‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/201/4359/899.2.full.pdf

Phenomenology of perception.

The four Visegrad states — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia (until 1993 Czechoslovakia) and Hungary — form a compact area between Germany and Austria in the west and the states of the former USSR in the east. They are bounded by the Baltic in the north and the Danube river in the south. They are cut by the Sudeten and Carpathian mountain ranges, which divide Poland off from the other states. Poland is an extension of the North European plain and like the latter is drained by rivers that flow from south to north west — the Oder, the Vlatava and the Elbe, the Vistula and the Bug. The Danube is the great exception, flowing from its source eastward, turning through two 90-degree turns to end up in the Black Sea, forming the barrier and often the political frontier between central Europe and the Balkans. Hungary to the east of the Danube is also an open plain. The region is historically and culturally part of western Europe, but its eastern Marches now represents a vital strategic zone between Germany and the core of the European Union to the west and the Russian zone to the east.

Economy and Society

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

basic research and clinical data in an attempt to derive a cohesive model which explains the behavioral effects of the drug. Johnson is an experimental psychologist, and his work underlies many of the chapters which suggest that lithium decreases the behavioral response to novel external stimuli. He then utilizes this foundation to propose a cognitive model for lithium's anti-manic action, its inhibition of violent impulsivity, and its prophylactic effects in recurrent depression. Previous formulations which were clinically based, such as that of Mabel Blake Cohen and her associates, stressed the primacy of depression and noted the \"manic defense\" as an attempt to ward off intolerable depression. In direct contrast, Johnson views mania as the primary disturbance in bipolar disorder. He considers depression in bipolar disease as an over-zealous homeostatic inhibitory responsf to a maniaassociated cognitive overload. Consistent with this, he believes, lit lum exerts its anti-manic effect by decreasing cognitive processing in a manner analogous to his animal studies. Johnson also suggests that lithium exerts its prophylactic effect in recurrent depressions by treating subclinical mania. These concepts are supported by the work of Johnson's associate, Kukopulos, to whom the book is dedicated. The bulk of the research which describes the cognitive disturbance in mania is complex, however, and uncomfortably open to multiple interpretations. Recognized as a preliminary effort, Johnson's formulation may help to guide further research. Although Johnson clearly traces lithium actions through a broad range of subjects, his discussion of the neurophysiological aspects of this drug is notably spotty. In particular, Johnson ignores the work of Svensson, DeMontigny, Aghajanian, and others who suggest that serotonergic systems may play an important role in the antidepressant actions of lithium. As a result, he fails to discuss one of the most important current uses of lithium: as an agent used in conjunction with antidepressant medications to increase treatment response in medication-resistant forms of depression. Lithium augmentation of antidepressant medication also challenges the formulation presented by Johnson. This formulation suggests that lithium should have no therapeutic value in patients, such as those with endogenous depression, who already \"under-process\" cognitive information. The omission of lithium augmentation in depression is clearly unfortunate in this text. Overall, this volume demonstrates the benefits of a single-authored text. It it clearly organized and readable. The bibliography is also broad and useful. In this book, Johnson primarily addresses a research audience, and his model seems designed to stimulate thought rather than to improve clinical technique. In this capacity, his book will be of most interest to behavioral psychologists. Other books, focusing purely on clinical data, may be more useful to clinicians. Nevertheless, the clear organization, the large bibliography, and the thoughtful presentation may make this text a useful addition to a clinical library as well.

The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.

The purpose of this article is to explore the relevance of ‘materiality’ to understanding changing modes of control in organizational life. In doing this, materiality is not placed in a dualistic relationship with social relations. Rather a conceptualization of ‘social materiality’ is developed whereby social processes and structures and material processes and structures are seen as mutually enacting. In developing this concept of social materiality, I have drawn upon insights from three areas of social theory. These are studies of material culture, Lefebvre’s work on the ‘social production of space’, and sociological and phenomenological approaches to embodiment. The final section of the article explores how control and materiality are linked through spatial politics in one organizational case.

Building a Social Materiality: Spatial and Embodied Politics in Organizational Control

Acknowledgements Preface The Spaces of Organisation and the Organisation of Space PART I: THE SPACE OF ORGANISATION Building Organisation: Securing and Obscuring Power Building People: Identities and Organised Spaces PART II: THE ORGANISATION OF SPACE A Political Economy of Organised Space Boundary Crossings: Reproducing Organised Space PART III: CHANGING SPACES, CHANGING ORGANISATION Building a Social Materiality: Spatial and Embodied Politics in Organisation Alternative Spaces of Organisation? Conclusions: Disorganising Space Bibliography Index

The Spaces of Organisation and the Organisation of Space: Power, Identity and Materiality at Work

Introduction: Body Politics The Body and Organisation Studies Written on the Body: Social Theory and the Body Bodily Knowledge: An Approach to Embodied Subjectivity The Scalpel: An Introduction to the Anatomising Urge Under the Knife: Anatomising Organisation Theory The Mirror Replicating Organisation Conclusions

Anatomising Embodiment and Organisation Theory

In this article, we are concerned with the ethical implications of the entanglement of embodiment and non-human materialities. We argue for an approach to embodiment which recognises its inextricable relationship with multiple materialities. From this, three ethical points are made: first, we argue for an ethical relation to ‘things’ not simply as inanimate objects but as the neglected Others of humanity’s (social and material) world. Second, there is a need to recognise different particularities within these entanglements. We draw on the work of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas to think through how the radical alterity of these Others can be acknowledged, whilst also recognising our intercorporeal intertwining with them. Third, we argue that recognition of this interconnectedness and entanglement is a necessary ethical and political position from which the drawing of boundaries and creation of separations that are inherent in social organising can be understood and which contribute to the denigration, discrimination and dismissal of particular forms of embodiment, including those of non-human Others. In order to explore the ethical implications of these entanglements, we draw upon fieldwork in a large UK-based not-for-profit organisation which seeks to provide support for disabled people through a diverse range of services. Examining entanglements in relation to the disabled body makes visible and problematises the multiple differences of embodiments and their various interrelationships with materiality.

Ethics and entangled embodiment: : Bodies–materialities–organization

‘Organizational wellness’ has become a high profile issue for businesses. We argue that a ‘wellness movement’ has sprung up around a particular coalescence of economic, ideological and organizational interests. In this article we re-read the discourse of this ‘movement’ through the lens of ‘organized embodiment’. We argue that organizational wellness operates as a rhetorical device which masks contradictory power relations. It serves to hide differential occupational effects and opportunities for workers, and obscures the relationship between wellness and its necessary Other, unwellness. The article suggests that employee unwellness is often produced—and required—by the different forms of organized embodiment that arise directly from occupations and employment. It analyses this corporeal ‘occupation’ in terms of the extortion, exchange and embrace of our bodies to the coercive, calculative and normative power of the organization. Thus, our organizational experiences produce an embodied individual who is ‘fit’ for purpose in a rather more circumscribed fashion than prevailing discourses of wellness might suggest.

Karen Dale

Papers

Building a Social Materiality: Spatial and Embodied Politics in Organizational Control

The Spaces of Organisation and the Organisation of Space: Power, Identity and Materiality at Work

Anatomising Embodiment and Organisation Theory

Ethics and entangled embodiment: : Bodies–materialities–organization

Being occupied: : An embodied re-reading of organizational wellness