Summer conference brings interdisciplinary focus to business

Pushkala Prasad, Zankel Professor of Management and Business, co-organized an interdisciplinary workshop in Sandwich, Mass., this summer that drew scholars from the U.S. and abroad working at the intersections of organization studies, sociology, public administration, communication and cultural studies.

The event, held June 4-5, 2014, was co-organized with Anshuman Prasad, and supported by a grant from Handelsbanken (Bank of Commerce of Sweden). Themed around the notion of “Making a Difference, ” the program brought together social scientists, hard scientists, and humanities scholars who discussed matters of interest to scholars of corporations, and business and commercial enterprises.

Participants interpreted and played imaginatively with the theme, some exploring the dynamic of “difference” in organizations, institutions, and culture in terms of identity and demographics, and others discussing organized attempts to “make a difference” in some transformational or impactful way. Pushkala Prasad explained, “A major impulse behind this workshop was the creation of a forum for conversations on the subject of difference and making a difference in organizations that would not be constrained by customary disciplinary and professional boundaries.”

She added, ”The participants were not focusing on traditional business ideas but rather on such topics as new ways of working together, and the influence of interdisciplinarity on the field of business studies.”

Workshop participants included noted scholars in the fields of management and organization studies, philosophy, molecular biology, sociology and communication, with affiliations to a range of higher educational institutions including St. Mary’s University (Halifax), Lund University (Sweden), University of New Haven, University of Massachusetts, Boston, Boston University, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), University of Colorado, Boulder, University of Toronto and Skidmore College. Topics covered ranged from U.S. public policy on obesity and the philosophic concept of “witnessing” to the everyday production of nationalism and a discursive history of corporate social responsibility in the U.S.A. A detailed description of the program is in the other attachment.

The idea for the conference arose from a book that the Prasads are editing, The Routledge Companion to Critical Management Studies (due in 2015) that features essays by a number of conference participants. Pushkala Prasad said that it is possible that another book could feature the work of those who presented at the “Making a Difference” conference. In the year ahead, she will be sharing the work presented in June to a business history conference and a business history journal.