Showing papers in "Culture and Organization in 2019"

New ways of working (NWW): work space and cultural change in virtualizing organizations

Abstract: This study offers a grounded theory of ‘new ways of working’ (NWW), an organizational design concept of Dutch origin with a global relevance. NWW concern business solutions for flexible workspaces ...

Dialogical writing: Co-inquiring between the written and the spoken word

Abstract: The foundational view of discourse as a descriptive mode of representation and writing as a retrospective stabilizing tool has been criticized in organization and management research. The purpose of this paper is to inquire into a more emergent, unfinished, and relational writing used throughout the research processes. To that aim, I develop the notion of ‘dialogical writing’ by drawing on the literature on performative utterances and a collaborative fieldwork project where writing became an integrated part of the research process. I come to understand this form of writing as one in situ where addressivity, responsiveness, and unfinalizability are emphasized. This enables writing to be part of a conversation; writing as a response to that which has been said and in anticipation of the next possible utterance. I close with implications for writing in organization studies, such as the possibility of thinking of writing as an offering of the tentative.

When is a bed not a bed? Exploring the interplay of the material and virtual in negotiating home-work boundaries

Abstract: Working from home is often associated with possibilities of anytime-anyplace working and with a fusion of work and home. In this empirical paper, we explore how the sociomaterial contexts of home-w...

Contextualizing Arab female entrepreneurship in the United Arab Emirates

Abstract: Cultural and structural challenges within the Arab context are found to constrain women’s opportunities towards entrepreneurial development and activity. In addressing the call for feminist...

Hidden in full view: the organization of public secrecy in Miéville’s The City and the City

Abstract: In this article, we explore China Mieville’s novel The City and the City as a literary experiment for analyzing the dynamics of public secrecy. We explore public secrets as an intrinsic part of org...

Filling the ‘empty space’: Site-specific dance in a techno club

Abstract: While organisational space has received broad scholarly attention, movement in organisational spaces remains under-researched. This paper introduces the notion of site-specific dance from dance theory to consider the dynamic relationship between space and people, emphasising that movements are a response to a space, its materiality and context. Berghain, in Berlin and one of the world’s most famous techno clubs, is discussed as a case. An interdisciplinary analysis shows how a site-specific performance is created through the interplay of the architecture, the sound and the music organised by the DJ, and the dancing crowd. Methodologically, the dance and performance studies approach develops suggestions for how to analyse movement interaction in organisational space. Reference to dance theory broadens our understanding of how organisational spaces and human interaction enable, produce and negotiate experiences that are transitory, embodied and difficult to pin down.

In the Flesh: A Poetic Inquiry into how Fat Female Employees Manage Weight Related Stigma

Abstract: This paper engages with the question of how fat female employees manage weight-related stigma at work. We use poetic inquiry to show the reader how it feels for our participants to be stigmatized b...

Learning empathy through literature

Abstract: In the field of organization studies, little consideration has thus far been devoted to the study of literature. The lacuna in the extant scholarship is unfortunate insofar as there is much to be gained for researchers interested in understanding organization to critically engage with literature. As an illustrative example of how literature can inform myriad pertinent discourses in organization studies, in this piece we study the question of empathy. That is, we describe just some of what may be gleaned about empathy from literature using anecdotes from a pedagogical exercise. Finally, we close this piece with a brief overview of the articles selected for this special issue.

‘Would you prefer not to?’ Resetting/resistance across literature, culture, and organizations

Abstract: In this paper we put the concepts of reset, aprosdoketon and minor gesture to work in the context of organizational narratives. In particular we engage with two iconic characters of the genre of or...

The cloud factory: Making things and making a living with desktop 3D printing

Abstract: This paper presents a case study of an open-source 3D printer called ‘Rep-rap’. 3D printing derives from computer numerical control machinery, a technology first introduced against a background of industrial conflict. This historical fact reactualises labour process theory as a theoretical resource. However, the hobbyists in the Rep-rap project are located ‘outside’ the typical setting studied in labour process theory, that is, the workplace. The case study is, therefore, suitable for examining the limits of labour process theory. Its key tenet regarding structured antagonism between labour and capital is put to the test when the ‘point of production’ is located in a community and ‘labour’ consists in non-remunerated contributions by hobbyists (i.e. non-employees). Drawing on theories of the social factory and free labour in the cultural sector, the article argues that this is changing as hobbyists, fans, makers, etc., are put to work by start-up firms and venture capital in the so-called “sharing...

