Item 1:
Invitation and a reminder for the 2nd International Health at Work Workshop 19-20 April 2012.

Welcome to join us for the Second International Health at Work Workshop, 19-20th April 2012, Stockholm University School of Business, Stockholm, Sweden.

This year’s topic is Workplace Health Promotion between Bodily Affects and Capitalist Politics. We invite health researchers and professionals across disciplines to join our group of Swedish and inter­national organizational researchers to critically interrogate the bodily, managerial and political-economic aspects of workplace health promotion under contemporary capitalism.

Whilst health and wellbeing are heralded as strategic factors in the management and growth of organizations, industries and economies, workplace health promotion has taken on a significant role in the management of people and organizations. Whether or not workplace health promotion really creates healthier, happier and more productive employees, more organizations seem to invest more time and money in promoting the health and wellbeing of their employees. This workshop therefore attempts to:
– examine how people manage, enact and challenge workplace health promotion
– address the bodily and emotional feelings that people experience in relation to workplace health promotion and health activities at work
– interrogate the economic logic and labour process which surrounds workplace health promotion under contemporary capitalism

Confirmed speakers and topics:
Organizational health and un/wellness
– Professor Gibson Burrell, University of Leicester School of Management
– Dr Karen Dale, Lancaster University Management School

Health and biomorality under capitalism
– Dr Carl Cederström, Cardiff Business School, University of Cardiff

Healthy elites
– Professor Mikael Holmqvist, Stockholm University School of Business
– Ms Janet Johanson, Stockholm University School of Business

Workplace health promotion and the capitalist labour process
– Dr Christian Maravelias, Stockholm University School of Business

One or many healths?
– Professor Iain Munro, Universität Innsbrück

Employee embodiment and emotion in workplace health promotion
– Professor Torkild Thanem & Mr Carl Lundevi, Stockholm University School of Business

Workshop sessions:
During the conference there will also be two interactive workshop sessions. Here speakers and participants will have the opportunity to explore areas for further research along with methodological and theoretical challenges in critical health promotion research.

Practicalities:
The workshop takes place at Konferens 7A, Strandvägen 7a, Stockholm. 19th of April 09.00-17.00 and 20th of April 09.00-13.00. The conference is free of charge if attending. A no-show or cancellation after the registration deadline will be charged with SEK 1,000. Substitutes are welcome. The registration deadline is February 28th. For registration or any other practical issues please contact Mr Carl Lundevi on clu@fek.su.se. The number of participants is limited.

Organizing committee:
Professor Torkild Thanem (chair) and Mr Carl Lundevi, Stockholm University; Ms Lisbeth Rydén, Lund University


Item 2:

Two PhD bursaries in the Department of Management at the University of Bristol, UK

Call for applications
Applications are invited for two PhD bursaries in the Department of Management at the University of Bristol. The successful candidates will conduct a programme of research for the degree of PhD and will also be expected to contribute to teaching within the Department. Candidates should have a first or upper second class Honours degree in a discipline related to their proposed research and should also hold (or be working towards) a Masters degree in a related subject. In all but exceptional cases, an MBA or similar generalist Masters in Management will not usually be considered.

The awards are for three years beginning in October 2012. We welcome applications in any field of Management, but preference will be given to candidates focused on critical and/or quantitative methodologies in the following areas:
· aesthetics, gender and history in management,
· supply chain management
· cultural perspectives on project organizations and organizing
· values in organisations and on organizational identity
· management ideas, occupations and consultancy from a social science perspective
· leadership
· international business and
· social network analysis

More details of staff research interests can be found on the Department website at the following address: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/management/research/. Preference will be given to applicants who have already identified a potential supervisor and briefly explained how their proposal would fit into that supervisor’s current research interests.

The successful candidate will be required to provide up to 96 contact hours of teaching a year (for example, 4 contact hours a week for 24 weeks) and to carry out attendant duties, such as teaching preparation and marking. They will also be required to carry out marking of level one exam scripts, to assist more generally in the planning and delivery of courses, marking and assessment, and to participate in Departmental events and seminar series. Some support and training will be provided as appropriate.

A wide range of further information about the School, including details of staff members and courses offered, can be found at http://www.efm.bris.ac.uk/

Conditions and the application procedure are described below.

Conditions
Where awarded, the bursary would be paid in each year of PhD study, up to a maximum of three, while the student remains registered as an active full-time research student (MPhil/PhD) in the School and satisfactorily provides the teaching outlined above. Payment in the third year would also be conditional on a successful upgrade from MPhil status to full PhD status, based on progress in doctoral research in the first 21 months of study. It is likely that the living allowance would be paid quarterly, in four instalments.

The award will not be payable once the PhD has been completed or when a student leaves the PhD programme, and payments will be suspended if the award-holder suspends their studies or switches to part-time registration.

Students who are liable to pay the overseas fee will have to meet the difference between the home/EU fee and the overseas fee from their own resources.

Application procedure
Applicants should make a formal PhD application as soon as possible, submitted no later than 16 March 2012, and email an expression of interest at the same time. When completing your online PhD application to the School, please note on the form that you wish to be considered for a School bursary.

As well as completing an online PhD application, all applicants who wish to be considered should email mark.hall@bristol.ac.uk and copy the message to jane.pitfield@bristol.ac.uk, to confirm that an online PhD application has been submitted. The subject line of this email should be ‘PhD Bursary Application’ and the deadline for this expression of interest is 16 March 2012.

The School reserves the right to consider applications after the deadline, and also reserves the right not to make the awards if no suitable candidates present themselves. Applicants who are not contacted by 30 March 2012 should assume that their application has been unsuccessful.

