LINGUIST List 16.1970
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Mon Jun 27 2005
Calls: Cognitive Science/Greece; General Ling/Germany
Editor for this issue: Kevin Burrows
<kevin linguistlist.org>
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Directory
1. Francesca
Bargiela,
Re-turn to Practice: Understanding Organization As It Happens
2. Sam
Featherston,
Linguistic Evidence: Empirical, Theoretical and Computational Perspectives
Message 1: Re-turn to Practice: Understanding Organization As It Happens
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Date: 24-Jun-2005
From: Francesca Bargiela <francesca.bargielantu.ac.uk>
Subject: Re-turn to Practice: Understanding Organization As It Happens
Full Title: Re-turn to Practice: Understanding Organization As It Happens
Date: 15-Jun-2006 - 16-Jun-2006
Location: Mykonos, Greece
Contact Person: Dalvir Samra-Fredericks
Meeting Email: dalvir.samra-fredericksntu.ac.uk
Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable
Call Deadline: 31-Jan-2006
Meeting Description:
This Workshop provides an opportunity for prospective participants to elaborate
on a variety of theoretical and methodological questions concerning the
character and study of practice, social realities, knowledge, and learning in
the context of organizations.
The Second Organization Studies Summer Workshop on
Re-turn to Practice: Understanding Organization As It Happens
15-16 June 2006 Mykonos, Greece
Convenors: Dalvir Samra-Fredericks, Nottingham Trent University, UK
Reijo Miettinen, University of Helsinki, Finland
Dvora Yanow, California State University, USA
Keynote Speakers: Wanda Orlikowski, MIT, USA
Theodore R. Schatzki, University of Kentucky, USA
Richard Whittington, University of Oxford, UK
About the Workshop
The Organization Studies Summer Workshop is an annual activity, launched in June
2005, to facilitate high-quality scholarship in organization studies. Its
primary aim is to advance cutting-edge research on important topics in the field
by bringing together in a Greek island, in early summer, a small and
competitively selected group of scholars, who will have the opportunity to
interact and share insights in a stimulating and scenic environment.
Following on the tremendous success of the First Organization Studies Workshop
in Santorini, we are happy to announce that the Second Workshop will take place
at Saint John Hotel (http://www.saintjohn.gr), Mykonos, on 15 & 16 June 2006.
Mykonos (http://www.mykonosgreece.com/, http://www.mykonos.net), a world-famous
resort with beautiful sandy beaches, unrivalled landscapes and unique Cycladic
architecture, not to mention its internationally known night life, will provide
an ideal setting for Workshop participants to relax and engage in authentic
dialogue. With this Workshop we aim to create a setting in which the juices of
intellectual creativity will naturally flow.
Because the aim of the workshop is to generate opportunities for creative
interaction and intelligent conversation, the number of participants will be
kept intentionally small - up to 50 papers will be accepted. Papers will be
circulated in advance and participants will be urged to read them prior to the
workshop. More about the practicalities and costs of the workshop will appear in
subsequent issues of Organization Studies as well as in the journal's web site
(www.egosnet.org/os).
About the Topic
We are currently witnessing a renewed interest in 'practice' in several social
science areas, among them organizational and management studies, science and
technology studies, professional/workplace discourse studies, and sociological
theorizing about the character of society and human action. For example, in
the strategy-as-practice subfield within organizational studies, we see a
growing interest in what particular organizational members actually do to
realize strategic practices. A practice-based approach has also been central for
understanding organizational knowing and learning among scholars who see these
as collective activities. In philosophy, practice has emerged as an important
element in such otherwise different philosophical approaches as phenomenology,
pragmatism, and Wittgensteinian philosophy developed from the tradition of
analytic philosophy. These various areas of renewed interest provide grounds to
consider and explore - as a recent collection of essays suggests - the
'practice turn' in social theory inspired by various philosophical and social
theoretical traditions and resources, among them phenomenology and hermeneutics,
ethnomethodology, activity theory, actor network theory, and Pierre Bourdieu's
theory of habitus. Given this intellectual lineage, it seems appropriate to
speak of a 're-turn to practice.'
Various theoretical traditions inform empirical studies of practice and the many
aspects of what people do. These include Cultural-Historical Activity Theory
and the pragmatism of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, among others, both of
which naturalize Hegel's concepts of consciousness, work, and tool. Both
approaches concern changes in practices, their mediation through artifacts (a
focus shared with hermeneutics), and cultural retooling in reconstructing the
environment and in organizational change. Both also propose interventionist and
experimentalist approaches to studies of human practices. Other theoretical
traditions have examined the fundamental basis for human interaction -
commonsense reasoning procedures, methods, protocols - and the moral
accountability of action, both of which also bear upon the realization of any
practice. Two such traditions arise from the work of Erving Goffman and Harold
Garfinkel's classical ethnomethodology. Yet another theoretical lens for
critical studies of practice arises from the work of Foucault where, for
example, a relational conceptualization of power/knowledge illuminates such
'effects' as gendered workplace practices.
These and other studies also suggest that practice-focused empirical research
needs to draw upon anthropological-ethnographic and sociological-participant
observer methodologies for accessing and generating data. These enable
researchers to get 'close to where the (inter)action is', thereby seeing human
beings in 'real-time' as they instantiate a practice. This is the route for
understanding ''organization as it happens'' (to paraphrase Boden ). Such an
approach suggests that it is only through intimate observation that we can
access organizational members' situated use and collective manipulation of an
array of tools, technologies, objects, vocabularies, and complex bodies of
knowledge in realizing a 'practice'. It is an approach that seeks to ground
theorizing in what it is that people actually do, rather than beginning with
theories abstracted from action. In this, it takes as its point of departure -
at times explicitly and consciously, at times by implication - a
phenomenological emphasis on lived experience, a hermeneutic emphasis on
meanings embedded in linguistic, physical, and action artifacts working
symbolically, and/or a critical theoretical emphasis on power.
