In December 2021, I will be co-chairing a sub-theme at the 12th International Critical Management Studies Conference with colleagues from the University of Eastern Finland and the Karolinska Institute. We’re hoping to welcome an interesting set of papers looking at contemporary challenges within the broad field of health and social care management. Our sub-theme, entitled Listening to Different Voices – Plurality and Power in Health and Social Care welcomes papers from established scholars, early career academics and PhD students.

If you are interested in presenting, please email an extended abstract (no more than 1000 words) by the 6th November 2021.

Call for Papers

The focus of this sub-theme is to ask how efforts to engage with, and listen to, a wider range of voices in relation to health and social care may help to address cultural and structural inequalities and to create more inclusive and diverse environments for collaboration and decision-making.

Recent experiences including the global pandemic have placed health and social care systems under enormous pressure and have served to highlight social and economic inequalities. We intend to use the sub-theme to provide a forum to discuss questions such as how we might engage with a wider and more diverse set of voices in order to better understand the nature of the challenges we face and to find new ways to work towards solutions. Echoing Carol Gilligan’s (1982) work In A Different Voice we intend to use the opportunity presented by the ICMS conference to encourage conversations that address the methodological, theoretical and practical implications of engaging in a more pluralistic manner.

Naturally, these conversations will pay close attention to cultural and structural issues, the inter-play between individual values and those of the institutions we create and represent and the radical nature of resistance and critique. In line with the overall theme of the conference, we intend these discussions to be welcoming, collegiate and as diverse as possible in order to stimulate new ideas and to revitalise the work of international CMS scholars in relation to health and social care.

Contributions will be invited and encouraged from across a range of disciplines, from those who bring academic and/or practical experience to the discussions. We seek to welcome papers with empirical, theoretical or methodological bases that are able to provide useful and stimulating insight into our discussion on the nature of people (professionals, clients and policy-makers) work and organization in health and social care or how we might better hope to understand the mechanisms and structures influencing the health and social care field. Specific attention will be paid to encouraging participation from scholars and practitioners from previously under-represented cultures, backgrounds and parts of the world. It is hoped that the decision to run this sub-theme online will enable those who may not be able to travel to the conference physically to attend and take part. Those wishing to engage with the conference in non-traditional ways – for example through video followed by discussion, or though mini-papers intended to prompt a longer period of shared reflection and debate are welcome. Our previous streams at ICMS conferences have focused on collegiate and supportive discussions in which our focus has been on encouragement and dialogue – we dare to promise the same for this sub-theme.

We welcome papers which address any topic that relates to this sub-theme, including those that consider:

  • Methodological questions in regard to plurality and diversity, perhaps engaging with ideas of co-production and co-creation in research;
  • Implications of, and reflections on, the COVID-19 pandemic on health and social care systems;
  • Consideration of how the Black Lives Matter movement, in bringing increased attention to cultural and structural social and economic inequalities, exposes a lack of diversity in relation to health and social care;
  • Empirical and theoretical benefits of more diverse and plural conversations in relation to addressing complex, or wicked problems, in health and social care (for example in how care should be managed and directed or how care is best delivered and sustained in an ethical manner);
  • Examine the nature and implications of reform agendas of health and social care systems, question notions of authority and expertise and the implications of power structures; and
  • How the ICMS community might move beyond critique to support the reform of existing systems, or the construction of alternative approaches.