CMS5 Conference:
Development and Globalisation: organising global concerns for security and participation
Stream description
This stream provides a stimulating and exciting space to discuss development and globalisation issues within a critical management studies context. We are inviting papers from diverse world views and academic fields to engage with current political questions that are central to understanding the international organisation of development and globalisation.
We hope to capture how the current political climate has been absorbed in our academic debates on development and globalisation and how these debates have been flavoured by our understandings of human security. We wish to explore the links between critical management studies and development and globalisations issues. These links should be central to all delegates who participate in this stream. However - the main precept from which we launch our call for papers, is for a committed and truly interdisciplinary approach to formulating theoretical assumptions and designing empirical studies.
Discourse on human security is often directly linked to political pressure to accept a society that is constrained by an apparatus of control. Today, disruptions in our personal space, limitations to our civil rights and additional fees and taxes are often justified by an urgent need for security. Is our life becoming less secure or can these measures enhance security? Who decides what constitutes threat and security?
While concerns for security are making us anxious and letting us accept limitations to our rights and freedoms, participation in democratic processes seems to require the opposite capabilities. Are participation and security becoming antonyms or is participation a main ingredient for establishing a secure society? Have the processes of public participation evolved to apply to all aspects of our lives?
Papers in this stream may consider the following themes:
- Organising Human Security
Autonomy, freedom, choice and security. These are ideas and concepts that preoccupy social theorists – but how can we integrate them together in an understanding of the managerial design and execution of development projects and efforts to globalise? First World powers are now pushing for rapid “democratization” in a bid to win the “war on terror”. As established international discourses, development and globalization are concepts under threat of becoming dangerously hollow rhetoric, overshadowing the inherently political nature of human security.
- Organising Participation
How do our changing understandings of democracy relate to the design and management of development practice? How have these understandings been integrated into discourses of sustainable futures, climate change and gender? Participation can be interpreted as accepting each other's ideas and respecting each other in the most fundamental ways. What anarchical, truly participatory structures have been tested and found adequate?
- The Politics of Representation
Representation is inherent to human communication and it is a powerful discursive tool used to legitimate certain practices and ways of knowing. How is this way of communicating operationalised within development organisations and through efforts to globalise? How are these operations relational to managerial discourses? How are spontaneity, argument and polemics impinged by misrepresentation? What are the implications of misrepresentation on a participatory process?
- Metaphors of Practice
Focusing more explicitly on the use of discourse in organisational practices, this session explores the emergence of metaphors in developmental work and globalisation debates. Delegates are asked to explore what they feel to be enduring metaphors or archetypical “master” metaphors in development that accent and shape work practices. What new metaphors have surfaced in the recent past and how have they been integrated into our existing understandings of what development is or should be?
Delegates are encouraged to submit abstracts that reflect on or explicitly engage with the three themes outlined above. We will consider all submissions and actively promote an interdisciplinary approach to understanding development and globalisation issues. In addition, we want to create a space to discuss different methodological approaches in tackling these themes.
Open Workshop
Following the success of our workshop with Professor Arturo Escobar at the last CMS conference, we are currently securing a visit from another distinguished academic to contribute to our stream (guest speaker to be advertised soon). All Development and Globalisation presenters will have reserved seating for this special event, which is open to all conference delegates.
Convenors
Dr Sadhvi Dar
Judge Business School
University of Cambridge
s.dar@jbs.cam.ac.uk
Dr Bettina Wittneben
Rotterdam School of Management
Erasmus University
b.wittneben@rsm.nl
