Cardiff Organisational Research Group

The Cardiff Organisational Research Group (CORGies) provides a welcoming, supportive and inclusive context to discuss the broad themes of organisations and organising from a multi-disciplinary, multi-paradigm and multi-methods perspective.

CORGies is based in the Management, Employment and Organisation Section of Cardiff Business School but also includes other scholars with an interest in organisations as well as visiting national and international scholars.

Reflecting a broad range of topics on the subject of organisations and organising the group’s research interests span a variety of themes including:

Critical leadership and management studies
Emotions and organisations
Identities and inequalities in organisations and organising – gender, ethnicity, age and disabilities
Ethics and organisations – sustainability, organisational deception, whistle-blowing
Conceptualising power elites and expert authority
Power and organisations – the role of social media and big tech
Social movements research – resistance and activism
New forms of organisations and organising – cooperatives, social enterprises, coliving

Research

The research group provides a vibrant, engaging and varied programme of activities which take place at least once a month and includes a wide range of participants and contributions. These include the following activities:

Book Readings

We discuss and review books which represent both new topics of inquiry as well as re-visiting classical texts in the field of organisations, in recent years this has included the following texts:

Zuboff, S. (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Hochschild, A. R (1983) The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling
Jackall, R. (1988) Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers
Gouldner, A. (1955) Wild Cat Strikes

External and internal research presentations

Colleagues are encouraged to present their research at whatever stage of development to gain insights and feedback from the group.

Some of the themes covered recently include:

Robin Burrow and Rebecca Scott – The Blood and Bruises of Organisational Life
Tom Entwistle and Heike Doering – Whistleblowing: The Mid-Staffs Case
Sarah Gilmore – Universal Basic Income
Cara Reed and Mike Reed – De-legitimising Expertise
Sarah Gilmore and Nancy Harding – Organisational Socialisation
Leighton Andrews - Unleadership and the COVID pandemic
Karel Musilek – Work/life Relations in Coliving spaces
Marcus Gomes – Platform Activism

In addition, CORGies welcomes presentations from external scholars from the UK and internationally and have includes the following speakers:

Alistair Mutch (Nottingham Trent University) – Rethinking Institutional Logics
Martin Parker (Bristol University) – The Future of the Business School
Mark Learmonth and Kevin Morrell (Durham University) – Critical Perspectives of Leadership
David Courpasson (Visiting Professor EM Lyon, France) and Mike Reed (Cardiff University) – Cannibals in Suits: Some Stories and Some Reflections
Morgana Martins Krieger (Fundação Getulio Vargas – EAESP Brazil) - Urban Conflict and Collective Action in Latin America: Struggle, Engagement and Agreements towards the Right to the City.

PhD student mini-conference

Every year we hold a mini-conference for PhD students to showcase their research. Students present their research to colleagues in a supportive context which helps to build and strengthen connections between their research and the wider research group.

Reading groups

To connect to broader discussions in the field of organizations and social sciences more broadly we also engage in extended discussions based on journal articles.

These have included:

CMS and Brexit – Bristow and Robinson (2018)
Does BREXIT mean the end of Critical Management? – Chris Grey (2018)
More recently, we assessed some of the lessons for the study of organizations in C Wright-Mills’ Sociological Imagination based on the review by Gane and Back (2012).

Extended Debates and Discussion

Annually CORGies organizes a day of extended discussion and debate on a selected topic which integrates the varied research interests of the group. Members participate in presentations on the theme which have included the following topics:

Identities and Organizations
10 years on from the GFC: Implications for Organisations and Organising
The COVID Pandemic: Confronting the Challenges of Organising and Organisation.

Projects

Sarah Jenkins is the Wales Lead for the UK Centre for Evidence Implementation in Adult Social Care (IMPACT). This is a newly funded centre by the ESRC/Health Foundation, the centre will be funded for six years from 2021-2027 with an award of £15m to focus on the establishment of an implementation centre to develop a programme of innovations and best practice to improve adult social care outcomes. IMPACT is a collaboration based on Universities representing the four UK nations, the centre is based in Birmingham University and led by Prof Jon Glasby.

Tim Edwards is the Principal Investigator for the ESRC's Global Challenges Research Fund (up to £60,000) to look at the challenge of sustainable development in the Atlantic Forest of Sao Paulo state, Brazil. Tim leads a team of social and computer scientists from Cardiff Business School and Cardiff School of Computer Science and Informatics working alongside social, computer and natural scientists from Fundação Getulio Vargas, UNICAMP and the Federal University of San Carlo, Brazil. The aim is to develop a responsible innovation approach to citizen science that builds the necessary socio-technical infrastructure to support sustainable development goals in the local community.