From: Richard Marens [mailto:
rmarens@monmouth.edu]
ANNOUNCING "THE DARK SIDE" CASE-WRITING COMPETITION
The Critical Management Studies Workshop (http://aom.pace.edu/cms/) and
the
Management Education Division of the Academy of Management (WEBSITE?)
are
sponsoring a case-writing competition. An award will be made at our
meeting
at the Academy of Management in Denver in Aug 2002 for the best
case-study
of the worst business practices.
The selection of the best case study will be made by a committee
composed of:
* Tom Kochan (MIT Sloan)
* Ron Blackwell (Director of Corporate Affairs, AFL-CIO)
* Liz Fulop (Griffith U. Australia)
* Mayer Zald (U. Michigan)
* Paul Adler (USC, CMSW co-coordinator)
* Carroll Stephens (Virginia Tech, CMSW co-cordinator)
* Richard Marens (Monmouth University)
THE MOTIVATION FOR THE COMPETITION
Our case libraries are almost exclusively devoted to "best-practice"
cases
and to difficult decisions faced by basically well-managed firms. The
cupboard is relatively bare when instructors look for cases on the more
typical, merely average firm, or on really scandalously bad practices,
or
on the sometimes bad consequences of much-praised practices. It is
difficult even to find reasonably rich cases on labor/management
conflict.
Some of our colleagues who write cases justify this "bright side" bias,
arguing that there are 100 ways to go wrong for every one way to go
right.
We challenge that premise, for several reasons:
* the patterns we observe among the wrong ways tell us a great deal
about
weaknesses of the broader system of business and of our society;
* there are a large number of organizations who do very well for one set
of
stakeholders (e.g. owners) at great expense to other stakeholders (e.g.
workers or local communities); and
* our students deserve materials that prompt them to think through the
scope of feasible and appropriate action if they happen to find
themselves
confronted with such practices.
This competition therefore aims to encourage the development of cases
that
provoke reflection and debate on the "dark side" of contemporary
capitalism. Some might argue that we are promoting "muck raking." They
are
correct: we feel that if there's so much "muck" out there, it behooves
us
to look at it squarely and decide what should be done about it. For both
teaching and research purposes, it is critical that we have
well-documented
worst-practices cases on the table, so that we have the opportunity to
understand how such organizations come in being, how they function, and
how
they might be changed.
Submissions could address any of a range of issues. We encourage
submissions focused on labor relations -- instructors in this area are
particularly eager to see cases that raise issues about the difficulties
workers encounter in organizing unions and otherwise expressing voice at
work, and cases that prompt discussion on how these difficulties might
be
surmounted. We also encourage submissions focused on environmentally
harmful practices -- we need to understand better the factors that
encourage firms to pollute, and how these conditions might be changed.
Other foci are also welcome.
THE SPECIFICS
We invite submissions from students or faculty. We are looking for
teaching
cases -- not research papers based on case studies or otherwise. Our
goal
is to encourage the development of good classroom materials. Submissions
can also be in the form of a published journalistic account along with a
teaching note.
All submissions should include a teaching note. This note would make
explicit the issues raised by the case and the importance of these
issues,
explain the research behind the case, discuss how it might be used in
the
classroom, and describe how the case could fit into a program. It should
enable the panel to judge the likely effectiveness of using the case in
the
classroom.
The award will go to the best case-study -- not to the worst offender.
The
award selection criteria will be:
* the importance of the issues raised;
* the quality of the underlying research: we encourage solid background
research using interviews, legal proceedings, archival data, etc.;
* the quality of the presentation: the case should not be polemically
one-sided -- it should give voice to a range of points of view;
* the clarity of the writing;
* the usefulness of an accompanying teaching note.
SUBMISSIONS AND INQUIRIES
Submissions should be received (by email please) by July 1. Submissions
and
inquiries should be addressed to the co-coordinators, Paul Adler at
padler@usc.edu and Richard Marens at <
rmarens@monmouth.edu>.