Starting October 15, 2011 - Ending April 12, 2012 Expired
We are pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the 6th Making Projects Critical workshop, to be held at Manchester Business School on April 16th-17th 2012.
The workshop will be hosted by the Manchester Critical Management Group and the Manchester Projects, Programmes and Portfolios Network (MP³), at Manchester Business School, University of Manchester in cooperation with the Global Operations Research Unit (GO RU), Bristol Business School and INDEK, Royal Institute of Technology of Stockholm.
Organising committee:
Damian Hodgson
Manchester Business School, University of Manchester
Monica Lindgren and Johann Packendorff
School of Industrial Engineering & Management, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm
Svetlana Cicmil
Bristol Business School, Faculty of Business and Law, UWE, Bristol
Background
'Making Projects Critical' is the title of series of international workshops intended to provide a forum for research from a wide range of critical perspectives relating to all aspects of projects, including project management, project based organising and the 'projectification' of society. Through the workshop, we hope to contest the theoretical and methodological limitations of traditional conceptions of projects and project management. In particular, the intention is to draw upon wider intellectual resources than the instrumental, positivist and technicist approaches traditionally used to understand, implement and control organisational projects.
The first five workshops have resulted in a themed stream at the 2011 CMS Conference and have produced two major publications:
• Making Projects Critical (2006), an edited volume with 16 chapters, eds. Hodgson, D.E. and Cicmil, S. Palgrave :Basingstoke, UK and New York, USA;
• ‘Project Management behind the Façade’, a special issue of ephemera: theory & politics with 7 contributions, 9(2) May 2009
Call for Papers
The broad range of themes addressed in past workshops include issues of power and domination in project settings, ethics and moral responsibility within projects, tensions between standardisation and creativity in project organisations, the limits to projectification and the dysfunctions of project rationality. Contributions on any of these themes or related critical topics drawing on pragmatic conceptualisations, empirical ethnography, narratology or concrete case studies, would be welcome.
A key concern of this workshop is to employ critical perspectives to analyse and evaluate the practice of project management and decision making as evidenced in the approval, governance and control of project work and project workers. We particularly welcome critical contributions which seek to bridge the gap between abstract theorising and the practice of project management. Such critique will be germane to those, such as project managers, who work closely and struggle with the demands of project-based organisation and who are trying to find more acceptable and participative/democratic ways of coping with their roles.
We would like to encourage papers which address the widening range of sectors in which organisations and organising are increasingly structured around the project form by focusing on issues of context, values and power. Such papers might encompass the following fields:
- Organisational Change projects
- Projects and programmes in the Public Sector
- Consultancy and Consulting projects
- Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial processes
- R&D, Innovation and New Product Development projects
- International Development projects
- Urban Regeneration and Community Development projects
- New Media and IT related projects
- Art and Event/Exhibition projects
- Research projects in both industry and academia
Contributions which adopt critical perspectives on the themes of temporality, complexity, phronesis, sustainability, the knowledge economy, professionalisation, pedagogy and education as related to the field of project management studies will also be of interest to conference participants.
Submission deadlines and selection process:
• Extended abstracts required by January 13th 2012
Extended abstracts should be 2-3 pages including references. Please send all submissions via e-mail to damian.hodgson@mbs.ac.uk with “MPC6 abstract” in the subject header.
• Notification of acceptance/rejection with feedback to authors by January 31st 2012
Extended abstracts will be reviewed by the organising committee members and the authors of selected abstracts will be invited to develop their papers for presentation in the workshop.
• Full paper submission by March 30th 2012
For details of previous MPC conferences, please visit;
www.uwe.ac.uk/bbs/research/bcloe/newsinshort/makingprojectscritical.aspx
For information and discussions on this and other MPC events, see the “Making Projects Critical” LinkedIn group
Making Projects Critical 6
April 16th-17th 2012
Manchester, UK
Call for Papers
for the 6th international workshop on critical studies of project based work, project management and the projectification of society and life at large.
Extended abstracts (2-3 pages) required by January 13th 2012 to Damian Hodgson (damian.hodgson@mbs.ac.uk)
