Being Crafty: The Significance of Craft for Research in Business and Management

Abstract:
In this lecture, I explore the meaning and significance of craft for the self-understanding and development of organizational research. The construct of craft is situated in the context of its displacement by modernisation, as a practice characterized by skills that elude standardization and routinization. Consideration of research-as-craft, we suggest, speaks to, and supports, a distinctive – imaginative, embodied and being-centred – aspect and mode of management and organizational research. In unsettling and subverting knower/known and mind/body dualisms, ‘craftiness’ is of ethical and political, as well as methodological, significance.

About Adjunct Professor Hugh Willmott:
Hugh Willmott (PhD Manchester University; Honorary PhD, Lund University) is Professor of Management at Cass Business School Research, City University and Research Professor in Organization Studies, Cardiff Business School. He previously held professorial appointments at UMIST (now Manchester Business School) and the Judge Business School. Hugh is a Fellow of the British Academy. He is past Associate Editor of Academy of Management Review and Associate Editor of Organization. He has also served on the editorial boards of Accounting, Organizations and Society, Journal of Management Studies and Organization Studies.

Full details can be found on his homepage. 

Programme:

15:00 – Welcome by Head of Department Dorte Salskov-Iversen

Introduction by Dean of Education Gregor Halff

15:15 – Inaugural Lecture by Professor Hugh Willmott

16:00 – Reception at MSC in Dalgas Have 15