Activities | UCD Smurfit School

Seminar: Policy and European Economic Convergence: the cases of Ireland and Poland

UCD Centre for Innovation, Technology & Organisation (CITO), UCD College of Business, and the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Ireland invite you to a seminar on 8th April.

Please register here or email cob-mktcomms@ucd.ie

This seminar will compare and contrast innovation and transformation in industrial and economic policy in Ireland and Poland. Panelists are Professor Frank Barry and Professor Marcin Piątkowski and the event will be moderated by Associate Professor Dorota Piaskowska.

Professor Barry will draw, in particular, on his recent book, 'Industry and Policy in Independent Ireland 1922-1972', published by Oxford University Press.

Similarly, Professor Piątkowski will draw on his book, 'Europe's Growth Champion: Insights from the Economic Rise of Poland', also published by Oxford University Press.

The seminar is being organised by the UCD Centre for Innovation, Technology & Organisation, UCD College of Business, and the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Ireland.

All are most welcome to attend on
Monday 8th April, 2024
4.00-5.30pm
(followed by a reception in the Laurence Crowley Boardroom)

Location - Lecture Theatre N204
UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School
Carysfort Avenue, Blackrock, County Dublin

Transformative change: unlocking institutional imagination

A conference on 'unlocking institutional imagination' co-organised by Donncha Kavanagh (UCD - CITO), Mary Murphy (NUI Maynooth), Ian Hughes (UCC) and Dermot O’Doherty (Innovation consultant).

When: Thursday, April 4, 2024 - 09:30 to 17:00

Where: Maynooth University

This conference provides a space for rethinking the role of institutions in enabling deeper, more systematic and speedier transformation. It is an opportunity to reflect on the nature of the transformative state, new forms of democracy, and the lessons that can be learned from international experience in re-imagining institutions. The focus is on reimagining institutions and on how institutional imagination might best be enabled. The conference is particularly relevant to policy makers, NGOs, academics, legislators, public representatives, journalists and those with responsibility for and interest in institutional change.

This conference is organised under the auspices of the Futures Forum, a network of interested people established after a successful event held at TCD and UCD in November 2022 on the theme of Futures Thinking. This involved a range of speakers from Ireland and other countries and focused on the need for and role of foresight and futures capabilities to address longer-term issues in Irish and European economies and societies.

History shows that states are capable of radical transformation and creative innovation. In the 1920s and 1930s, Ireland pioneered the concept of semi-state organisations, while it subsequently created a range of institutions that were central to the country’s economic development. Internationally, we can point to many examples of positive radical imaginaries from Roosevelt’s New Deal, to the UK’s welfare state, to the eradication of polio, to the US’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, all of which illustrate what a capable state can achieve.

Donncha Kavanagh
Full Professor of Information & Organisation
UCD College of Business

Conference information and registration page: Link to register at Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute

Moran-Introna Keynote Lecture 2008

The following episode is a bonus cross-pod publication (pollination?) between “Design Talk” and “CITO Conversations” a research community pod hosted by University College Dublin’s Centre for Innovation, Technology & Organisation.

This ‘from the archives’ recording is the first part of the keynote from “ Triangular Conference 2008”.

We were delighted to have Dermot Moran and Lucas Introna to talk about the value of conducting research in the phenomenological tradition and considerations when carrying out research into organisations, information systems and modern technology.

Part 1

In part one Dermot introduces Phenomenology and argues for its continuing relevance to Philosophy and Science.

The talk was recorded in-person with a live audience on Thursday June the 5^th 2008 in the UCD Lochlann Quinn Undergraduate School of Business, Belfield, Dublin, Ireland.

The conference was supported by the UCD School of Business Doctoral Studies Programme and hosted by the UCD Centre for Innovation, Technology & Organisation (CITO).

Moran-Introna Keynote Lecture 2008

This ‘from the archives’ recording is the first part of the keynote from “ Triangular Conference 2008”.

Part 2

In part two Lucas argues that Phenomenology offers deep insights into fundamental aspects of the human experience of technology and information systems, with implications for the sociology of Management and Organisation.

The talk was recorded in-person with a live audience on Thursday June the 5^th 2008 in the UCD Lochlann Quinn Undergraduate School of Business, Belfield, Dublin, Ireland.

The conference was supported by the UCD School of Business Doctoral Studies Programme and hosted by the UCD Centre for Innovation, Technology & Organisation (CITO).

CITO seminar: Investigate the frontline

This seminar is titled "Investigate the frontline: performing an affective ethnography in a theatre workshop" by Laura Lucia Parolin, University of Southern Denmark & Carmen Pellegrinelli, University of Lapland.

Laura is an ethnographer who uses the Latourian ANT approach, familiar with SCOT and HCI, Carmen is a theatre director, producer, and playwright. Their research is in the areas of materiality, affectivity and embodiment examining diverse empirical settings. They will present work-in-progress that on an affective ethnography of a theatrical laboratory organised for/by the hospital staff in Bergamo as a form of collective therapy. If you remember the hospitals in Bergamo were acutely affected during the Covid pandemic.

Organised by the UCD Centre for Innovation Technology and Organisation (CITO) - The seminar took place in-person on Tuesday, February 21st, 16.00-17.00 - in the Q026 Angela Moore Boardroom, Quinn School, University College Dublin. Introduction by Donncha Kavanagh, Professor of Information & Organisation, UCD College of Business.

