> 
> **Apologies for cross-posting**
> 
> Critical Perspectives on the Third Sector
> 
> A Stream within the Critical Management Studies Workshop,
> 
> Montreal, August 4th - 5th, 2010
> 
> Convenors:    Richard Hull  [log in to unmask]
> 
>               Fiona Whitehurst [log in to unmask]
> 
>               Kasia Zdunczyk  [log in to unmask]
> 
> 
> Deadline for Abstracts: January 15th.
> 
> The Critical Management Studies Division of the US Academy of
> Management will conduct a research workshop immediately prior to the
> 2010 Academy of Management meetings in Montreal in August 2010. The
> workshop will begin mid-morning of Wednesday Aug 4 and run till the
> evening of Thursday Aug 5.  We are coordinating a stream called The
> Third Sector in this workshop, and seek submissions from interested
> researchers.
> 
> By the Third Sector we mean, crudely, all of that which is in neither
> the Private nor the Public sectors. It thus includes charities and a
> range of organisations which may be labelled as non governmental,
> voluntary, community or not-for-profit, but also those which are at
> least attempting to make a surplus but with a prominent social element
> or commitment; organisations such as housing associations, credit
> unions, worker or consumer co-operatives, social enterprises and the
> new legal forms such as L3C (Low-profit Limited Liability) in the US
> and CIC (Community Interest Company) in the UK. Many governments
> believe the Third Sector or 'social economy' (Haugh & Kitson, 2007;
> Moulaert, 2005) is of increasing strategic importance. There is in the
> UK for instance considerable financial and other support for groups of
> workers in the health and social care services to establish
> co-operative employment agencies and various forms of social
> enterprise care provision. In addition the new CIC legal structure is
> designed to ease the legislative, accounting and administrative burden
> for new social enterprises, and the government is co-funding a large
> Economic & Social Research Council research centre for Third Sector
> research.
> 
> A cynical view is that this governmental attention and support is
> merely a new version of attempts to privatise public services and
> reduce public spending. A more sophisticated but still cynical view is
> that it is an essentially New Labour attempt to respond to Robert
> Putnam's Bowling Alone and to exploit the newly discovered social
> capital and citizens' capacities for self-help - but again with the
> overall aim of reducing public spending. This view is reinforced by
> governmental enthusiasm for methods of calculating and monetising the
> social benefits achieved by specific third sector organisations.
> 
> On the other hand some Third Sector models such as worker
> co-operatives may provide similar or better value services but with
> improved working conditions; in addition, greater mutuality in
> financial services companies might have prevented some of the worst
> aspects of the recent financial crisis; and medical charities may
> justly deserve their new role as significant actors in pharmaceutical
> R&D.
> 
> Critical Management Studies has made little significant engagement
> with this major sector of the economy and therefore there is a very
> wide range of potential topics. However, in the spirit of CMS we are
> especially interested in empirical papers which provide rigorous
> and/or personal accounts of specific sub-sectors, organisations or
> types of work (see for example Amin 2009). Theoretical papers are also
> welcomed, but should preferably be based on new empirical material.
> Possible sub-topics include but are not limited to the following:-
> 
>    1. Critical case studies of specific Third Sector organisations
>    2. Third Sector provision of public services - problems, issues
> and/or resistances.
>    3. Critical and radical techniques for evaluating 'social return on
> investment'.
>    4. Management and leadership in the Third Sector
>    5. Managing volunteers
>    6. Volunteering and Volunteers - descriptions, perspectives, analyses
>    7. Social Entrepreneurs (in the US) versus Social Enterprises (rest
> of the world).
>    8. The role of the Third Sector in scientific and product R&D
>    9. Genealogies of key concepts in the Third Sector or any of its
> constituent parts.
>   10. The political economy of the Third Sector (the one topic where
> we favour theoretical papers).
> 
> 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.
> Therefore this workshop will be organized as a series of parallel
> streams (working groups), with each stream comprising of people who
> have contributed papers on a well-defined topic (perhaps with some
> invited discussants), working together over the course of the
> day-and-a-half, discussing the papers in depth. 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.
> 
> The organisers have yet to finalize the cost of the workshop, but hope
> to be able to offer low-cost accommodation during the event, and
> dovetail it with the AOM meetings, especially those events involving
> the CMS Division. They will finalize the details quickly on the
> expenses of the workshop.
> 
> If you wish to be part of this stream, please submit a 250 word
> abstract to [log in to unmask] and
> [log in to unmask] by January 15th, 2010.  Please note
> that submissions can be concurrently on review at the regular AOM 2010
> conference as well.  The submission of an abstract constitutes a
> good-faith agreement to submit a full paper for the stream by June 1,
> 2010 if the paper is accepted.  The final paper should be less than
> 8000 words in length.  For guidance, see the previous workshops of
> 2006 and 2008,
> 
> 
> http://group.aomonline.org/cms/Meetings/Atlanta/Workshop06/Altanta06main.htm
> 
> 
> http://group.aomonline.org/cms/Meetings/Los_Angeles/Workshop08/LA08_Abs.htm
> 
> 
> 
> References
> 
> Amin, Ash (2009), "Extraordinarily ordinary: working in the social economy"
> Social Enterprise Journal, Vol. 5 (1) pp. 30-49.
> 
> Haugh, Helen and Kitson, Michael (2007) "The Third Way and the third sector:
> New Labour's economic policy and the social economy", Cambridge
> Journal of Economics Vol. 31 pp. 973-994.
> 
> Moulaert, Frank and Ailenei, Oana (2005) "Social economy, third sector
> and solidarity relations: A conceptual synthesis from history to
> present", Urban Studies Vol. 42 (11) pp. 2037-54.
>