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The Open University Business School to host ICMS 2019

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The Open University Business School in collaboration with VIDA, the Critical Management Studies Women's Association, has been selected from a shortlist of excellent proposals to host the 11th International Critical Management Studies 2019 conference.

The theme of the conference will be “Precarious Presents, Open Futures”.

In a statement, Dr Peter Bloom, Head of the Department for People and Organisations at The Open University Business School, said:

Image of Dr Peter Bloom

Hosting this conference in the year The Open University celebrates its 50th anniversary makes this event even more pertinent and critical as we explore how we as an institution can ‘Open up the Future’ for individuals, organisations, communities and society.

We are enthusiastic in our desire to foster discussions, papers and installations/interventions regarding what it means for societies and organisations to be “open” in the 21st century.  This includes, but it is not limited to how being open is under attack by renewed discourses of individualised privilege and “closure”, as well as exploring what currently constitutes a radical or even revolutionary form of political, economic, historical, and ethical openness in organisations and management, and the possibilities of what this could look like in the future.

We are thus interested in critical interventions that explore timely and new concepts such as “digital inclusion”, “decolonizing data management”, “trans-human management”, “open sourced organisations”, “virtual progress”, “glocal solidarity”, and “mobile organising”. These themes all critically interrogate the ways that technologies and emerging forms of organisation can subvert established identities,  processes and practices, values/ ideals and open up space for new and marginalised voices to shape the present and future. Just as importantly, we are committed to “opening up” how a conference is organised and managed – inviting collaborative and creative spaces for constructing knowledge sharing between academics, activists, practitioners, artists, and policy makers.

Further information will follow soon including a call for streams, workshops, installations, interventions and other events. In the meantime, please contact Dr Peter Bloom if you would like any further information on the CMS 2019 conference.