'Feminism and Critical Race Theory? That's Chapter 12':
Doing Critical Management Studies as if Feminism and Critical Race Theory Really Mattered
CMS6 - The 6th International Critical Management Studies Conference
13-15 July 2009
Warwick Business School,
The University of Warwick
Conference home:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/wbs/conf/cms2009/
Stream Link:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/wbs/conf/cms2009/streams/fem__crit_race.doc
Submission Deadlines
* Abstracts maximum 1000 words, A4 paper, single spaced, 12 point font to be submitted to Elaine Swan by 1st November 2008:
e.swan@lancaster.ac.uk
* Notification of acceptance of abstracts by 18th December 2008
* Full paper to be submitted by 1st May 2009
Convenors
Dr Diane Grimes, Syracuse University, US
Dr Deborah Jones, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Professor Beverly Metcalfe, Liverpool Hope University, UK
Jennifer Mease, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, US
Dr Pat Parker, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, US
Sarah Proctor-Thomson, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Dr Valerie Stead, Lancaster University Management School, UK
Dr Elaine Swan, Lancaster University Management School, UK
Stream Description
This conference stream invites papers and work in progress from those wishing to examine the marginalisation of feminist and critical race theorising in Critical Management Studies (CMS). We take CMS to work as a subfield of study, a growing body of knowledge, a way of organising and producing knowledge, and a network of power.
In a recent book, Martin Parker writes that the CMS identity claims that it has 'broad left, pro-feminist, anti-imperialist' sympathies (2002: 117). We beg to differ: in our view, CMS has gone little beyond the tactic of 'add women and stir'. Our argument is that feminism and critical race theory have been largely ignored by much of the writing within CMS. CMS scholars have shown a reliance on, or perhaps a phallic fascination with, male philosophical writers (e.g. Derrida, Foucault). They have given space to feminist theorists in tokenist ways, citing only certain famous feminists such as Butler and Haraway and then only marginal sections of their work: for example, by citing Judith Butler and her work on Derrida and Foucault when in fact she also draws extensively on feminist writers such as Cixous, Irigaray and Fraser. In these ways, feminism and critical race theory are seen as sub-themes or even 'derivatives' of CMS. As our title suggests, most key critical management studies texts place gender and race, feminists and critical race theorists in one chapter, or literally in the margins.
But more than this, we suggest that CMS produces knowledge and spaces within the academy based on certain unexamined practices of inclusion and exclusion. After Sara Ahmed (1998), we want to examine under what conditions feminism and critical race theory, and feminists and critical race theorists are included in CMS. In what ways does CMS authorise and define what and who counts? More importantly, we want to explore how feminism and critical race theory can 'speak back' to CMS. Our argument here is not meant to stabilise, essentialise or fix these studies: for example, there is not just one feminism. We do want to recognise, however, how CMS operates as a 'gendered [and racialised] modality of enunciation' which involves particular ways of organising concepts and values (Ahmed 1998: 14). These have material gendered and racialised effects which authorise certain texts, theories and hierarchies of knowledge.
This stream proposes that one important way in which feminism and critical race theory can talk back is by cutting the Gordian knot of theory and practice which ties up CMS. Feminism and critical race theory can do this by locating academics as practitioners in a political world of sex, gendering, racialisation, power and knowledge. In contrast to the split - between us (academics) and them (practitioners) - which constitutes a key binary in the development of CMS, most feminists and critical race theorists in organisational studies occupy the positions of both us-academics and us-practitioners.
We agree that, as Valerie Fournier and Chris Grey have suggested, CMS represents 'a commitment to (some form of) denaturalization' and so is associated with 'an anti-performative stance' (2000: p.8). But much of CMS seems to marginalise the complex and sophisticated feminist and critical race theory debates in which 'denaturalizing' tendencies join with an urgent performative drive to make a difference. At the same time where the 'denaturalizing' theory of feminist and critical race theorists has been taken up, the transformative critique largely neutralised. Thus, whilst there has been recent discussion within CMS on making more connections with practitioners, e.g. via studying or collaborating with social movements, these seem to be constructed as CMS academics helping to supplement a 'lack' by adding in some politicos. This stream wants to debate whether CMS practitioners might take a more reflexive approach by looking at the politics of their own knowledge production - both in terms of what counts as knowledge and how racism and sexism are reproduced in academic institutions including CMS.
In this stream we invite contributors to scrutinise both the 'academic-practitioner' sides of the binary. In particular, we would like to explore the absence and presence of feminist and critical race knowledges conceptually and empirically. We also want to examine the conditions under which they are 'included' in CMS and what these indicate about what CMS has achieved so far. Examples of research informed by feminist and critical race theory which 'speak back' and offer alternative ways of doing CMS are encouraged. We would also welcome submissions which locate the production of CMS texts within gendered and racialised academic practices whereby black men and women and white women continue to be marginalised in all the typical ways that scholars of male-dominated white organisations describe. We hope the stream will go on to imagine 'doing CMS as if feminism and critical race theory really mattered'.
References
Ahmed, S. (1998) Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fournier, V. & Grey, C. (2000) 'At the critical moment: Conditions and prospects for critical management studies'. Human Relations, 53(1), 7-32.
Parker, M. (2002) Against Management. Cambridge: Polity.
Call for papers
We invite papers or workshops which do one or more of the following:
* Explore, challenge and examine gendered and racialised knowledge production in CMS and academia
* Imagine, speculate, fantasise what CMS would look like if feminism and critical race theory spoke back and were heard
* Examine and address the gendered and racialised hierarchies of knowledge in management and organisation theorising
* Analyse the tensions/convergences between feminisms and critical race theories, feminists and critical race theorists and between these and CMS
* Provide accounts of the implications of feminisms and critical race theories for CMS and its espoused transformative project/s
* Examine the terms on which who or what gets included and authorised in CMS and the institutional practices and apparatuses that produce these inclusions and exclusions
* Address how methodologies and decisions about empirical research sites for CMS can continue to collude in the privileging of particular gendered and racialised thinking and practices
* Explore where and at what point social movements including feminism become important and interesting enough to be collaborated with in CMS
* Conceptualise how feminisms and critical race theory enable us to challenge, re-conceive, antagonise and reconfigure CMS practices and theorising
This list is of course not exhaustive and we welcome different ideas broadly related to the spirit and theme of the stream. Please contact any of the convenors if you wish to discuss your paper or work in progress.
Dr Deborah Jones
Victoria Management School
Victoria University of Wellington
P.O. Box 600, Wellington
NEW ZEALAND
Te Whare Wananga o te Upoko o te Ika a Maui
Pouaka Poutapeta 600
Te Whanga-nui-a-Tara
AOTEAROA
http://www.vuw.ac.nz/vms/staff_academic/JonesDeborah/JonesDeborah.aspx
Tel. 64-4-463-5731
RH902
Rutherford House
Bunny Street
Wellington