The deadline for applications is 16 March 2012.


Item 3:

International Journal of Work, Organisation and Emotion – 2nd call for special issue: sensually exploring culture and affect at work, Extended deadline: 1st May 2012

Guest Editors: Gavin Jack (La Trobe University), Samantha Warren (University of Essex), Kathleen Riach (University of Essex) & Antonio Strati (University of Trento)

Anonymised full papers no longer than 7000 words (not under review elsewhere), using IJWOE guidelines for authors, should be e-mailed to sensesatwork@gmail.com by 1st May 2012. Refer to submission practices here for further details. Please address any queries to the special issue editors on the above e-mail.

This special issue seeks to provoke renewed thinking and stimulate ideas surrounding how culture is experienced through the senses. As Martin (2002: 161) suggests, given the increased attention to emotion in recent organizational theory, an approach that can tackle the aesthetics, lived, experienced dimension of culture may provide inspirations for exciting new research vistas. This is especially so in light of the affective turn and interest in non-representational theory within the wider social sciences (Thrift, 2007). If we are to explore what culture ‘feels’ like for organizational members in contemporary workplaces, and their “intensities of feeling, emotional attachments and gut reactions” (Liljestrom & Paasonen, 2010: 1), we must suggest that cultural encounters are created and constituted through perceptual, cognitive, material and embodied interaction.

The concern with culture, be it organizational, subcultural, national or popular continues to linger in the academic debates within management studies (e.g. Ybema et al., 2010; Organization Science, 2011). Invited to interrogate the essence of this miasmic concept, the ways that we share, experience, feel and embody its presence imply that the tentacles of culture go far beyond normative forms of logic and communication and implicate the sensory dimension of lived experience. Indeed, an underlying suggestion that culture cannot be grasped through logocentric accounts alone can be traced to 1980’s corporate culturism where a manufactured culture may be shared through the use of ‘artefacts’, or visible signs such as organizational traditions, rituals, heroes and stories. Simultaneously, an instantiative view of culture of various hues critiqued functionalist paradigms of culture and focused on the interactional and symbolic processes through which actors in organizations ‘accomplished’ their worlds (Chan, 2003; Frost et al., 1991; Smircich, 1983; Martin, 1992). More recently a ‘cultural studies of organization’ approach (Rhodes & Parker, 2008) has made use of popular culture resources and techniques to understand and deconstruct organizational life, focusing on the meanings of social action in both a productive or consumptive context. So too have particular forms of postcolonial analysis denaturalised the textual strategies used to organise racial inequalities and the latent imperialism of a variety of culture management and marketing activities (Priyadharshini, 2003). However, in these fields of interest, sight and vision - in line with the wider ocular bias of Western societies - remain the privileged sense for the leveraging of social control or influence implicit in culture management initiatives.

Whilst the current field of organizational aesthetics helps us focus on the ‘don’t-know-what’ of organizational life (Strati, 2007) tales of our senses being managed, manipulated and controlled remain unrecorded by scholars although are often discussed in media and practitioner circles (Tischler, 2005; Lindstrom, 2010). Sensory marketing is now estimated to be worth more than $5 million worldwide, and with impending computer technologies such as ismell and SENX on the market within 3 years, the traditional boundaries between virtual and ‘authentic’ sensuality continue to blur in our daily experience. Within the workplace, UK travel call centres broadcast ‘natural noises’ and infuse the air with the smell of suntan lotion to motivate agents on the workfloor. Elsewhere, buildings are architecturally designed to be silent but pump in air-conditioning noises to allow confidential discussion in an open plan office, whilst music may be a ‘gift’ to workers that can be bequeathed or sanctioned (Korczynski & Jones, 2006). All this suggests that, like cultural products and objects, sensory experiences can become a ‘lubricant for the system’ (Adorno, 2001:117).

However, notwithstanding some notable exceptions that explore how knowing and competence are achieved through the senses (e.g., Strati, 2007; Candau, 2000; Hindemarsh & Plinick, 2007) less is understood about the ways in which actors in organizations feel, smell, touch, taste, hear or otherwise sensually negotiate culture and the social relations that it constitutes. Perhaps this is a consequence of the textualization and visualisation of culture that has dominated recent scholarship in a variety of disciplines, organization studies included, with “its tendency to downplay the sensory and the material in accounts of society and culture while conceptualizing cultural phenomena as discourses, texts of systems to be interpreted” (Liljestrom & Paasonen, 2010: 1). As a response, a cross-disciplinary ‘affective turn’ (Clough & Halley, 2007) has emerged to reconsider non-representational and embodiment issues in the development of theoretical and empirical accounts of work and organization.

Subsequently, we invite contributions exploring the following indicative areas:
· How might we better understand the cultural circuits that stimulate affective work through a sensory lens?
· How, and with what kinds of success, might a consideration of the senses aid the theoretical and conceptual development of culture at work?
· What might be the implications of the ‘affective turn’ in the social sciences for the study of the senses, emotion, work and organization?
· What is the sensory experience of, living in/through/by culture at work?
· In what ways is culture constructed, understood or reproduced through sensual or polysensory processes?
· How might sensual methodologies provide us with new insights into organizational culture? What ethical issues are implied?
· To what extent does organizational engagement with the senses privilege or silence particular groups, bodies, or types of work

We particularly welcome ambitious studies that go beyond a Western/Eurocentric hierarchy of the senses and take into account thermoreception, coenaesthesis, vibration, nociception (pain), movement or proximity to other bodies. These areas are already explored in disciplines ranging from anthropology to physiology (e.g., Bessour & Perl, 1969; Stoller, 1989; Classen et al., 1994).