A talk of interest to the COR community…

THE FUTURE (IM)PERFECT: IMAGINARIES AND SENSEMAKING IN THE CONTEXT OF GEOENGINEERING

Professor Klaus Weber, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

Date: Friday, April 26, 2019

Time: 10:30am -12:00noon

Venue: SB1 5200 (Porter Colloquia Room & Executive Terrace)

Speaker Bio: Klaus Weber is a Professor of Management & Organizations. He is also affiliated with the Department of Sociology, the Buffett Institute for Global Studies and the Northwestern Institute for Sustainability and Energy. His research is grounded in cultural and institutional analysis, with substantive interests in the intersection between social movements, organizations and markets; economic globalization; and environmental sustainability. Klaus’ research has been published in journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, American Sociological Review, Organization Science, Organization  Studies, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal and Harvard Business Review. His work has won best paper awards at the American Sociological Association, Administrative Science Quarterly, and the SYNTEC Conseil en Management. He was a senior editor at Organization Science and has guest edited volumes for Organization Studies and Organization Science. At Kellogg, Klaus teaches MBA courses on environmental sustainability and on power in organizations; and doctoral seminars on cultural and text analysis, organization theory and research methods. Professor Weber received his PhD from the University of Michigan and joined the Kellogg faculty in 2003.

A talk of interest to the COR community…

Dr. Daivi Rodima-Taylor

BLOCKCHAIN NARRATIVES, PROPERTY AND CITIZENSHIP IN POST-SOVIET EASTERN EUROPE
Date: March 19, 2019
Time: 3:30 – 5:00pm
Location: Social Sciences Plaza B (SSPB), Room #1222
To RSVP: bit.ly/2Eh9aT8

Digital technologies for property and identity management are increasingly viewed as central in building transparent and inclusive societies in many parts of the world. Blockchain technologies have emerged as one alternative to empower distributed public record systems and land registries. Several recent applications of these emerging technologies involve post -socialist societies of Eastern Europe – offering interesting perspectives into evolving narratives and practices of property and citizenship. Blockchain has been touted in development and financial industry circles as a key enabler of property formalization – with sparse evidence to support such claims so far. Facilitating novel public-private partnerships in public administration projects, blockchain technologies also raise new concerns about data ownership and commoditization, and introduce risky financial practices. The presentation examines blockchain-related public administration initiatives in two post-Soviet states, Estonia and Georgia. It explores the imaginaries of new types of participatory collectivities and connective spaces that render governments accountable, and make legible the ambiguous post-socialist expanse of ‘recombinant’ property forms. The East European experience highlights the embeddedness of such digital infrastructures in local histories and epistemological struggles, as people strive to manage the environments of chronic uncertainty through inventive practices of ‘toiling ingenuity’ (Guyer 2016).

DR. DAIVI RODIMA-TAYLOR is research associate and lecturer at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University. Her research focuses on fiduciary culture and financial inclusion, informal economies, migration and diaspora, land tenure, and post-conflict and post-authoritarian transitions. She has been leading Boston University’s interdisciplinary Pardee Center Task Force on migrant remittances and post-conflict development, leads the African Studies Center’s Diaspora Studies Initiative, and co-chairs Land Mortgage Working Group with prof. Parker Shipton. Daivi has conducted longitudinal ethnographic research in Africa, taught anthropology and development studies, and published in academic and policy-oriented journals. Her undergraduate degree is from Tartu University, Estonia, and doctorate from Brandeis University.

For inquiries, contact: Jenny Fan, imtfi@uci.edu

A talk of interest to the COR community…

Professor Kate Brown, MIT

“Chernobyl in the Age of the Anthropocene”

Date and Time: March 4, 2019 | 2:00 PM-3:30 PM

Event Location: Humanities Gateway 1010

Kate Brown is an award-winning historian of environmental and nuclear history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (W.W. Norton) is forthcoming in 2019 . Her previous book, Plutopia, won seven academic prizes. She splits her time between Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Dear COR colleagues,

Please join us for a colloquium with Professor Kathrin Sele (Aalto University School of Business in Helsinki, Finland)

“When the Food you Order Ends Up Ordering You: A Rhythmanalysis Perspective on Temporal Order(ing)”

February 22, 2019
12:00-1:15pm
SBSG 1321

RSVP by February 15, 2019 to cor@uci.edu
Lunch will be provided

Abstract: Organizing is a matter of time, but could we see it as a matter of rhythms? Building on the biological notion of entrainment, existing research suggests that rhythms should be accounted for when studying how organizations synchronize their activities and (re)produce order. However, rhythms tend to be portrayed as something that organizations, industries, or the economic environment at large just have. Accordingly, they are conceptualized as entities or relatively stable organizational features. Following a larger turn toward temporal aspects and the subjective nature of time in organization and management studies, we advocate to study rhythms as a relative rather than an absolute concept and as something that organizations “do”. We build on Henri Lefebvre (1999; 2004) who defines rhythms as “movement and differences within repetition” to capture their role in the continuous enactment and reproduction of social order. This rhythmanalysis perspective enables us to study rhythms as “lived” and to approach the temporal unfolding of practices as rhythmic performances. To understand how rhythms “order” practices and thus become a source of social order empirically, we draw on an ethnographic study of household food collectives in Finland. The results of our study suggest that the everyday performance of the different practices that make up these food collectives are characterized by the flow, beat, and regularity of rhythms that overlap, exist in parallel, and at times, collide. We show how biological, material and idealistic aspects embedded in human action nurture and influence the rhythms at play leading to enhancement (eurythmia) and/or disruption (arrhythmia). Finally, we elucidate how food collectives deal with this polyrhythmicity by introducing what we call embodied qualities of rhythmic engagement that are necessary for continuous social order and, hence, the everyday ordering of practices.

Bio: Kathrin Sele is an Assistant Professor in Organization and Management at Aalto University School of Business in Helsinki, Finland. Her research focuses on organizational routines and their role in innovation and strategy making with a particular focus on sociomaterial and temporal aspects as well as on discursive practices and rhetorical strategies and their role in emergence and legitimation processes of new technologies, research paradigms, and strategies. For her PhD, she conducted a 3-year ethnographic study at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the University of Zurich based on which she recently published a study that elucidates the generative nature of routine interactions. After completing her PhD at St. Gallen University in 2012, Kathrin was an assistant professor at the Toulouse School of Management in France. During her stay at UCI, Kathrin will be working with Professor Martha Feldman at the School of Ecology.