Curing the monster Some images of and considerations - Prof. Dr ...

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(1986: 6) states, in the history of SCOS there is a reversal of the ancient hero myth
in which "the hero fights a struggle against a reality which is different from what he
wants it to be... Reminding one of that fairy-tale written down by the Grimm
brothers of the young man who travelled into the world in order to learn what horror
was, at the beginning of SCOS some young and daring scholars went into
academia not to fight the dragon, but to find him. Researching the dragon they
enacted a revaluing of values (an 'Umwertung aller Werte' - a paradigm change),
because they tried to use the treasure of rationality, of choice, of consciousness as
an instrument for finding the dragon. On the road to the dragon-country, the
promised land of life and understanding, we made some friends and met quite a
few fellow-travellers .... One interpretation of the ways of SCOS is that of a
religious quest, in search of the truth of organization life".
"It is generally assumed", as P. O. Berg (1984: 4), the first chairman, put it, "that
SCOS was created in the bar of Strathclyde Business School, the last evening of
the EGOS 1981 Colloquium" in Glasgow. As a matter of fact, it was only a small
group expressing their common interest in 'organizational symbolism', using it
somehow as a container for a possible broader methodological and
interdisciplinary variety of organizational research. When after two smaller
conferences in Exeter and Groningen the First International Conference was set up
at Lund University in 1984 already more than 200 people from a whole variety of
countries attended. Despite its increasing membership SCOS has succeeded in
remaining a network in its true sense over the years; it only has a very minimal
organizational infrastructure and is primarily carried by its members' initiatives; it
emphasizes "the importance of personal interactions in an open and nonevaluative
atmosphere" (Nauta 1984: 7). Quite unusual or even superfluous for normal
scientific associations, in SCOS "the shared attitudes of support and tolerance ...
have left room for the individual, the spontaneous and the unpredictable
performance" (Kreiner 1987: 17).
2. Draconology or the science of dragons: Some facts and figures