This Workshop provides an opportunity for prospective participants to elaborate
on a variety of theoretical and methodological questions concerning the
character and study of practice, social realities, knowledge, and learning in
the context of organizations. In this light, we propose the following as
starting points on the theoretical front:
* What similarities or differences exist between or among theories and concepts
of practice? How do they inform empirical studies, and what do they enable or
constrain in such research?
* What particular elements of practice are important for the study of
organizational actions? How might key practice-related phenomena such as
knowledge, skill, rule, tools, and technologies be understood?
* How do various theories of practice account for stability and the maintenance
of order, on the one hand, and change, on the other?
* How do we account for power and politics in realizing a practice or understand
phenomena such as gendered practices? How do we account for the emotional and
moral aspects which infuse practice?
* How are practices learned? What might be the role of reflection therein?
Also crucial for developing our understanding of these issues and phenomena are
empirical studies which embrace the fluid, embodied, and collective efforts of
organizational actors engaged in performing a 'practice'. We take the following
questions as starting points on this topic:
* What methodological presuppositions do we make and what methods are called
into play to enable the study of the rich complexity of practice being 'done' in
real time, including its mix of knowledge, skills and artifacts and its
organization across time and space?
* How can we access and study the embodied and tacit dimensions of practices, or
other aspects of organizational life such as moralities/ethics, emotions, and
aesthetics?
* What is the role of the researcher in the study of practices (e.g., observer,
participant in dialogue, change agent)? How does that role anchor our own
practices in 'doing research'?
This 'practice turn' also has implications for wider debates concerning, for
instance, what constitutes 'effective' practice and how, if at all, it can be
taught or transferred from one setting to another. Here, we start with these
questions:
* To what extent can practice-focused research establish generalizable,
normative claims for specific practices deemed to enhance organizational
effectiveness? Can such identified local practices be transferred to other
places or organizations, and if so, what kind of learning does such transfer
call for?
* What are the implications of practice-based theorizing for pedagogy and
management education?
* What are the implications of the 'practice turn' for theorizing organizational
studies or even social theory and epistemology more broadly?
We welcome both theoretical and methodological papers elaborating one or several
of these questions. We also seek papers that draw on empirical research and
creatively combine theorizing and innovative research methods to develop our
understandings of practice and of organization as it happens.
Submissions
Interested participants must submit to the Editor-in-Chief
(OSeditoralba.edu.gr) an abstract of no more than 1000 words for their proposed
contribution plus a brief biographical note by January 31st, 2006. The
submission must be made via email and it must be a Word attachment. It should
contain authors' names, institutional affiliations, and email and postal
addresses, while the subject matter line of the email should indicate the title
of the Workshop. Authors will be notified of acceptance or otherwise by February
28th, 2006. Papers should be submitted to the Editor-in-Chief by May 15th, 2006
and will be electronically circulated to all participants prior to the workshop.
Message 2: Linguistic Evidence: Empirical, Theoretical and Computational Perspectives
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Date: 23-Jun-2005
From: Sam Featherston <sam.featherstonuni-tuebingen.de>
Subject: Linguistic Evidence: Empirical, Theoretical and Computational Perspectives
Full Title: Linguistic Evidence: Empirical, Theoretical and Computational
Perspectives
Short Title: LingEvid2006
Date: 02-Feb-2006 - 04-Feb-2006
Location: Tübingen, Germany
Contact Person: Sam Featherston
Meeting Email: sam.featherstonuni-tuebingen.de
Web Site: http://www.sfb441.uni-tuebingen.de/LingEvid2006
Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics
Call Deadline: 05-Sep-2005
Meeting Description:
Linguistic Evidence 2006 aims to bring together people working on the
relationships between linguistic data on the one hand and linguistic description
and theory on the other.
Empirical, Theoretical, and Computational Perspectives
Second Call for Papers: Linguistic Evidence: Empirical, Theoretical and
Computational Perspectives
The ever-increasing accessibility of corpus data and the wider application of
experimental linguistic techniques in recent years has led to a remarkable
revival of interest in issues of the empirical base of linguistic theory in
general, and the status of different kinds of linguistic evidence in particular.
Consensus is growing that all sorts of data, even so-called primary data from
introspection or from authentic language production, are inherently complex and
reflect performance and production factors as well as the constructs which are
subject of linguistic theory. It is therefore necessary for linguistic studies
to adduce evidence from multiple data types or sources: introspective data,
corpus data, psycholinguistic data, experimental data, historical and diachronic
data, typological data, neurolinguistic data and language learning data are not
only welcome but also often essential. It is in particular by contrasting
evidence from different sources with respect to particular research questions
that we may gain a deeper understanding of the status and quality of the
individual types of linguistic evidence on the one hand, and of their mutual
relationship and relative weight on the other.
It is the aim of this conference to bring together researchers from different
areas of linguistics to discuss their views on the above issues and their use of
different types of evidence in dealing with linguistic research questions of
different generality, and thereby help establish a better understanding of the
nature of linguistic evidence. We therefore invite original contributions from
all fields of linguistics (including syntax, semantics, pragmatics, phonology,
morphology, phonetics, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics,
neurolinguistics, historical linguistics, typology) on any of the above issues
concerning linguistic evidence.
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