Call for Papers

In recent years, management and organization studies (MOS) have shown an increasing interest in examining the causes and consequences of different types of violence that are related to inequalities and inequities (e.g., Alamgir & Cairns, 2015; Chowdhury, 2023; Cooper, 2008; Pawlak, 2022; Varman & Al-Amoudi, 2016; Varman & Srinivas, 2023). Expanding upon this emerging line of research, we posit that there is an urgent necessity to broaden research on violence in relation to creativity and innovation. We posit that it is crucial to explore and unveil how creativity and innovation contribute to the formation and perpetuation of violence in diverse geographies and contexts.
 
This can assist us in understanding how creativity and violence often go hand in hand rather than occurring implicitly and in a hidden manner. By adopting this approach, we can grasp how organizational creativity and innovation yield negative externalities, disrupt societies, and compromise justice in, around and of organizations, thereby adversely affecting marginalized groups. For example, recent research highlights how violence inherited from colonial legacies is materialized through digital financialization and surveillance capitalism (Zulfiqar, 2023). These mechanisms are employed to exercise novel forms of violent acts in the Global South, simultaneously providing governments in these regions with the means to oppress their own citizens (Varman & Vijay, 2022; Zulfiqar, 2023).
 
Thus, an advancement of the literature on violence is essential for a better understanding of capitalism, its contradictions, and its violent pursuits in contemporary organizations and societies. Management and organization researchers (MORs) can explore diverse types of violence, including normative (Butler, 2004; Haleem, 2019; Varman & Al-Amoudi, 2016), systemic (Žižek, 2008), symbolic (Kerr et al., 2024), and insensitive (Chowdhury, 2021) violence.
 
Normative violence, for instance, can help us to understand how organizations innovatively develop or destroy certain norms and values to perpetuate exploitations (Butler, 2016). Subjective violence, concerned with physical and psychological abuse, is equally vital to study because the ways in which violence is inflicted are under-researched (Muzanenhamo & Chowdhury, 2022, 2023). Similarly, MORs hardly pay any attention to legal violence (Menjívar & Abrego, 2012), where aspects of the law segregate or dehumanize marginalized groups such as people of color, undocumented workers, refugees, and LGBTQ+ individuals. Such individuals or groups often lack representations and power to influence the legal system, which is supposed to protect them from discrimination. In this process, marginalized people are derealized (Butler, 2016; Varman & Al-Amoudi, 2016), meaning that their voices and concerns are unrecognized or misrecognized, subjecting them to misrepresentation in academic, corporate, and media discourses (Chowdhury, 2023). Insensitive violence further exacerbates the experience of marginalized groups when powerful actors such as state agencies, corporations, and NGOs conceal their involvement in derealizing or marginalizing the very subjects they claim to represent or care for, combining illegal, unethical and insensitive means (Chowdhury, 2021).
 
Essentially, there is a need to explore and challenge different forms of violence so that we can pinpoint and conceptualize sources of violence such as creativity or innovation that are often generated in and around organizations to exploit and degrade human lives and the environment. Also, we emphasize that organizations do not act alone to perpetuate violence and inequality. Therefore, it is equally crucial to study the contexts and networks involving powerful actors such as states and corporations to comprehend and explore the violence and violent acts that are facilitated and enabled through creativity and innovation.
 
Subsequently, this sub-theme aims to bring together scholars interested in understanding, examining, and theorizing violence or aspects of violent actions in different theoretical traditions, to enrich MOS, and to open up new possibilities for critical and alternative research paradigm. Potential questions and topics include the challenges and specificities of MOS related to the study of violence; how literature on violence informs MOS about diverse innovative oppressions and hostile acts; the methodological challenges of studying violence’s negative externalities; and the role of organizations in developing violent structures and norms in societies. Potential questions and topics that can be addressed are:

• How can literature on violence inform MOS about diverse creative/innovative oppressions among marginalized regions, groups, and individuals?

• How can we acquire a better understanding of organizational and political contexts or different geographies where (in)visible, (in)sensitive, (non)subjective, (non)systemic, and (non)structural forms of violence are formed and perpetuated through creativity and innovation?

• How do organizations employ creativity in different contexts (e.g., Global South, small businesses, social responsibility, and stakeholder initiatives) to exploit individuals and environments? Why and how does organizational failure occur simultaneously to prevent such violence?

• How do organizations play a creative role in developing and disseminating violent structures in broader societies?

• How are the legacies of colonial violence and its corollaries (such as the logics of elimination and dispossession, and ontological conflicts and epistemic expectations or demands) connected to creativity in contemporary organizations, contributing to the development of innovative but violent processes?

• How can powerful actors (e.g., states, legal authorities, multinational corporations, NGOs, and international organizations) creatively formulate equitable mechanisms to eradicate violence?

• How can marginalized groups be innovative to challenge and counter violence inflicted by power actors?

These are just a few suggestions. In addition, we are open to contributions addressing issues not listed here but that are relevant to our overarching theme.
 

References

• Alamgir, F., & Cairns, G. (2015): “Economic inequality of the badli workers of Bangladesh: Contested entitlements and a ‘perpetually temporary’ life-world.” Human Relations, 68 (7), 1131–1153.

• Butler, J. (2004): Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.
• Butler, J. (2016): Frames of War. When is Life Grievable? London: Verso.
• Chowdhury, R. (2023): “Misrepresentation of marginalized groups: A critique of epistemic neocolonialism.” Journal of Business Ethics, 186 (3), 553–570.
• Chowdhury, R. (2021): “(In)sensitive violence, development, and the smell of the soil: Strategic decision-making of what?” Human Relations, 74 (1), 131–152.
• Cooper, M. (2008): “The inequality of security: Winners and losers in the risk society.” Human Relations, 61 (9), 1229–1258.
• Haleem, I. (ed.) (2019): Normalization of Violence. Conceptual Analysis and Reflections from Asia. Milton Park, UK: Routledge.
• Kerr, R., Robinson, S., & Śliwa, M. (2024): “Organising populism: From symbolic power to symbolic violence.” Human Relations, 77 (1), 81–110.
• Menjívar, C., & Abrego, L. (2012): “Legal violence: Immigration law and the lives of Central American immigrants.” American Journal of Sociology, 117 (5), 1380–1421.
• Muzanenhamo, P., & Chowdhury, R. (2022): “Leveraging from racism: A dual structural advantages perspective.” Work, Employment and Society, 36 (1), 167–178.
• Muzanenhamo, P., & Chowdhury, R. (2023): “A critique of vanishing voice in noncooperative spaces: The perspective of an aspirant black female intellectual activist.” Journal of Business Ethics, 183, 15–29.
• Pawlak, M. (2022): “Humanitarian aid in times of war: Organization and ignorance.” Organization Studies, 43 (6), 993–996.
• Varman, R., & Al-Amoudi, I. (2016): “Accumulation through derealization: How corporate violence remains unchecked.” Human Relations, 69 (10), 1909–1935.
• Varman, R., & Srinivas, N. (2023): “Theorizing necroptics: Invisibilization of violence and death-worlds.” Organization, https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084231189188.
• Varman, R., & Vijay, D. (2022): Organizing resistance and imagining alternatives in India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Žižek, S. (2008): Violence. New York: Picador.
• Zulfiqar, G.M. (2023): “Digital financialization and surveillance capitalism in the Global South: The new technologies of empire.” Organization, 30 (6), 1246–1251.
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