PRECONFERENCE # 3

Click to view the Preconference Program!

* NOTE:  This preconference is not held at the Sheraton
This preconference is cosponsored by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Université de Montréal; HEC Montréal; ICA’s Language & Social Interaction, Organizational Communication, and Public Relations Divisions; and Waikato Management School, New Zealand.

Title:  What is an Organization? Materiality, Agency, and Discourse

Date:  May 21 and May 22, 2008; 9:00 – 17:00 each day

Location:  HEC Montréal, Université de Montréal, Québec, Canada

Limit:  300 persons

Cost:  Regular: $160.00
          Student: $65.00
          (two lunches, coffees, one dinner, and proceedings included)

Transportation:  You will meet at the Sheraton at 8:15 and will be guided to the Université de Montréal.

Leading international scholars from various disciplines will gather in Montreal, Canada, to discuss and debate central issues of contemporary organization theory. Obviously, the concept of an organization as primarily a social and economic reality has been challenged from many sides in the past 20 years. Critics coming from various fields of the social sciences (sociology of science, anthropology, discourse analysis, and semiotics, among others) have offered new metaphors and constructs to recast the reality of contemporary organizations in very different realms: culture and meaning, interaction and discourse, and materiality and artifacts, among others.
 
The work of James R. Taylor is an outstanding example of an attempt at synthesizing these various trends in a conception of organization that gives new meaning to basic concepts of organizational studies such as agency, conversation, text, and materiality. With a view to advance the discussion on the fundamental issues of the nature of organizing, agency, and text, this conference brings together the contributions of leaders in the fields of communication and organization studies in a debate convened around Taylor’s work and extends it in several new directions.

Keynote Speakers

Barbara Czarniawska (U Göteborg, Sweden)
Bruno Latour (Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris, France)
Haridimos Tsoukas (ALBA, Greece, University of Warwick, UK)
Linda Putnam (U of California, Santa Barbara, USA)