Theme

Drawing from but extending beyond local crossings, the 2025 Standing Conference of Organizational Symbolism seeks to engage with what ‘crossing’ and ‘crossings’ mean, especially in a world that seems increasingly polarized and divided. Submissions are encouraged to explore acts of ‘crossing’, ‘transversing’, and ‘reaching across’, but also how we define the notion of ‘boundaries’ both symbolically and in practice. Crossing and boundaries may be physical, mental, emotional, social, cultural (Duarte & Hodge, 2007), geographical (Rottenburg, 2007; Muhr 2012), organizational, disciplinary, visual, identity-based or other. Boundaries may be solid or fluid (Kreiner & Schultz, 1995), visible or invisible, obvious or hidden, externally or internally imposed, socially or emotionally constructed (Prasad, 2014), sometimes hostile and sometimes needed or even wanted. As a result, crossings and boundaries may be fundamental to organisation and organizing.

What does it mean then to reach across these boundaries? Can studies of organisations and related scholarly work, seen as an embodied and sometimes political activity, help us make sense of this act? Can we theorize the permeability and porosity of boundaries and the effect of crossings on them? Is scholarly work also, in itself, an act of crossing?

Most importantly, how can we form connections both in spite of but also emerging from these crossings? In the Cyprus SCOS conference, we want to ask—is it possible to revitalize academia, bringing hope (Kostera, 2024) and ‘goodness’ (Connell, 2022) back to the university and especially to the epicentre of the business school classroom (Rhodes and Pullen, 2023)? Drawing on the powerful metaphor of the sea that surrounds the island, we seek papers that work with concepts of fluidity to explore how sometimes what seems to separate is also what connects. Can the past and the roots of management/organization studies help us accomplish future crossings?  Can we seek new routes in how we ‘do academia’ but also business and management?

The call for contributions will seek to gather a multiplicity of approaches and disciplinary foci, but also pay attention to diversity in authorship to include authors from different geographical locations, career stages and demographics.

Cyprus and crossings

Fitting to the unique location, history and sociopolitical situation of the host country, Cyprus, the theme of SCOS 2025 is ‘Crossings.’ With a history that dates back to the paleolithic era, Cyprus stands at the cultural, linguistic and historic crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa, densely layered with the influences of settlers, conquerors and pilgrims, from the heroes and heroines of the Trojan war, to the early Phoenecians, Romans, Byzantines, Venetians, Crusaders, Ottomans and British. And, as the island’s population still finds itself on the ‘crossroads’ of the Mediterranean, it is accustomed to crossing the millennia, backwards to its neolithic settlements and forward to a potential space program, both for identity and inspiration. Even the theme of Shakespeare’s Othello, which takes place in Cyprus, can be seen as a ‘crossing’ of sorts, an attempt to cross divisions, internal and external, and form connections.

Nicosia, the host city, remains a divided capital since 1974, while a third of the island’s population have never actually crossed the physical ‘line’ dividing the two parts of the city and the island, known as the ‘green line’. Displaced Greek and Turkish Cypriots long to ‘return home’, amidst a paradoxical and conflictual emotional and physical state of being both ‘at’ and ‘away’ from home.

Apart from its own political strife resulting from the Turkish occupation of a third of the island, Cyprus has also been at the crossroads of the refugee crisis of the last decade, as thousands of asylum seekers and migrants from Africa and the Middle East seek refuge, crossing boundaries, seas and continents, sometimes even stuck in the so-called ‘buffer zone’.

To borrow and paraphrase from Othello, ‘’Tis certain, then, for Cyprus’ that the island encapsulates what crossings—and connections—could be.

Potential lines of enquiry:

• What does crossings and boundaries entail?
• What do geo-political boundaries, borders and crossings—or the infeasibility or danger of such crossings— involve? How do they form and/or disrupt communities? And, how do we relate to these boundaries and crossings?
• How are boundaries defined? When do boundaries become borders? How are boundaries demarcated, constructed, maintained, reconfigured, dissolved? With what consequences, for whom?
• In an age of unprecedented human mobility, what role does ‘power’ as an analytical concept have in helping us make sense of boundaries and crossings?
• Can fluidity allow us to explore how sometimes what seems to separate is also what connects? How do we form and forge connections amidst/due to/ in spite of crossings?
• How do we make sense of symbolic boundaries and crossings? How do literal and symbolic boundaries and crossings inform each other?
• What does the ‘in between’ of crossings look like?
• How do we make sense of boundaries and crossings in nature? And what are the ecological implications of these?
• How do crossings entrench/challenge/redefine identities?
• What are the boundaries of our bodies? What affects, emotions and responses do crossings and boundaries produce?
• (How) can we reimagine spatial and temporal boundaries wherever, whenever and in whatever form they exist (in states, organizations, pasts/presents/futures)? When do crossings become liminal spaces of/for transformation? What role do we as scholars have in this?
• How do we bring care and vulnerability into our discussions of crossings and the potential of crossings for inclusivity?

SCOS 2025 will also have an open stream, allowing for the presentation of papers of more general interest to the SCOS community.

Structure

The conference will take place over three days and include a seaside gala dinner and walking tour of Nicosia. The conference will begin with a welcome reception at an archaeological site. It will also include yoga-in-the-park sessions for some serious fun!

There will be a special workshop for doctoral students and early career researchers focused on writing and publishing, especially for but not limited to Culture and Organization.

For those interested, there will also be a special session on how local NGOs and different forms of organizations are ‘crossing boundaries and making connections.’ In seeking to actively engage these communities in the organization of the conference, every attempt will be made to secure services from local craftspeople and small family-owned businesses for the meals, transport, etc of the conference.

Additional tours and excursions may also be organized upon request, for an additional cost.

Abstracts of up to 500 words can be submitted by January 13th 2025. We also welcome ideas for workshops and other contributions including exhibits and live performances.

References

• Connell, Raewyn (2022). The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why it’s Time for Radical Change. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
• Duarte, Fernanda and Hodge, Bob (2007). Crossing Paradigms: A Meta‐Autoethnography of a Fieldwork Trip to Brazil, Culture and Organization, 13(3): 191-203.
• Muhr, Sara Louise (2012). Strangers in Familiar Places – Using Generic Spaces in Cross-Cultural Identity Work, Culture and Organization, 18(1): 51-68.
• Kostera, Monika (2024). The University of Hope. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
• Kreiner, Kristian and Schultz, Majken (1995). Soft cultures: The Symbolism of Cross-Border Organizing, Culture and Organization, 1(1): 63-81.
• Prasad, Ajnesh (2014). You Can’t Go Home Again: And Other Psychoanalytic Lessons from Crossing a Neo-Colonial Border, Human Relations, 67(2): 233-257.
• Rhodes, Carl and Pullen, Alison (2023). The Good Business School. Organization, 30(6): 1273-1280.
• Rottenburg, Richard (2007). Sitting in a bar 1. Culture and Organization, 6(1): 87-100.