{"id":11,"date":"2025-05-13T17:16:53","date_gmt":"2025-05-13T17:16:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/icms-lancaster-2027\/?page_id=11"},"modified":"2026-03-17T16:56:19","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T16:56:19","slug":"call-for-papers","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/icms-lancaster-2027\/","title":{"rendered":"Call for Streams, Session, Event and\/or Workshop Organisers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Critical Management Studies beyond the Academy?<\/span><\/h2>\n

Lancaster University (and local\/hybrid variants)<\/p>\n

It seems that the legitimation crises of the University and the Academy are a recurrent feature of modernity (or late- or post- modernity). Today, this question presses with a particular urgency. The university has come to appear simultaneously as an institution estranged from a unifying sense of public purpose, organised under increasingly vacant terms of legitimation and accountability – \u201cexcellence\u201d, \u201cstudent experience\u201d, \u201cresearch impact\u201d, \u201cknowledge exchange\u201d, \u201cgraduate employability\/outcomes\u201d. It has become subjected to the remorseless disciplines of managerial neoliberalisation, marketisation, and hierarchical bureaucratic authority; and to \u2018competition\u2019 by commercialised forms of dissemination and algorithmically-legitimated simulacra of epistemic claims. These present crises, then, appear to ostensibly concern precisely the foreclosure of this question: as the university\u2019s purposes are increasingly homogenised by the vacuous language of managerialism, its constitutive relation to the wider social worlds beyond its institutional boundaries becomes more pressing than ever. This is despite long-standing critical work showing that the Academy and academic work and labour more broadly, is always implicated in the institutions, communities, struggles, and material conditions it helps to shape (see, for example Boussebaa, 2020; Cunliffe and Pavlovich, 2022; Goddard et al., 2016; Goddard and Vallance, 2013; Parker, 2023; Smith, 2008; Zanoni et al., 2025).<\/p>\n

Building on these tensions as points of consolidation and departure, we seek to stimulate and explore how the ideas and concepts pursued within Critical Management Studies (CMS) and allied disciplines are experienced and played out in the communities, workplaces and social spaces beyond the \u2018standard\u2019 sites of academic practice (Butler et al., 2018; Fleming and Banerjee, 2016; King and Land, 2018; Spicer et al., 2009). We also seek to enquire into what other modes of epistemic production may be caring, or generative for practice, research and\/or theory (Antoni and Beer, 2024; Bartunek and Lei, 2026), as well as critiquing the reproduction of the \u2018Academy\u2019 and the politics of particular forms of epistemic production and dissemination (Boussebaa, 2020; Muzanenhamo and Chowdhury, 2023; Parker, 2023; Prasad and \u015aliwa, 2024; Santos, 2012).<\/p>\n

We welcome submissions for streams, sessions, workshops, panels, ideas, proposals, epistemic forays and other fora or activities which address or problematise the primary question of \u201cWhat relations are there (or should there be?) between the forms of organising that are conceptualised, critiqued and encouraged in academic writing and research and the world beyond the Academy?\u201d For example, are these forms of organising imaginable, possible, infectious, realisable, resonant, transmissible, reworked, discordant, resisted, liveable, mimetic, translatable, rendered untenable and\/or generative beyond the Academy?. In posing this primary question, we encourage critical scrutiny of potential assumptions and biases inherent within it \u2013 whether prefiguring beyond as refusal, reworking, a mode of surpassing, co-witnessing or co-production. Secondarily, we also seek critical engagements with the constriction, assault upon, precariatisation and restructuring of the Academy in many parts of the world, and the institutionalised and commercialised processes of academic publication and dissemination. Likewise, we also encourage creative excursions in critical management studies and allied disciplines, for example, in terms of different modes of epistemic engagement, co-production or reception.<\/p>\n

We also encourage streams that reflect and inquire into the following, including but not limited to:<\/p>\n