Colleagues, this Call will appear on the JMSR site shortly, but I
thought you might want a sneak peek to get started on your papers.
Please also let me know if you are interested in serving as a reviewer.
Eric
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Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion
Call for Papers for a Special Issue
“A Tribute to the Work of Jerry Harvey, an MSR pioneer”
Guest Editor
Eric B. Dent, Ph.D.
Dr. Jerry B. Harvey (1935-2015) taught a course, “The Ethical, Moral,
and Spiritual Issues of Management” in the MBA program at The George
Washington University possibly as early as the 1980s. In the 1970s, he
published articles such as “Organization Development as a Religious
Movement” (Harvey, 1973). Before the MSR special interest group was
established in the Academy of Management, Harvey was considering deeply
the spiritual and religious aspects of managerial and organizational work.
Harvey was graduated with his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the
University of Texas. He was employed by the National Training
Laboratories for a few years where he learned at the feet of Chris
Argyris, Warren Bennis, Dick Beckhard, Rensis Likert, Douglas MacGregor,
Ron Lippitt, and other OB founders. He finished his career with more
than 40 years of service on the faculty of The George Washington
University School of Business. He is, perhaps, best known for
identifying the “Abilene Paradox.” A movie by this title is CRM
Learning’s all-time best-selling training video program and has been
shown by countless classrooms and corporate settings throughout the
world. Since there was no critical mass of MSR scholars during the most
active years of his career, Harvey developed his own definitions and
emphases in the field.
For example, although most MSR articles privilege spirituality over
religion (Dent, 2014), the CEOs Harvey consulted with “sure as hell do
not talk about ‘work spirit,’ ‘Spirit,’ ‘organizational transformation,’
‘Open Space,’ energy sources,’ and ‘organization as community’. They use
‘God,’ ‘Allah,’ ‘religion,’ ‘prayer,’ ‘church,’ ‘worship,’ ‘Jesus,’ and
‘Budda’” (Harvey, 2001, p. 377). Harvey’s article is cleverly entitled,
“Reflections on Books by Authors who Apparently are Terrified about
Really Exploring Spirituality and Leadership.”
Harvey was also convinced that prayer facilitates the development and
maintenance of learning organizations (Harvey, 1999, p. 87). He argued
that “members of all organizations, including families, churches,
businesses, academic institutions, governmental agencies, and voluntary
associations, must engage in prayer, particularly if they want to
innovate and grow. (p. 88). What Harvey meant by prayer wouldn’t involve
eyes closed and palms touched together. He defined a “prayer of
communication” (p. 93) as “engaging in caring, concerned, truth-seeking
communication, suffused with a spirit of ineffable transcendence” (p.
92). These prayers happen between and among two or more people and are
often more powerful than, and interrupted by “prayers to the deity” (p. 98).
Although Harvey was a religious person, he was not at all solemn, and
tended toward the irreverent more than the reverent. In Harvey’s first
two books he refers to a conversation with his daughter in which she
asks, “What if God is a mouse?” Harvey was not a high-church Christian,
to say the least. He would even comment about farting in church (“On
Tooting Your Own Horn or Social Intervention as the Process of Releasing
Flatus in the Confines of Religious Institutions,” 1999)! But, Harvey
took matters of faith quite seriously, in addition to quite
light-heartedly.
For Harvey, honesty is also a form of spirituality. The solution to the
Abilene Paradox (1974), for example, is for people to be honest with
each other. The role of honesty plays a spiritual and critical role
throughout Harvey’s corpus from “Eichmann in the Corporate Boardroom”
(1988) to “Musings about the elephant in the parlor: Or “who the devil
is Elliott Jaques?” (1992).
A final point to make in this introduction is that Harvey also modelled
what he wrote about. After a friend challenged, “Why don’t you admit
that your essays are sermons, call them that, and go on from there?”
(Harvey, 1988, p. 4), Harvey embraced his role as a storyteller and
preacher. As a professor, Harvey “professed.” He was famous for
not*teaching (Harvey, 1999). He told stories about the luminaries in the
field of OB gathering around a piano after “work” and lustily singing
spirituals (Harvey, 2011). He told stories about Phrog Farms (Harvey,
1977). He was brutally honest in his evaluation of student work and in
what he was willing, or not willing, to do for corporate clients. In
short, he was a personality, accented with a distinctive Texas dress and
drawl.
For this special issue we solicit articles about any aspect of Harvey’s
life and work including, but not limited to, the following research
questions and topics:
- What do we know about the role of prayer in management and organizations?
- What practical manifestations do religious and spiritual behavior take
at work? Can they be irreverent or are they mostly solemn?
- What is the role of honesty in organizational practice? Has society
placed a privilege on “spinning,” posturing, political correctness, or
other dynamics that interfere with honesty?
- What, if any, is the relationship between honesty and spirituality?
- What has Jerry Harvey’s life and work meant to your own life and work?
How has his legacy been carried forth? What have been specific
applications of his work for pedagogy and research?
- What connections to spirituality and/or religion are there with
Harvey’s work on a range of other topics such as “Encouraging Cheating”
(1984), “Not*Teaching” (1979), the Abilene Paradox (1974) and the
development of the field of Organizational Behavior as a
secular-spiritual endeavor (2011)?
-
Submission Instructions
Authors are requested to submit a full manuscript for double-blind
review via JMSR’s Manuscript Central link
(http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rmsr) by 1 September 2016. Please
consult and follow the JMSR guidelines for authors:
http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=rmsr20&page=instructions#.Uss_UdIW3lc
For feedback on whether or not a paper might be suitable for this
special issue, please send an abstract to
dr.eric.dent@gmail.com
Target Dates (subject to change)
• 1 September 2016: Deadline for submission of manuscripts
• 1 November 2016: Guest editor invites authors to revise and resubmit
manuscripts
• 1 February 2017: Deadline for submission of revised manuscripts
• 1 April 2017: Guest editor notifies authors of final status (authors
of accepted manuscripts informed of next steps for publication)
• 1 August 2017: Special issue available in print
- References
-
Dent, E. B. (2014). Is it enough to be spiritual? MSR 2.0. Leadership
and Organizational Management Journal. 2014(3), 139-154.
Harvey, J. B. (1973, Winter). Organization development as a religious
movement. OD Practitioner, 3, 4-5.
Harvey, J. B. (1974). The Abilene Paradox: The management of agreement.
Organizational Dynamics, 3(1), 63-80.
Harvey, J. B. (1977). Organizations as phrog farms. Organizational
Dynamics, 5, 15-23.
Harvey, J. B. (1979). Learning to not teach. Journal of Management
Education, 4(2), 19. doi:10.1177/105256297900400205
Harvey, J. B. (1984). Encouraging students to cheat: One thought on the
difference between teaching ethics and teaching ethically. Journal of
Management Education, 9(2), 1-13.
Harvey, J. B. (1988). The Abilene Paradox and other meditations on
management. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.
Harvey, J. B. (1992). Musings about the elephant in the parlor: Or “who
the devil is Elliott Jaques?” in S. Chang (Ed.), Feschrift for Elliott
Jaques. Arlington, VA: Cason Hall.
Harvey, J. B. (1999). How come every time I get stabbed in the back my
fingerprints are on the knife? And other meditations on management. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Harvey, J. B. (2001). Reflections on books by authors who apparently are
terrified about really exploring spirituality and leadership. Leadership
Quarterly, 12(3), 377-378.
Harvey, J. B. (2011). Swatting flies and telling lies: Stories of a mad
consultant. Baltimore: Otter Bay Books.