Technological Innovation: Emancipation,
Domination, or Something In-Between?
Convenors:
Richard Hull
richard.hull@ncl.ac.uk,
Bill
Kaghan
wkaghan@msn.com
Technological innovation forces us to choose – accommodate
change or resist, praise innovation or condemn it, create new
worlds or preserve existing worlds. More concretely, it is
often technological changes in people's life worlds (whether
work or leisure related), which seem, to those directly
affected, to force the issue - accept or reject. In the
workplace, technological change purportedly promotes economic
growth and wealth creation. But does technological change
contribute to the quality of working life? In modern
lifestyles, consumers are asked to choose - resist genetically
modified foods, demand organic produce, resist electronic
voting machines, demand the old paper ballot, resist nuclear
power, demand renewable energy, buy the latest gadget, or wait
and see if it takes off. Starting with the Cold War and
carrying on into the "global war on terror," governments have
been forced to constantly respond with new "science-based"
weapons. More recently, governments seem compelled to respond
to climate change, computerised financial markets and
expensive medical treatments on a global basis. Is
technological progress really progressive in an emancipatory
sense over the long run? Or does technological progress
simply reinforce the status quo (or replace traditional
structures of domination with new structures of domination)?
In this
track, we propose to look more closely at how people plan,
experience, and respond to technological change. How do
technology designers envision how their designs will change
the world and how do people who choose (or are compelled) to
adopt the technology envision the changes that will result by
incorporating new technologies into their worlds? Do
designers (or their employers) intend to entwine consumers in
more insidious webs of domination or is ever-improving
technology and technology alone the key to human freedom?
Rather than taking people's views (whether capitalist or labor
leader, engineer or humanist) of technology for granted, we
should be more closely examining and engaging with these
(often conflicting) views.
In
particular, we are interested in efforts to imagine
technological change outside the framework of free market
capitalism and the type of valorized process creative
destruction associated with Schumpeter. For example, Free
Libre Open Source Software calls into question some elements
of the free market in software development and usage in an
effort to overcome what are perceived as market failures.
Similarly, there are a growing number of examples of
participatory decision-making to find 'in-between' solutions
to the problems posed by science and technology. What is
behind these efforts and what are their prospects? Rather
than continuing to rely on traditional assumptions about
class-consciousness and resistance, we should be looking more
closely at the relationships between technological change and
the manner in which individual and collective 'consciousness'
is formed and framed in the process of technological change.
These
are deliberately provocative suggestions, but arguably it is
the studies of technological and scientific change that have
posed the most awkward questions for critical analyses of
management under capitalism. From Lukács and the Frankfurt
School, with their critiques of the 'scientism' of the Second
International's version of Marxism, through the sociology of
scientific knowledge since the 1970s and the Foucauldian
assaults upon the 'naturalism' of Braverman's Labour Process
Studies, it is analyses of science and technology that have
been active in pushing forwards the critical agenda and which
provide pointed critiques of managerial capitalism. Arguably,
studies of scientific and technological change have
significantly disrupted taken-for-granted assumptions
in CMS about the "fundamental" characteristics of scientific
research and technological change.
We call
for papers that use our provocations as the jumping-off point
for discussions of the following (and related) themes:
The
motivation for the workshop is simple: neither the PDW nor the
main program events at the AOM give us enough opportunity to
engage in in-depth discussion of papers in critical management
studies. So the workshop will be organized as a series of
parallel streams (working groups). Each stream will consist of
people who have contributed papers on a well-defined topic
(perhaps with some invited discussants), and the group will
work together over the course of the day-and-a-half, going
around the room discussing the papers in turn. In order to
maximize discussion, authors will not present their own
papers, but rather participants will be asked to present and
discuss each others' papers. We will also arrange a couple of
plenary sessions and some social time where all the
participants come together.
We are
yet to finalize the cost of the workshop, but based on present
estimates, we anticipate that the workshop will cost between
$400 and $550 for each participant, depending on whether they
choose to stay for two nights or three, and whether they
choose single or double rooms. The fee will include meals
(lunch and dinner on 7th and all 3 meals on 8th). We will
finalize the details quickly on this front.
If you
wish to be part of this stream, please submit a 250 word
abstract to
richard.hull@ncl.ac.uk and
wkaghan@msn.com by
January 15th, 2008. Please note that submissions
can be concurrently on review at the regular AOM 2008
conference as well. The submission of an abstract constitutes
a good-faith agreement to submit a full paper for the stream
by June 1, 2008 if the paper is accepted. The final paper
should be less than 8000 words in length.
NEW
DATES (as of 30 December 2007)
Feb 20: Abstracts of papers submitted to stream conveners
March 10: Submissions accepted/rejected
June 15: Full papers submitted by this date for inclusion in
the Workshop.
