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Kaunas as a RGCS new chapter

Presentation of Kaunas as RGCs chapter

Prof. Vladislav V. Fomin, vvfomin@gmail.com

Viktorija Janavičienė, Viktorija.Janaviciene@knf.vu.lt

The city of Kaunas is the second largest Lithuania‘s city. Kaunas is located at the confluence of the two largest Lithuanian rivers, surrounded by the hills and situated at the crossing of international roads going North to South (Tallinn to Warsaw, to Berlin) and East to West (Minsk to Klaipeda). Due to its geographical position, Kaunas is Lithuania‘s most important center of multi-modal communication.

The city is famous for its Interwar architecture which was awarded the European Heritage label and is on its way to UNESCO. Kaunas is the only city in the world where so much of the style of the buildings has survived to the present day. The city keeps the authentic spirit of the country‘s national character alive.

Kaunas, also called the temporary capital city of Lithuania, was chosen as the

What will work look like in 2030?

By François-Xavier de Vaujany, Université Paris Dauphine – PSL; Amélie Bohas, Aix-Marseille Université ; Aurélie Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, IESEG School of Management; Julie Fabbri, EM Lyon et Sabine Carton, Université Grenoble Alpes

Work is changing and so is society as a whole. Debates on its future have been particularly animated over the past three years, (re)launched by discussions on digital technologies, self-employment, individuals with multiple careers (slashers), universal income, or questions of new forms of management, solidarity and governance.

Focusing on employment, work or management practices, these debates have had one merit: to bring to light the multiple possible futures of work.

Did you say “atmosphere”?

In its latest research note, “The future of work in 2030: four atmospheres?”, the international network and think tank RGCS offers a multi-faceted vision of the future of work.

We begin by presenting eight paradoxes at play in … Read more

Assembling the old and the new worlds: plugging an unconference into a conference

By Marie Hasbi (Université Paris II)

Summer is filled with notable academic conferences. For organization researchers, July is particularly notable for holding the annual and big conference of the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS), an interdisciplinary event about organizations, organizing and collective activity. As most academic conferences, EGOS colloquia provide a venue for researchers to present and discuss their research papers through sessions and sub-themes.

In 2017, The Research Group on Collaborative Spaces (RGCS) added an event off the track, an unconference called: “Organization & Organizing of the Sharing Economy” (OOSE). I have been part of the organizing committee of the two first sessions in 2017 and 2018.

Behind the Unconference Scene

Each season, through a series of Skype planning meetings, our small group of conveners shared visions about a gathering that might both enhance and criticize the current thinking on the sharing and … Read more

Learning differently with students: walking our teaching

By Julie Fabbri (emlyon business school, OCE & STORM, fabbri@em-lyon.com), David Vallat (Université Lyon 1) et Amélie Bohas (Université Aix-Marseille)

“Entrepreneurship is an incredible Odyssey whose leaders are the heroes”. These were the first words of the organizer of the 7th Printemps des Entrepreneurs in Lyon (France), where we spent a whole day with students from emlyon business school. Why? To experience real-life working conditions. How? We led an Open Walked Event-Based Experimentation (OWEE) in this context to help them to get the most out of the event. In a nutshell, we lived a spatio-temporal odyssey in and around the fair to grasp, all together, what is at stake in entrepreneurial journeys and what could be the future world of organizations.

On April 24, 2018, at 8am, about thirty red dressed students gathered in front of the Double Mixte, a well-known business event hall. They are double-degree … Read more

Street Art: Who Holds the Wall?

By Renée Zachariou

The promise was enticing, and the menu quite mysterious: OWEE (Open Walked Event-based Experimentations) is a research protocol conducted by international researchers. After several experiments all over the world (in Tokyo and London), a tour in the 13th district of Paris was concocted, open to all. It is difficult to give a precise definition of OWEE without giving in to tautology: it is an experiment, while walking, while seeking. You’re welcome.

