#SYMPOSIUM2019

1. Topics of the third symposium

This third RGCS symposium will be focused on renewed creativity and collective creation in the spaces of cities and inventive ways to organize production and innovation.

A growing literature is investigating nature, principles and functioning of new work practices and collaboration, e.g. co-working, makers, hackers, fab lab network, as well as their interactions with more traditional forms of work practices, especially from the corporate world. This symposium seeks to build on these efforts to further understand the development of such collaborative work practices and their impact on society.

In addition, the symposium will seek to investigate the link between creativity and collaboration: how do collaborative work practices generate creativity, creation and innovation in cities and under which conditions? How are makers and hackers collectively organizing for innovation? What capacities do they need? What are the role of networks and meta-organizations in the local, national, international diffusion of practices and capacities?

We welcome both theoretical and empirical studies. For inspiration, we provide examples of key topics below. Papers on other topics are also welcome as long as they explicitly contribute to research on collaborative spaces and the transformation of cities:

• Repair, DIY, DIT, maker movements and their relationship with society, organizations, organizing and their joint transformations;
• Fab labs as networks, contributors to open knowledge and their translation in a corporate environment;
• Spatial, temporal, visual and material dimensions of creativity and creation in changing cities;
• The impacts of creativity and co-creation dynamics on cities, and the impact of cities on creativity and co-creation
• The legitimation and co-legitimation of collaborative techniques, collaborative communities and corporate projects;
• Historical views on creativity, creation and collaborative movements. Comparative historical perspectives on the phenomena;
• Critical perspectives on the ‘use’ of corporate techniques in the collaborative world;
• Emergence of new work practices;
• Institutional, practice, process, phenomenological, Marxist, post-Marxist views on the phenomena and their joint evolution;
• Affordance and proximity in and of collaborative spaces in the city, and how they relate to traditional business districts;
• Open innovation and how it is grounded, justified, fed by transformations introduced by collaborative communities;

We also welcome papers that investigate epistemological and methodological challenges of organizational ethnographic approaches. Such papers may aim to address several questions, among which:

• What are the roles of body, space and socio-materiality in research in management and social sciences?
• How do contemporary methodologies (e.g. OWEE, learning expeditions, “netnographies”) relate to and diverge from ethnographic traditions and practices?
• How can organizational ethnographies make use, and to what purposes, of social networks and “meta-texts” (e.g. live tweeting or sequences of tweets)?
• How do ethnographic group participants relate to each other and how does this affect the happening of the event?
• How to collectively produce scientific knowledge based on collective ethnographies/learning expeditions?
• How to conceptualize “unconferences”, i.e. participant-driven events that are starkly different from conventional scientific congress, and what can be their role in contemporary science?
• What is the dark side of these methodologies? Who is excluded from them?

Local organizing committee:

Héloïse Berkowitz (CNRS, TSM Research), Montserrat Pareja-Eastaway (University of Barcelona)

Scientific board:

Héloïse Berkowitz (CNRS, TSM Research), Hélène Bussy-Socrate (Warwick Business School), Claudine Bonneau (ESG UQAM), François-Xavier de Vaujany (Université Paris-Dauphine, PSL), Julie Fabbri (EM Lyon), Anna Glaser (ESCP Europe), Stefan Haefliger (Cass Business School), Pierre Laniray (Université de Poitiers), Montserrat Pareja-Eastaway (University of Barcelona), Cristina Rossi (Polytechnic University of Milan), Viviane Sergi (ESG UQAM), Matt Statler (New York University), Tadashi Uda (Hokkaido University), Paula Ungurean (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia)

The event will include academic presentations, keynote conferences, panels, OWEE… and city expeditions.

Registration will be free of charge, but a small contribution will be asked for food costs. In addition, the number of seats at the symposium will be limited and registration will be accepted on a first-come first-served basis

For questions or submissions:  collaborativespaces@gmail.com