WELCOME to MSR: 2015-2016
Welcome from the 2015-2016 MSR Executive Committee! We are privileged that you have tasked us with the care of the AOM Management Spirituality and Religion community, and it is our honor to work with those making MSR your home. We look forward to working with you to promote a deeper understanding of the scholarship and practice related to these areas.
The Executive works hard to build the MSR community both in numbers and in involvement. As of September 2015, our community had 656 members, representing a 10% growth over the last year. The Academy of Management is represented by over 18,000 members in over 100 countries. Many members participate in multiple divisions that reflect their preferred areas of research or related fields of interest. For this upcoming year, we invite you to join MSR and work with us to share the benefit of spiritual and religious principles when enhancing management practices in the business environment.
The theme for the 2016 conference is “Making Organizations Meaningful” and we believe that our MSR community can contribute significantly to this understanding. We are living in a time of a great shift; when people are waking up to a different possibility of being. MSR is in a position to bring the ontological, epistemological and methodological uniqueness of our scholarship to the Academy. Our scholarship has a wide stretch – from enhancing mainstream management with a MSR flavor, to significant ontological shifts in the way we are in the world. Yet, we know that the world ‘out there’ is created by our inner world, and the contemplative and wisdom traditions underpinning such of our practice offers much solace at a time of disruptive change. Hence, we embrace diverse outlooks and contributions that together may create new (enlightened) forms of organising.
We look forward to our involvement with you, and we also want to hear what you want from MSR. One of my requests to our membership is to ask, “What are the questions that are important to the MSR community?” Please feel free to pose these questions on our listserve and/or our facebook page. We hope to get some stimulating conversation from your questions that will emerge in our scholarship as we plan for Anaheim in 2016.
We know that many people want to contribute to MSR, but don’t have the time to be on the MSR Executive committee. Hence, there are a number of smaller committees that you can volunteer with:
• MSR Retreat (Stacie Chappell)
• Dissertation and Service Recognition Awards
• MSR Foundation (funding and program support)
• Research and scholarship
• Division Application Review (Mary Finney)
• Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion (JMSR): Kathryn Pavlovich
If you are interested in working with any of these committees, please don’t hesitate to contact an executive committee member to be directed to the proper point of contact.
We appreciate your input and continued support and look forward to a great year. Finally, a big thank you to the following people on the Executive Committee for their hard work over the next 12 months:
• Orneita Burton, Past Chair, 2016 Elections and technology
• Kathryn Pavlovich, MSR Chair
• Jim Stoner, Chair Elect
• Mary Finney, Program Chair
• Michael Pirson, PDW Chair
• Stacie Chappell, Communications and Newsletter Editor, Retreat Coordinator
• Eleftheria Egel, Treasurer
• Dan Harris, Secretary and archivist
Reps at large:
• Technology and website (Kay Rudsill)
• Membership/Community Building (Charlie Tackney)
• Research & Scholarship (Julie Burkey)
• International Community Liason (Richard Major)
Thank you
Warmly Kathryn