Will You Still Need Me … When I'm 64?1 The Future of CMS

I became involved with CMS in 1998 at the fi rst CMS Academy Workshop in San Diego, and through the First International Critical Management Studies Conference in Manchester in 1999. Living in the US, I was fi nding it diffi cult to survive in a normalized academic world where my work didn’t fi t the norm. The crowning moment was when, as an adjunct, I was told I wouldn’t get a tenure-track position because I wasn’t doing the ‘right’ work, with the ‘right’ people, publishing in the ‘right’ journals and, in addition, my work was ‘too innovative’. I thought the latter was a joke—it wasn’t. During that time, it was the CMS community, along with a small group of women ethnographers, who frankly kept me sane, intellectually alive and engaged in the work I really wanted to do. Fortunately, the last four years have been in more supportive institutions, but this earlier experience leads to my particular interest in ensuring the CMS community is alive and kicking to celebrate its 64th birthday. How might we get there?