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The
Business of War: Corporate Imperialism and the Management of
Global Violence
Conveners:
Bobby Banerjee,
b.banerjee@uws.edu.au
and
Martyna
Sliwa
masliwa@essex.ac.uk
Conventional
notions of war are primarily derived from a
political-rationalist assumption. For example, Rousseau
writing The Social Contract declares, ‘war is
constituted by a relation between things, and not between
persons…War then is a relation, not between man and man, but
between State and State’. In the field of organization and
management theory Sun Tzu’s 6th century BC military
treatise The Art of War
became a popular source for a variety of books written by
management and strategy gurus in the 1980s and 1990s. Notions
of war have also been used to frame discourses such as the
‘war on drugs’, the ‘war on poverty’ and more recently the
‘war on terror’. The Oxford
Dictionary offers a more expansive
definition of war to include ‘any
active hostility or struggle between living beings; a conflict
between opposing forces or principles’. War has also become a
profitable growth industry in recent years as an increasing
number of governments turn to private military corporations as
a result of military downsizing. These companies represent
national and corporate interests that raise disturbing
questions about the collusion between state and multinational
corporations. In many cases the nexus between corporations,
governments and private military forces involves control over
valuable mineral resources in the developing world. Diamonds,
gold and oil have proved to be a curse rather than a boon for
local communities from whose lands wealth is extracted while
further impoverishing them. This type of accumulation by
dispossession requires a global organization and management of
violence, a process that has not received much attention in
the organization and management literature.
David
Harvey refers to accumulation by dispossession as ‘the new
imperialism’. While the term imperialism has largely acquired
a polemical meaning we are more interested in exploring it as
an analytic, particularly as a political-economic process.
Political and military imperialism shows itself clearly: the
problem lies in articulating the different guises of
imperialism in neoliberal ‘free’ market economies. Its
operation is often masked and because imperialism has learned
to “manage” things better, it is difficulty to identify its
disciplinary power in all its nuances. Thus, if imperialism
is to be viewed as a fundamental set of economic relations,
then examining the range of relations (such as the
relationship between nation states, international institutions
and corporations) becomes an important task in order to
uncover the presence of imperialism in current institutional
structures and processes. In the political-economic context,
imperialism (or capitalist imperialism) results in a
colonization of reality seen in practices of production, flows
of capital, corporate mergers and acquisitions, labor
migration, knowledge flows, and so on.
In this workshop we are
seeking papers that develop the notion of war in the context
of management theory and practice. While seeking to avoid
narrow political-rationalist conceptions of war we are looking
for papers that address different formations of war and the
manner in which the geopolitical and the biopolitical become
linked in the organization and management of global violence.
Such a perspective will admit the possibility of real and
metaphorical wars, violent and non-violent conflicts between
systems of thought, economic doctrines, corporate imperialism,
conflicts over resources, racial and colonial relations of
power, and conflicting sovereignties.
Examples
of topics include:
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Institutional, material,
and discursive power formations in the political economy
that result in violence and dispossession. |
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The privatization of
combat: private military companies and their role in the
organization and management of global violence. |
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Corporate imperialism and
accumulation by dispossession: discourses of privatization
and corporatization of the public sphere. |
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Knowledge management as
imperialism, appropriation of public goods by transnational
corporations, biotechnology and intellectual property rights
regimes. |
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Corporate complicity,
culpability and liability in human rights violations. |
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Privatization of the commons through
corporate control of natural resources and the resulting
conflicts over resources between multinational corporations
and communities. |
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Interrogating discourses
of development, questions of authority and power,
institutional restructuring and structural adjustment
programs imposed on Third World sites. |
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Interrelationships
between the polity and the economy in an era of
globalization. The role of the state and international
institutions such as the WTO, IMF and the World Bank and
their relationships with transnational corporations. |
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The rise of disaster
capitalism where corporations profit from, control resources
and reshape economies of regions devastated by natural and
human made disasters. |
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Resisting imperialism:
the role of social movements and civil society. |
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
b.banerjee@uws.edu.au
and masliwa@essex.ac.uk
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.
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