Abstract

In March 2020, Bergamo was hit by the first wave of the pandemic. More than 6.000 people have died in the area, where the emergency facilities lived in a stressful situation for months. In January 2022, a group of ER doctors and nurses from the main hospital in Bergamo - the frontline in the crisis - wanted to reflect collectively on their experience with the pandemic. The group set up a one-year-long theatre workshop involving around thirty colleagues from the ER. The workshop also aimed to prepare a theatre show, "Giorni muti, notti bianche" (Silent days, sleepless nights), presented in Bergamo's main theatre. By participating in the theatre workshop, we conducted a collaborative affective ethnography to investigate the dimension of affect in ER professionals' work practices during the first wave of the pandemic. This contribution focuses on affective ethnography discussing the characteristics and potentials of this (post)qualitative research method for organisational scholars.

Laura Lucia Parolin (parolin@sdu.dk) is Associate Professor of Organizational Communication at the University of Southern Denmark. She is interested in the relationship between knowledge, body, sensitivity, affect, care, materiality, and innovation in work practices. She is currently visiting UCD, having been awarded a Carlsberg foundation grant.

Carmen Pellegrinelli (cpellegr@ulapland.fi) is finishing her PhD at Lapland University in the Faculty of Social Sciences. Her research interests are focused on creative practices, theatre and post-human philosophy. She is a professional playwright and director of theatre.

CITO Seminar: Towards a Firm for Our Time

Friday March 5th, 2021 at 14:00 GMT

JC Spender

Prof. JC Spender, Research Professor, Kozminski University, Warsaw; Visiting Scholar, Rutgers University, NJ and Visiting Scholar, Fordham University, NY

Abstract

The widely accepted understanding of the firm is deeply flawed and is a serious impediment to policy-making. Indeed there seems to have been little advance in theory since 1937, when the youthful Ronald Coase tweaked economists, charging they could not explain why firms existed, let alone how they worked. Notions of managers making decisions 'scientifically' is not only narrow, it ends up erasing their practice's essential nature and socioeconomic significance. Spender revisits the nature of the firm and argues that managing might be more helpfully understood as entrepreneurship, a value-creating activity often supported by science's facts and reasoning but never 'dominated' by them. The human condition is one of uncertainty, of not-knowing and therefore questing for knowledge; Homo Inquirentes rather than Homo Sapiens. Taking this as the starting point, Spender goes on to explore the implications for the private sector firm and for managing.

Bio

JC Spender is Research Professor at Kozminski University, Warsaw and Visiting Scholar at Rutgers University, New Jersey and Fordham University, New York. He served in RN submarines and worked with Rolls-Royce on nuclear propulsion, IBM on financial computing, and as an investment banker before earning a PhD at the Manchester Business School (UK). Retired in 2003 as Dean of the School of Business & Technology at FIT/SUNY (New York).
He has published 8 books, and over100 journal articles and book chapters. His most recent book is titled Business Strategy: Managing Uncertainty, Opportunity, and Enterprise (Oxford UP 2014) and is about managing a business's creative responses to uncertainty (‘business model innovation’). He also writes about the theory and ethics of the firm, business strategy, and the history of management education. He is Commissioning Editor for the Cambridge University Press Elements in Business Strategy. In 2014 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in economics by the Lund University School of Economics & Management. https://jcspender.com

CITO seminar: Meaningful Work and Hermeneutics

Wednesday December 9th, 2020 at 16.30 GMT

Todd Mei

Todd Mei is founder of the public philosophy and consultation organization Philosophy2u. He calls himself a `public philosopher’. It involves adapting abstract concepts and ideas from philosophy and employing them to frame new ways of understanding work as meaningful and virtuous beyond obligatory, functional or mere utilitarian views.

Abstract

Meaningful work is the idea that work holds an important role in the flourishing of societies and individuals. While there are many debates about what meaningful work is and whether we should take it seriously, this talk will focus on what I call the work-flourishing gap (WFG). Because work is a physical activity, there tends to be controversy as to how it can participate in those kinds of intellectual and imaginative activities we tend to associate with self-actualisation and flourishing. I will discuss how Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical theory of action (based on speech acts) can help dissolve the WFG by demonstrating how the activity of work bears features of linguistic meaning. This linguistic claim enables us to see work as more than just a bare physical phenomenon; it is communicative in the broad sense of being assertoric (locutionary), conventional (illocutionary), and transformative (perlocutionary). I will conclude with a reflection on some practical examples.

CITO Lecture Series - Uncommon Economies

We started 2021 with a series of lectures inspired by "Uncommon Economies".

Uncommon Economies: Successes, failures, and the circulation of values

This lecture series presents diverse perspectives on the “uncommon economies” that intersect bodies, media, and technologies. These economic realities surround us everyday but mark the exception to ordered life and are, as such, commonly absent from academic scrutiny. This event brings together scholars from across the academy to discuss a set of uncommon socio-technical phenomena, ranging from algorithms to biomedicine.
The tie that binds these diverse approaches is an implicit problematization of the circulation of values. For some of the topics, the values are negative—economic failure, antisocial behaviour, and broken technologies. Yet, the same values offer lessons for designs and architectures that, in relief, portray a truer image of humanity as one with evolving values and norms.

CITO Lecture Series - Uncommon Economies 15

Tuesday April 20th, 2021 at 3pm IST/BST (10am EST)

Diane-Laure Arjalies (Ivey Business School, Western University)

"Cryptocurrencies, Accounting and The Real Economy: The Case of Impak Coin"

What if no money could be produced—hence debt allowed—if transactions in the real economy did not match the overall financial evaluation of the latter? What if the primary role of accounting was to allow a transaction to happen, instead of recording it? Would we see a new form of capitalism arise in which the land of our desires would match the land of our lives? What would be the conditions for such change to happen? This project is a first step towards such an understanding. By analyzing the cryptocurrency impak Coin whose explicit goal is to align the production of value in the real “impact” economy, it aims to uncover the mechanisms through which such a form of valuation and production could be obtained.