Seminar - Secrecy at Work: The Hidden Architecture of Organizations
Secrecy at Work: The Hidden Architecture of Organizations
Imagine a day at work – with no secrets. That is to say, any plans your organization has for new products and strategies are publicly known at the moment that they are first discussed; the information that your firm captures about clients and employees are open to inspection; none of your colleagues tells you in confidence about upcoming job opportunities or even the latest gossip about the boss. When we consider this implausible scenario it is easy to see that secrets and organizational life are intimately interwoven.
However, the examples already given suggest that secrecy comes in different forms. Nevertheless, beneath these different forms we can find some common processes which are to do with the way that secrecy is bound up with identity (who is ‘in the know’ and who is not) and control (how secrets allow us to control other people but also require self-control). In the presentation we consider this ‘hidden architecture’ of organizational life.
Speaker: Jana Costas
Jana Costas is Assistant Professor at the Department of Management, Freie Universität Berlin and a European Union Marie Curie Fellow at Copenhagen Business School. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on culture, identity, control and leadership. She has recently conducted an ethnographic study of the organizational underworld of cleaning. With Chris Grey, she is currently working on a book on organizational secrecy to be published by Stanford University Press in 2016.
Speaker: Christopher Grey
Christopher Grey is a Professor of Organization Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. Previously, he was a full Professor at the University of Cambridge, and subsequently at the University of Warwick, where he was Head of the Industrial Relations and Organizational Behaviour Group. He has also held several visiting appointments, most recently as Velux Foundation Visiting Professor at Copenhagen Business School in Denmark and as Professor-invité at Université Paris-Dauphine.
The lecture is organized by Christina Garsten, Mikkel Flyverbom and Adrienne Sörbom, in conjunction with the workshop Political Affairs."
Registration is necessary
Please send an email to Conference.icm@cbs.dk with your name and position.