Critical Management Studies (CMS)

With apologies for cross-posting, please see below and attached. We are seeking papers for a Special Issue focused on how wellbeing organizes and could re-organize that seems particularly apt given current events. 

Re-organizing wellbeing: Contexts, critiques and contestations of dominant wellbeing narratives

Guest Editors: David Watson, Norwich Business School, UEA; Chris Land, Anglia Ruskin University; James Wallace, Swansea University; Jana Patey, Norwich Business School, UEA; Zareen Bharucha, Global Sustainability Institute, Anglia Ruskin University.

The emergence of the coronavirus pandemic in recent months and the varied responses brings into focus the way in which the notion of wellbeing can organize our society and, in particular, work. Within a capitalist framework wellbeing can be considered as central to human resources deployed to facilitate the expansion of profit. However, although organizational and societal discourses frame practices of wellbeing, the individual retains some agency in responding to those discourses and shaping the wellbeing practices they are engaged in.

Within organizations, multiple values and agendas of sustainability, CSR and wellbeing can run in parallel and may compete with performance expectations and the logic of productivity that prove detrimental to wellbeing. The question of what opportunities exist for radical or critical practices of wellbeing then becomes key. Furthermore, this invites investigation into the contexts which give rise to these opportunities; what roles can be accorded to different organizations and organizational actors; as well as into how might these practices be underpinned by collective notions of wellbeing or informed by social and environmental regeneration.

In this Special Issue, we particularly encourage papers that engage critically with the management of wellbeing at work, but that also move beyond a purely negative moment of critique to understand radical potentials for wellbeing that trace a line of flight away from managerial versions of 'corporate wellness' and the 'wellness syndrome'.Wellbeing is emerging as one of the dominant discourses of management and organization. Practices of wellbeing are located in concrete organizational arrangements and shaped by power relations built upon embedded, intersecting inequalities and therefore require critical evaluation. Hence, it is necessary to locate wellbeing in its historical, social, ethical, political-economic, technological, and environmental context; moving beyond a narrow, individualised approach that has characterised wellbeing in most organizational literature to date.

To this end, we are seeking papers for a special issue that will focus attention on two main aspects of wellbeing: (1) Its emergence in particular managerial and organizational contexts, and the limits those contexts place on wellbeing's ability to encourage human flourishing; and (2) the potential for alternative, critical, radical practices of wellbeing, as well as potentially understanding illness as a counter capitalist practice.

Papers may be submitted from 1st April 2021 until deadline date of 1st May 2021, please see full call details attached and available at https://journals.sagepub.com/page/org/call-for-papers.

On behalf of the editorial collective,