Stream

At

The 9th Art of Management and Organization Conference

University of Brighton, Business Faculty, Brighton, East Sussex, UK, 30th August – 2nd September, 2018

The Performativity of Poetry / Poetics

Conveners:

Andrew Armitage, Anglia Ruskin University of East Anglia (Andrew.armitage@anglia.ac.uk)

Per Darmer, Copenhagen Business School(pd.ioa@cbs.dk)

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The Performativity of Poetry/PoeticsThe stream focuses on the creative interplay of poetry, poetics and performativity in order to further our understanding of the concepts i.e. their contents and the relations between them. The stream encourages to play with poetry of all varieties, to interpret poetics broadly as different kinds of poetic writing, to explore the whole range of forms that performativity comes in, and to be creative in exploring the relationships between the three concepts (the three P’s of Poetry, Poetics and Performativity)

The stream aims to: Show how poetry and poetics can enhance or better performance in the

workplace, in organizing and managing Provide further understanding of how the performativity of poetry / poetics

might contribute to the analysis and understanding of aesthetics, organizing, leading and management.

Inspire the interplay between the performativity of poetry and poetics and to create more and deeper reflections upon such interplay.

Explore the liberating potential of the performativity of poetry and poetics within organizing and managing.

Poetry performed and the performativity of poetry.Performativity is understood broadly and includes a continuum for forms. At one end is the normative of practical performativity and performance that challenges us to enhance, improve or critically evaluate our practice to be more efficient/better (which relies on Lyotard’s 1984 understanding of performativity as optimization).

At the other end of the continuum the focus is upon an understanding of how performance/performativity is part of the poetic process. Meaning that poetry is made to perform something i.e. poetry is performativity, and how different forms of poetry and poetics shape the performativity of making poetry and poetics, for example, a haiku demands a certain performativity by the author as the rules of the form are to be followed. This end of the continuum points towards the direction of the critical performativity, where Spicer, Alvesson and Kärreman, 2009:543) they talk about performativity as: ‘How to do things with words’ and as ‘The practical and sometimes parodic use of discourse’. (p. 538). This stream therefore encourages the various ways in which the performativity of poetry/poetics can be illustrated, created, and established in all its forms, for example, the many conventions, and their traditions.

Play with the performativity of poetry The stream welcomes the whole range of papers, poems, presentations, and performances that play with both the explicit and the implicit performativity of poetry and poetics and which play with the often intangible interrelation between the three concepts in organizations and/or the management of them. It is the

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purpose of the stream to explore what performativity, poetry, and poetics is - and can be. And how the interrelations between poetry, poetics and performativity are.

These interrelations can be seen as a process of construction, where it is partly in the eyes of the beholder, and partly part of conventions (and changing conventions) i.e. where conventions are made to classify things and activities as art/poetry, good art/ poetry, not art/poetry etc. Meaning that anything can not be turned into art just by someone calling it art, as Becker (1982: 154) notes ‘Even if in the end it is the successful christening which makes an object art, not every attempt at christening is successful’. Furthermore, poetry, can assume a powerful way to critique ongoing process of conventions and change - a dynamic that is always in the process of becoming.

The stream encourages a range of papers, workshops, performances that explores:

The discussion of how poetry/poetics can challenge “what is” and the possibilities of “what might be”. In other words poetry/poetics as disruption.

The performance and/or presentation of poetry. Performance can include the reading poetry, acting the journey, involving the audience, or overlaying cinematic material as backdrop in its delivery. Presenters are therefore encouraged to see their performance (presentation) as an event.

We welcome all types and genres of topics: Organisational poetry/poetics and the creative process Organisational poetry / poetics in relation to alienation and anxiety Organisational performativity of ethics and morality The performativity of toxic leadership and/or culture Poetry/poetics and the agenda for change Organisational power dynamics as poetry /poetics The (em)power(ment) of the organisational poet Bearing the soul: poetry/poetics as confessionals The interaction of the poet and the audience Workshops for example, constructing a poem: power and politics

PoeticsThree short examples are used to illuminate the idea of poetics and to illustrate its variation. .

Weick (2004) departs from Czarniawska’s (2003) description of six styles of organizational theory, where Weick’s work is identified as “poetic” (one of the six styles), to talk about poetics as a search for ideas and idea development. Weick’s writing is often poetic and sometimes includes poems, as he tries to create new ideas and make sense of existing ones. “It’s all pretty chaotic. The

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trick is to make sense of chaos, and in my case then to make sense of the making sense of chaos.” (Weick, 2004, p. 655). Sköldberg (2002) departs from the eighteenth century Neapolitan philosopher Vico to emphasise a poetic logic to administration. The poetic logic is not a product of rationality, but draws upon a triad inspired by Hayden White’s work on the poetics of eighteenth century historiography. The triad is a figure, which consists of three elements method, style of thought and organizational drama. The interrelation between the three elements produces an organizational style. Sköldberg (2002) talks about four different organizational styles or poetic logics, and describes how they produce different styles and changes of style in the art of organizing.

In his book from 1985 “My light burns.” (Mit lys brænder) the Danish Poet Søren Ulrik Thomsen develops a poetic (“en poetik”) around his practice of writing poetry, which is or becomes itself a practice. Thomsen emphasises both organizing and aesthetics, when he mentions that the poetic, he develops is not a schedule for writing poetry. It is a reflection upon a poetic practice to make clear what relations this practice is embedded in, the assumption it rests upon, and what will result from it. The departure for Thomsen’s reflection was the always present question whenever a poem is made, why it is a good or bad poem respectively, which is an aesthetic reflection Thomsen (1985) finds to be imperative. The reason for this is that if you are not conscious about the poetic (the practice of writing and evaluating poetry), it might enslave you.

AbstractsDeadline for Abstracts: December 1 st , 2017 Abstracts of no more than 500 words, in word.doc format, should be submitted as an e-mail attachment by 1. December, 2017 to aomo2018@gmail.com and to stream convenors: andrew.armitage@anglia.ac.uk (Andrew Armitage) and pd.ioa@cbs.dk (Per Darmer). All decisions of acceptance will be made on the basis of the abstracts submitted.

Full papersFor those in need a fully refereed conference paper, a deadline for submission of full papers will be communicated a little closer to the conference.

ReferencesBecker, H. S. (1982): Art Worlds. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1982.

Lyotard, J.-F. (1984): The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984. Sköldberg, K. (2002) The Poetic Logic of Administration. London: Routledge.

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Spicer, Alvesson & Kärreeman (2009): Critical performativity: The unfinished business of critical management studies. Human Relations, 62: 4, pp. 537 – 560.

Thomsen, S. U. (1985) My Light Burns. Outline of a Poetic (translated from the original Danish title: “Mit Lys Brænder. Omrids af en poetik”). Copenhagen: Vindrose.

Weick, K. E. (2004) ‘Mundane Poetics: Searching for Wisdom in Organization Studies’. Organization Studies, 25 (4): 653 – 668.

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