The idea of a Conference comes from the work carried out in the last year by the Associazione IL NODO group research team on envy in society. With this project we aim to explore how envy develops and manifests itself in organisational and work contexts. We believe that, although in these contexts envy is mostly unsaid if not denied (or perhaps because of this very fact), the costs it imposes on people and organisations cannot be overlooked.

Starting from an understanding of the economic contributions that have focused on envy, through an integration with what other disciplines – philosophy, social psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, political economy – have to offer in this respect, we want to highlight and possibly measure the human and economic costs that envy in the workplace imposes on individuals and teams, and how it affects the atmosphere and the destiny of the organisation itself. As some experiments on the attribution of compensations, the hypotheses of the so called "neuro-economy", and numerous aspects of the recent bubbles in the financial markets seem to prove, powerful and scarcely controllable emotions, such as envy, hold hostage of the supposed rationality of economic and organisational behaviours, leading to scenarios where probably there is not any winner while everybody has something to lose.

We wish to contribute to promoting a reflective process and a "cultural change" around workplace envy, a topic which is hardly discussed or, when it happens, it is tackled in a cursory, biased or moralistic way. In this sense, we aim to reach the following goals:

• To reconsider the attitudes of denial or the lack of recognition of envy that obstruct the perception of this feeling.
• To decrease the overestimation of positive, evolutive aspects of envy, those concerning emulation which are the only ones that are recognized in a way that obscures the negative aspects.
• To draw the attention to the destructive sides of envy and the severe damages they can cause for the organisation and its members.
• To find envy indicators and tools to detect it, in view of its potential quantification in economical-financial terms also.

The Conference would like to gather and open a dialogue between people and institutions that have been exploring about these themes and at the same time to open up a forum for a discussion with an audience of people interested in improving the working life of individuals and the functioning of organisations.

Planned dates : September 22^nd – 24^th , 2011

Where: Turin

Keynote speakers:

• Yochi Cohen-Charash - Baruch College, N.Y., USA
• Michelle Duffy – University of Minnesota, USA
• Bob Hinshelwood – Essex University, Colchester UK
• Mark Stein – University of Leicester, UK
• Bénedicte Vidaillet – Université de Lille FR
• Daniel, J. Zizzo – University of East Anglia, UK

The Conference will take place in two parts:

1. A half-a-day Workshop (Thursday a.m. from 9.00 to 13.00) open to a selected audience (for example, HR managers, economists, industrial psychologists, consultants), with the presence only of the invited speakers or some of them and a more interactive approach based on seminar work in small groups, starting from the focus topics presented by the speakers or on cases brought by the participants.
2. An international Symposium of one and a half days (from 15.00 on Thursday to 17,30 on Friday) for a wider audience, centred on the papers delivered by the keynote speakers, with some room for other presenters, and the contribution of the Il Nodo group Research team on envy. Besides the papers, parallel panels and poster presentations are planned.

The official languages of the Conference are English and Italian, with simultaneous translation and the project of publishing the Conference Proceedings.