The theme for SCOS 2024 is ‘Electricity’, the conference will take place at Newcastle University Business School.

A history of power and innovation, including the invention of the incandescent lightbulb and the harnessing of hydroelectricity, inspires and provides the symbolic focus on electricity for our conference in the beautiful host city of Newcastle upon Tyne.

The theme offers explorations of the implications of electricity for the way we understand and organise management, work, organisations, society and our interaction with our natural and anthropogenic world. This may include examining and critiquing the idea of electricity as a form of power, as a form of control, as a form of communication, and as a form of transformation. Energy can be conceptualised both as generative, a stimulus, and destructive, an annihilator. Such explorations and provocations seem ever more relevant at this moment in our existence with the recent explosion of AI which is more sophisticated and capable of performing a wide range of tasks that were once considered exclusive to human intelligence.