Professor Marta Calas & Professor Linda Smircich

Marta B. Calás is Professor of Organization Studies and International Management at the Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and adjunct professor of Women’s Studies, at this university’s Women’s Studies Program. She received her MBA from the University of California-Berkeley, and her Ph.D. in Organization Studies with supporting field in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Earlier in her career, Prof. Calás held a professorship in Management and was associate and interim dean of the College of Business Administration at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez. She was also a Fulbright Scholar at the Autonomous University of Honduras (1980) and at Åbo Akademi, Finland (2000), and visiting faculty at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1992). Born in Cuba but living outside this country most of her life, Prof. Calás’ work reflects the intellectual concerns of a mobile subject in a constantly shifting world.

Linda Smircich is Professor of Organization Studies at the Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She received her BA in Anthropology-Sociology from the State University of New York-Oswego, and her MBA and Ph.D. in Organization and Management from Syracuse University, from whom she received the Distinguished Ph.D. Alumni award in 2008. She was on the faculty of Penn State University from 1978-1982 and was a visiting research professor at Abo Akademi in Finland in 1993. Her early work experience with New York Telephone Co. left an indelible mark, propelling her curiosity about organizations. Evolving from that experience, her subsequent academic writings on organizational culture were part of the movement toward more interpretive approaches in organization studies.

Enabled by feminist, poststructuralist, postcolonial/transnational theorizing, and other critical analytical approaches, Professors Calás and Smircich’s collaborative work interrogates and retheorizes areas of organizational scholarship such as globalization, leadership, business ethics, and entrepreneurship. Through these approaches, they also examine the logics behind contemporary institutions such as universities and other work organizations. At the 2006 US Academy of Management meetings, Professors Calás and Smircich received the Sage Scholarship Award of the GDO division in recognition of their scholarly contributions over the years. Their recent works include “Feminist perspectives on gender in organizational research: what is and is yet to be” (Handbook of Organizational Research Methods, 2009) and “Extending the boundaries: reframing ‘entrepreneurship as social change’ through feminist perspectives” (with K. Bourne, Academy of Management Review, 2009). They are members of the founding editorial team of Organization: The critical journal of organization, theory & society.

 

Professor Simon Critchley

Simon Critchley studied philosophy at the University of Essex in England (BA 1985, PhD 1988) and at the University of Nice in France (M.Phil 1987). Among his teachers were Robert Bernasconi, Jay Bernstein, Frank Cioffi, Dominique Janicaud and Onora O’Neill. Critchley's M.Phil. thesis dealt with the problem of the overcoming of metaphysics in Heidegger and Carnap and his Ph.D. dissertation was on the ethics of deconstruction in Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida.

After a position as University Fellow at Cardiff University, Critchley was appointed Lecturer in Philosophy at Essex in 1989, where he became Reader in 1995 and Professor in 1999. Also at the University of Essex, he was Director of the Centre for Theoretical Studies and collaborated closely with Ernesto Laclau.

Critchley was President of the British Society for Phenomenology from 1994-99. In 1997 and 2001, he held a Humboldt Research Fellowship in Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. Between 1998-2004, Critchley was a Programme Director of the Collège international de philosophie, Paris. In 2006-7, he was a Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Since 2004 he has been Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York. In addition, he has held visiting professorships at Nijmegen (1997), the Universities of Sydney (2000), Notre Dame (2002), Cardozo Law School in New York (2005), and Oslo (2006). From 2009, he will be part-time Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tilburg.

He is author of The Ethics of Deconstruction (1992), On Humour (2002), Infinitely Demanding (2007), and The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008) amongst others.