For this day dedicated to Street Art, we meet at 9 am on a gray Thursday in front of the square Luis Say (founder of Beghin-Say and, fun fact, brother of the liberal economist Jean-Baptiste Say), at the exit of the metro Glacière. Facing us, three facades completely covered with murals. On the left, a delicately rendered cat from the French artist C215, in front, a « freedom-equality-fraternity » muse in the iconic Obey style, on … Read more

Co-producing Traces From Our Walked Discussions: The Use of Digital Tools

By François-Xavier de Vaujany and Viviane Sergi

Our learning expeditions and field trips following the OWEE protocol have often resulted in co-produced traces by means of various tools: posts on blogs (e.g. RGCS WordPress, the Conversation, LSE Business Review, LSE impact blog…) written by coordinators during and after the event, social networks (in particular Twitter, Facebook and Instagram), geolocalization systems (e.g. Samsung health systems) but also more specific collaborative technologies such as Stample or Framapads. The use of these tools aimed at narrating our events as they were happening, learning and reflecting from them, searching for political impact through better integrative and connective narratives.

We would like here to give a short feedback about two technologies we used: Framapads and Twitter and how they help us to co-produce reflexive traces of our events.

Framapad: great open technology, but atmosphere and animation are key

Framapad is a great … Read more

Managing Indoor and Outdoor Times in Learning Expeditions

By Aurore Dandoy & François-Xavier de Vaujany

This summer, walking has been a trendy topic in French bookstores. Presented either as healthy practice, an opportunity for true, reflexive loneliness, a possibility to explore a territory, a new managerial approach or a political engagement, walk is an embodied practice at the heart of numerous trends and fashions today. Indeed, it is a very old practice. Aristotle taught philosophy while walking in the Lyceum of ancient Athens. Beyond the peripatetic school, situationists (with the practice of ‘drifting’) or revolutionaries (through walk as a protest) have all settled practice as a movement with possible political connotations.

Walk is also an experience. Moving from one place to another (see vignette 1 below) without thinking about it, there is something lived in-between. Walking as a group of researchers outside university walls is an intriguing liminal experience. For academics (and probably entrepreneurs…) experimenting … Read more

Notes as gestures: The use of log books in ethnographical work

By François-Xavier de Vaujany and Albane Grandazzi

Our learning expeditions in collaborative spaces and our ethnographies of new work practices have been the opportunity to use numerous diaries, reports and note books to keep a trace of what we saw, what people said or what we felt.

Such a practice is not new in ethnography and auto-ethnography. Ethnographers have always collected and self-produced the narrative traces of their experience. They have always done it asynchronously (e.g. at the end of the day…) or synchronously (in the flow of what they were observing). We would like to stress here an embodied, material, visible aspect of ethnography as a practice: the gesturing of notes, sketches, traces of our shared experience with the people and societies explored.

More than ever, in a digital, largely disembodied, world, gestures and physical movements of the ethnographer are key micro-practices on the field. Our ethnographies and … Read more

Do it Yourself! Exploit yourself? #OOSE Season 2

By: Marie Hasbi (Université Paris 2), Albane Grandazzi(Université Paris-Dauphine, PSL), Aurore Dandoy (Université Paris-Dauphine, PSL), Stefan Haefliger (CASS Business School) & François-Xavier de Vaujany (Université Paris-Dauphine, PSL).

Acknowledgements,

We would like to express our great appreciation to the following persons who have generously offered their help in the organization of this event.

Mikael Peiro (PhD Researcher at Montpellier University) for designing the visual iconography of the event, Heigo Mõlder (Co-Founder & Manager at Skeemipesa) for hosting the second part of our event.

We also thank our Keynote Speakers:

Anthony Hussenot is a professor in organization studies at the Université Côte d’Azur. He has conducted research about the new work practices and the emergence of new organizational forms. He is currently focussing on topics such as freelancing, maker’s movement and digital nomads. He is running the research standing working group “New work practices, new lifestyles” at AIMS … Read more