Essex Business School Inaugural Lecture Series: Audio Recordings
The Bananas Always Go First: Organization through the lens of aesthetics by Professor
Sam Warren and A Necessary Invention - Christmas, Work and Organization by Professor Philip Hancock
7 December 2011
Part One:
'The Bananas Always Go First': Organization through the lens of aesthetics
Listen now:
Samantha Warren's research to date has explored how organizations have increasingly been using employees'
sensory and emotional engagement with their work and workplaces as a management tool. In her lecture she
will explain how new forms of working depend on these "aesthetic sensibilities" and critically consider
the effects of an 'aesthetic engagement' with work for individuals, organizations and society.
Samantha Warren is Professor of Management
and Deputy Research Director at Essex Business School.
Part Two:
'A Necessary Invention': Christmas, Work and Organization
Listen now:
The theme of this lecture is whether or not it is time for the business school to take Christmas seriously.
Christmas has long since been a concern of historians, folklorists and cultural sociologists amongst others.
For some reason, however, those with an interest in work and organization have largely overlooked it. Perhaps
this is because Christmas is, for many, a time of frivolity, kitsch and 'non-productive' attitudes and activities;
matters that the field of work and organization studies has historically found difficult to acknowledge, let alone
write about. Yet Christmas is now a global business of sizeable economic proportions. Indeed, as the writer and
journalist Katherine Whitehorn has observed, 'from a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would
be necessary to invent it'. Furthermore, it is both a product of organization and also a problem for it: devouring
resources, pressurising individuals and their families, and amplifying the contradictions of a world driven by
acquisition and yet increasingly paranoid about the price it will have to pay for it. Perhaps it is time, therefore,
to give Christmas the attention it deserves - albeit with a glass of eggnog and a mince pie in hand.
Philip Hancock is Professor of
Work and Organization and Head of the Management Group at Essex Business School.
Image courtesy of Bob Fisher www.eastscapes.co.uk