free to email Raza Mir mirr@wpunj.edu before submitting a formal proposal and no later than December 13, 2011. All proposals will be subject to a peer review process. The deadline for proposals is January 10, 2012, 5PM EST through the AOM submission website.

CRITICAL MANAGEMENT STUDIES (CMS)

Program Chair: Gavin Jack, La Trobe University, Australia, cmsaom@latrobe.edu.au

Jan Schapper, La Trobe University, Australia, cmsaom@latrobe.edu.au

2012 CMS Division Scholarly Program: Call for Submissions

At first glance, the 2012 meeting theme, “The Informal Economy” connects well to the domain of Critical Management Studies (CMS). The theme asks scholars to consider informal work when for decades the formal economy has been the primary subject of research inquiry. In contrast to the traditional interest in activities in the developed world, the theme also invites scholars to consider economic activity in developing countries where up to 75 percent of non-agricultural production is classed as informal. The theme in particular asks us to consider when and how the benefits of the informal economy outweighs its disadvantages – whatever these may be – and what are the moral and ethical questions that emerge when addressing such questions. For scholars of alternative organizing/organization(s), this 2012 theme of The Informal Economy may be of particular interest.

However . . .

The CMS ethos also calls for scholars to critique the articulation of discursive possibilities within the theme description. For instance:

· What are the costs and benefits, and conditions of possibility, of the Academy’s attention to the informal economy?

· What assumptions (of the economy, of “business”, of the role of the state, of regulation, of organizing, of citizenship and so on) underpin the ‘valorization’ of the informal economy?

· Would the diverse members of informal economies welcome our scholarly attention? Who is legitimizing whom with such attention?

· How, if at all, might CMS scholars engage with the controversial bottom of the pyramid (BoP) concept in their attention to the informal economy?

· The CMS Domain statement states that “Our premise is that structural features of contemporary society, such as the profit imperative, patriarchy, racial inequality, and ecological irresponsibility often turn organizations into instruments of domination and exploitation”. How do we understand this premise in the context of the informal economy?

All of these elements provide rich topics for critical investigation and the chairs of the CMS division’s main programme welcome scholarly papers (theoretical and empirical) and symposia that address the conference theme. For those who do not wish to engage directly with the conference theme, we also invite papers and symposia that not only advance scholarship within the AOM but also develop epistemic and political pluralism within the CMS division as it engages with its own challenges of perspective and representation (see the CMS domain statement (http://group.aomonline.org/cms/).

CMS Division Awards will be given for the best paper authored by a doctoral students, for the best paper overall, and for the best (development-oriented) reviewer.