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What’s Up?
Interesting places to visit: on site or
virtually
Conferences
36th World Congress of the International
Institute of Sociology—Social Change in the Age
of Globalization
International
Institute of Sociology
www.iis2003beijing.com.cn/en/invitation.htm
July 7-11, 2003
Beijing, China
The Congress will provide opportunities to
participants from different parts of the world to
share ideas and research findings, communicate with
one another, and establish academic and intellectual
relationships for future exchange. Sessions will be
held on the following topics:
- Contemporary state in transition: under the
influence of regional integration and
globalization.
- Corporate accountability, corporate governance,
and corporate social responsibility in the global
economy.
- Community and organization.
- Economic institutions: challenges to states and
to markets.
- Migration, ethnic diversity, and citizenship in
the perspective of globalization.
- Globalization and women.
- Globalization and environmentalism.
- Globalization of macro- and micro-structure:
convergences and divergences.
- Globalization and the sociology of
youth.
21st Standing Conference on Organizational
Symbolism—Organizational Wellness
Department of Management, University of Keele
http://www.scos.org/conference2003/
July 9-12, 2003
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
The conference invites your reflections on the
subject of organizational wellness. Even a cursory
online search gives thousands of references to
wellness—wellness councils, wellness
foundations, wellness centers, wellness institutes,
etc.—all of which speak of a contemporary
preoccupation with fitness, goodness, beauty, mental
stability, health, happiness, and hygiene. Work that
body, tell me about your childhood, crunch those abs,
flex those pecs, lose a dress size, discover your
inner goddess, get buffed, get ripped, get a
six-pack, get some therapy, get a life…the
exhortation to BE WELL (and not sick, overweight,
unhealthy, unfit, unstable, unhappy, unattractive, or
unclean).
Papers will be presented on possible
interpretations of wellness in the
organization:
- Organizations and biology: the demand for
constant productivity in organizations and the
failure to take account of human biology in the
structuring of time and place at work.
- Being well-behaved: management attempts to
secure hearts and minds, to encourage employees to
work harder, faster and smarter, and the successes
and failures of such initiatives.
- Being well-dressed: organizational dress codes,
uniforms, transgender, and religious issues to do
with appearance at work.
- Being well-fed: work canteens, cafés and
restaurants, energy and nutrition at work, coffee
breaks, and snacking in the workplace.
- Stress: individualizing and normalizing effects
of the “management” of organizational
stress, the ever-greedier organization, job rage,
and health promotion at work.
- Occupational syndromes: different occupational
symptomatologies, the 24/7 economy, the impact of
night work on diurnal human beings, and the
increasingly sedentary character of work and its
implications. Ergonomics and health and safety:
treating employees as extensions of workplace tools
or machines so as to enhance output, sick building
syndrome, employment conditions in the informal
economy, and sweatshops.
- The wage-effort bargain: expectations that
those in certain occupations are thin,
well-groomed, poised, muscular, and so on in order
to fulfill their side of the contract.
• Organizational lifecycles: organizational
births and deaths; buoyant and stagnant
organizations; and models of organizational wellness
and illness, of performance, prosperity, and
decline.
Workshop on Autonomy, Delegation, and
Control: From Inter-agent to Organizations and
Institutions
Department of Computer
Science & Computer Engineering, University of
Arkansas
http://csce.uark.edu/~hexmoor/AAMAS-03/AAMAS-03-cfp.htm
July 14-15, 2003
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Papers will explore autonomy in the context of
interaction with other individual agents and
collective groups of agents. Examples of common
issues to be modeled are the following:
- The theory of “initiative” in
interaction, collaboration, and problem
solving.
- Kinds and levels of initiative and consequent
problems of lack of control or coordination and of
intrusiveness.
- The problem of intention recognition (and in
general, mind reading) and of shared or non-shared
plans for dialogue, collaboration, and
over-helping.
- The problem of when and how to monitor the
other, and on the basis of which kind of feedback
(inspection, report, etc.).
- The problem of forms of intervention for
surveillance, advice, assistance, or
repair.
- The problem of coordination and its bases
(shared knowledge and plan, communication,
observation, constraining infrastructures, rules,
and conventions, etc.).
- The problem of reliance, responsibility, and
trust.
Web Sites
NETIQUETTE
http://www.albion.com/netiquette/introduction.html
“Netiquette” is network etiquette, the
do’s and don’ts of online communication.
Netiquette covers both common courtesy online and the
informal “rules of the road” of
cyberspace. This site provides links to both summary
and detail information about netiquette.
What is netiquette? Simply stated, it’s network
etiquette—that is, the etiquette of cyberspace.
And etiquette means “the forms required by good
breeding or prescribed by authority to be required in
social or official life.” In other words,
netiquette is a set of rules for behaving properly
online.
When you enter any new culture—and cyberspace
has its own culture—you’re liable to
commit a few social blunders. You might offend people
without meaning to. Or you might misunderstand what
others say and take offense when it’s not
intended. To make matters worse, something about
cyberspace makes it easy to forget that you’re
interacting with other real people—not just
ASCII characters on a screen, but live human
characters.
So, partly as a result of forgetting that people
online are still real, and partly because they
don’t know the conventions, well-meaning
cybernauts, especially new ones, make all kinds of
mistakes.
SCOS (Organizational Symbolism and
Culture)
http://www.scos.org/
SCOS is an international and interdisciplinary
network of academics and practitioners interested in
organizational symbolism, culture, and change. Formed
in 1981 as an autonomous working group of the
European Group for Organization Studies, SCOS has
grown to become a global research network with
hundreds of members. Moving into its third decade,
the SCOS network continues to develop innovative
views of organization and management, taking
inspiration from a variety of different fields and
disciplines.
SCOS has always been committed to providing a
forum for research that crosses traditional
disciplinary and functional boundaries, and a
reflective space for the development of new forms and
new voices for this work. The SCOS Network also aims
to produce and develop theoretically and practically
innovative views of organization and management and
seeks to:
- Encourage and foster new approaches in the
study of culture and symbolism of everyday life in
organizations.
- Provoke discussion of marginalized perspectives
on the understanding of organized life.
- Provide an arena where the boundaries of
conventional thinking about organized life can be
challenged and blurred.
- Sustain continuity and development in this
fast-growing field of study.
- Enable the continued exchange of information
and the development of community amongst a highly
dispersed group of researchers, scholars, and
practitioners.
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