Aesthetics & Organization:
Listening

Silence & Noise

April 20 - 22 2005
 

This conference is planned as the first of two events centering on the theme of Aesthetics and Organization. The first to deal with the theme of Listening, and the second (planned for 2007) to focus on Looking.
Appropriately, Aesthetics and Organization: Listening, will be held in a castle (in Germany) where J S Bach lived, composed and performed.

Call for papers (abstract deadline: 1 January 2005):

CONFERENCE OUTLINE:

Aesthetics and Organization: Silence and Noise evokes the organizing of space(s) wherein sound is repressed, permitting music to exist. Originally there is noise, disorganization and chaos; silence, organization and order come afterwards. Stillness, empty space and nothingness are imposed; listening entails being deprived of noise.

To what purpose is the acoustic rendering of order? What sort of time and motion are created via sound-images? What are the narrative forms of the auditory? Is the listened to (re-)presented? In listening are matter and mind, actual and virtual, on a single plane of immanence? Can the topology of listening be described?

The confrontation with listening as aesthetics can be a (post-)phenomenological (or postmodern) theme wherein judgment is experiential rather than (purely) rational. The Kantian link via aesthetics between rationality and practice is threatened by Schiller’s unities of sensibility and thought, feeling and morality. Judgement and
deconstruction, intuition and planes of immanence, collide --- in noise, silence, speech and art. Reasoning --- personal and collective, organizational and ethical, purposive and reflective --- is at stake.

Keynote: Christoph Wolff (Johan Sebastian Bach; the learned musician);
other keynotes to be announced.

 

CALL FOR PAPERS:

• Stream - Silent Leadership
  Stream Convenors: Professor, Dr. Phil. Ole Fogh Kirkeby, Centre for Art & Leadership
   
• Stream - Intervals, Interludes & Interstices
  Stream Convenors: Heather Höpfl, Ian King & Ceri Watkins
   
• Stream - Das Wohltemperierte Klavier
  Stream Convenors: Hugo Letiche, Ruud Kaulingfreks & Robert v Boeschoten
   

Good leadership does not need speech; it is omnipresent in the person of the just and generous leader. The leader must be an apt "mimer" --- balancing carefully between the traps of mimesis and the advantages of a mild mimicry. The leader identifies with the ethos of the organisation - which he or she must have contributed to him- / herself. The conductor is a living image of this productive silence, in the fertile use of gestures, tacit anticipations, and the positive use of a functional
code. The Artistic Director, the conductor, Peter Hanke, will assist us in exploring this. Also the pantomime, the humoristic distribution of the roles of Pierrot and of Harlequin, not to speak of the beautiful Columbine, cast a light on the pressures which local line leaders, and newly appointed HRM-bosses have to face. Here the dramatist, Soren Friis Moller shall assist us. We invite papers exploring the relation between listening and silent leadership.

Email ofk.lpf@cbs.dk or Fax: + 45 3815 3635

Center for Art & Leadership, Department of Management, Politics & Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Blaagaardsgade 23B DK-2200 Copenhagen-N, Denmark

 

Stream - Intervals, Interludes & Interstices
Stream Convenors: Heather Höpfl, Ian King & Ceri Watkins

The organisation of noise and chaos produces explicable (perhaps “coherent”) narratives of music, speech, stories and so forth. These tend to focus the attention of the percipient on key symbols in the organisation process such as musical notes, phrases, words, the musical motif, the volume of sound, and on effects such as the crescendo or diminuendo. This is what is present rather than what is absent in the
construction of intelligible sound(s). This focus has resulted in a propensity for the spaces between the symbols to be disregarded --- pushed outside of conscious consideration, submerged or suppressed. In result, the contribution of the interval and the caesura are ignored. This stream invites participants to explore issues around Intervals, Interludes and Interstice --- and other breaks and spaces that are
crucial components of phenomena such as duration, rhythm, noise and its other, and thus of understanding. Proposals for papers addressing these issues drawing on fields such as listening and experience, judgment and perception, organization and sound, aesthetics and pragmatics, harmony and noise are welcome.

Email us at: artofman@essex.ac.uk or Fax + 44 1206-873429
Jane Malabar c/o Ian King,
Art of Management and Organisation Conference,
Essex Management Centre,
Dept. of Accounting Finance and Management,
University of Essex,

Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ, UK.
 

Stream - Das Wohltemperierte Klavier
Stream Convenors: Hugo Letiche, Ruud Kaulingfreks & Robert v Boeschoten

The Well-Tempered Clavier is a collection of educational pieces --- moving ‘through all the tones and semitones’. It is ‘for the use and profit of [those] … desirous of learning as well as for … those already skilled in this study.’ {title page, 1722 edition}
In this spirit: what is the relation between music and organization? Is it possible to see organizations from a musical perspective? What music is appropriate, for thinking about organizations? How do organizations deal with music? Can we apply musical concepts like rhythm, harmony, melody, swing, improvisation, beat, etcetera, to organizations? Music can be seen as the harmonic ordering of noise. Melody and rhythm have always been regarded as forms of metaphysical beauty (spheres). Music appeals to the senses and through them to the spirit and opens up
the world of sensorial emotions. Thinking about such a link raises questions about when sounds or noise become music. Is there a relation between noise, sound, music and silence; and organizations and organizational studies? When is an organization ‘in tune’? Or, are there only dissonance, cacophony and atonality?
We invite papers exploring the relation between music and organisation.

Email us at: rvb@uvh.nl
Dr Robert v Boeschoten, UvH, KOS
Postbus 797, 3500 AT Utrecht, Netherlands

 

CONFERENCE DETAILS:

Location: The conference will be held in Burg auf der Creuzburg in Creuzburg, Germany. Hotel accommodation is being arranged in nearby Eisenach.

The conference fee (normal fee: 600 euros; reduced student fee: 300 euros) will include registration, hotel (3 nights) and most meals.

The closest airport is Erfurt (Ryanair from London Stansted; pick-up arrangements will be available), although train travel is encouraged.

Preliminary Programme:
Wednesday 20 April registration, keynote, concert and reception (buffet)

Thursday 21 & Friday 22 April sessions, keynotes;
Friday evening conference dinner.

The music of Bach will be played on several occasions.

Email conference organization: rvb@uvh.nl

Abstract deadline: 1 January 2005 (authors will be notified by
mid-February). Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be sent to the
individual stream convenors, see above.