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Dear colleagues,

*Apologies for cross-posting*

We would like to invite you to submit your short paper to our EGOS 2017 track on Viewing the Unseen Organization in Practice. 

Look forward to seeing you in Copenhagen!

Feng, Michael and Linda

EGOS 2017 Sub-theme 61: Viewing the Unseen Organization in Practice

Convenors:

Feng Liu

Sobey School of Business, Saint Mary's University, Canada

Feng.liu@smu.ca

Michael Jarrett

INSEAD, Singapore

Michael.jarrett@insead.edu

Linda Rouleau

HEC Motréal, Canada

Linda.rouleau@hec.ca

Call for Papers

Politics, symbolic power and resistance relationships often go unacknowledged along with the strategies, practices and realities that lie behind the socio-economic project of organizations (Vince & Mazen, 2014).  We argue that they represent the unseen organization in practice. Thus, this subtheme seeks to make "visible" the processes that are accomplished in practice by which networks, groups and actors balance, compromise, divert and resist the multiple objectives and goals that pervade the gestalt of organizations. Beyond what people do and say, there are layers of subjective experience, knowledge and complex forms of participation and resistance that only make sense through visual and lived artifacts including, for instance, pictures, films, graphs, as well as dress and space. 

We believe that "Viewing the Unseen Organization in Practice" is an important step for advancing practice studies.  The visual mode of discourse, meaning and social reality construction and the powerful performative effect of visuals in situ can bring up new cues for understanding the processes through which organizations are negotiated, transformed and resisted.  Notions such as visual narrative (Höykinpuro & Ropo, 2014), and emotional display (Liu & Maitlis, 2014), can help to better understand the "creative entanglement of doing and knowing" (Gherardi, 2015) along with multiple circuits of power (Denis et al., 2011) that characterized the Unseen Organization in practice.

To provide a more integrated perspective of what really goes on and, paradoxically, to illuminate how the functions of dysfunctions can deliver better socio-economic outcomes (Ashforth & Reingen, 2014), we propose to look at the following set of questions:  "Why" should we "view" the multiple and heterogeneous assemblages of practices that constitute the unseen organization? "What" can be "viewed" from these assemblages, whether the involved practices are symbolic, discursive, ideological or political? And "How" we can "view" these assemblages?

The "why" question addresses the reasons, the opportunities and the challenges for practice researchers to endorse the visual turn for understanding and researching the "bright" as well as the "dark" side of the organization. Following Bell & Davidson (2013) and Meyer et al. (2013), this subtheme aims to explore the epistemological and theoretical underpinnings as well as the pros and cons of adopting visual studies and methods for highlighting the hidden side of the organization whether it is positive or negative.

The "what" question ambitions to reveal what the unseen organization looks like and to understand the processes through which it is constructed, interpreted, resisted, communicated, legitimized, defended and strengthened (or weakened) to its internal and external stakeholders. These could be addressed by examining the visual artifacts which reflect the organization's cultural and political systems (e.g., Gagliardi, 2006), the values that may be reflected through photos in CSR reports (e.g., Höllerer et al., 2013) or following communication studies, we suggest that analyzing visual artifacts such as CEO talks, would enable us to understand these implicit organizational practices. 

The "how" question highlights the variety of visual methods through which to examine the many sides of the unseen organization (See Bell & Davidson, 2013 and Meyer et al., 2013). Researchers can either draw on pre-existing visual artifacts such as website images or use visual artifacts that organizational members develop in real-time during the research process. In addition, we see the value of video recording of organizational members' daily activities (Rouleau, de Rond & Musca, 2014), TMT power dynamics (e.g., Jarrett & Liu, 2015; Liu & Maitlis, 2014), the tools and artifacts they engage (Kaplan, 2011), and the space they involve (Jarzabkowski, Burke, & Spee, 2015; Teulier & Rouleau, 2013). Such rich visual, multi-channeled, cues deepen our understanding of the social construction of the organization in real time.

Finally, the broader aim of this sub-theme is to integrate, and further develop ongoing efforts to draw on visual research for exploring the unseen organization in practice (Bell & Davidson, 2013; Meyer et al., 2013). We welcome contributions from many traditions of both theoretical and empirical papers devoted to produce knowledge for better understanding practices drawing on visual research and methods. Our only requirement is that the contributions are thought provoking, innovative, and rigorous!

For more information on this EGOS subtheme and to upload your short paper, please visit: 

http://www.egosnet.org/jart/prj3/egos/main.jart?rel=de&reserve-mode=active&content-id=1442567999321&subtheme_id=1442568081289