Manipulating surface and producing ‘effortless’ elegance – analysing the social organization of glamour

Abstract: This article explores the social organization of glamour in a specific affective economy. Glamour, a phenomenon often viewed as frivolous and feminine, has been relatively under-explored wi...

Professional blinders? The novel as an eye-opener in organizational analysis

Abstract: Scholarly textbooks often follow a logic where suitable empirical cases are selected to illustrate the theoretical and analytical points that we as scholars want to make. But what would happen if we would do the opposite: build a textbook on a novel written by a novelist for such purpose and let the theories explain the actions and emotions of fictional characters? In this article, we share and reflect upon our experiences of co-authoring a textbook in organization theory together with a professional novelist. We argue that the novel can function as an eye-opener in organizational analysis, forcing us to look beyond more static and rationalistic perspectives on organizations as well as the stereotypes of such. We build and relate our experiences to the growing literature about using fiction in scholarly work and discuss the potential of such genre-bending work when we bring in flesh and blood into the analyses.

I am not that Caitlin: a critique of both the transphobic media reaction to Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover shoot and of passing

Abstract: In this article I discuss and critique transphobic media reactions to the celebrity Caitlyn Jenner’s 2015 Vanity Fair cover shoot. I then consider these in the light of Garfinkel, H. [1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall] concept of ‘passing’ in his celebrated case story of Agnes and argue that ‘passing’ is often conflated with ‘being out’. I argue that the two are significantly different and claim that the former is implicitly based on a public lie. I use several auto-ethnographic narratives to illustrate the argument.

Death and the Penguin: modularity, alienation and organising

Abstract: The originality of this paper lies in the ways in which it explores how the depiction of organised crime within Andrey Kurkov’s novel Death and the Penguin can inform our understanding of organisational modularity. This non-orthodox approach might open up new avenues of thought in the study of organisational modularity while further illustrating how novelistic worlds can inform accounts of organisational realities. Two main research questions underlie the paper. How can Andrey Kurkov’s novel further our understanding of the complexity of organisational worlds and realities by focusing our attention on different landscapes of organising? How does Kurkov’s novel help us grasp the concept of modularity by drawing attention to new forms of modular organisation? Drawing from our reading of Kurkov’s novel, we primarily explore organisational modularity through Kurkov’s depiction of organised crime and consider the themes of alienation and isolation in the context of modular organising.

Innovation-by-numbers: an autoethnography of innovation as violence

Abstract: This article offers an account of a university exercise in ‘innovation’ to illustrate how innovation discourses and processes can be a vehicle for violence in organisations. Presented as two narratives of the same event told from different perspectives, our stories of a curriculum redesign workshop explore the ways innovation became a form of symbolic capital that prompted struggles of control and compliance among individual staff. Schemes of managerial dominance were then in turn individuated, while the assault of innovation became institutionalised and ultimately shielded from critical interrogation. In presenting these accounts, we seek to challenge the rising dominance of innovation as something vital to economic growth and social needs, highlighting instead how its romanticisation is highly problematic.

‘Blowing up the pylon’: the limitations to Lacanism in organization studies, seen from the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari

Abstract: We critically engage with the Lacanian notions of fantasy and lack through an understanding of desire as ontologically productive. The introduction of the Lacanian psychoanalytic notions of fantasy and lack into organizational studies has helped to widen the understanding of the mechanism that makes employees desire the idealized images of identity provided by the organizations for which they work. Our claim is that Deleuze’s and Guattari’s conception of desire as productive contributes to the understanding of the role that desire plays in producing and organizing the social setting in which such fantasies and a sense of lack emerge in the first place. Furthermore, we argue that Deleuze and Guattari can help point to the inherent danger of Lacanism’s blunting its own analytical and critical potential when trying to understand such social settings.

Juggling resistance and compliance: The case of Israeli ultra-orthodox media

Abstract: In an attempt to examine how resistant discourses are constructed in a highly conservative society, this article presents four discursive forms of resistance used by an Israeli ultra-orthodox Jewish magazine juggling between compliance and resistance in its attempt to subvert hegemonic rabbinical authority. These resistance forms are: cushioning, discursive hybrids, explicit provocation and trivializing. Based on a qualitative content analysis of 229 articles published in the weekly magazine Mishpacha (Family), the study seeks to contribute to the existing literature on resistance in and around organizations by exposing the complex and heterogeneous nature of discursive resistance in authoritarian-religious environments. Furthermore, the paper offers a glimpse into the ways that a social group within a religious society resists authority though without shattering its ideological basis.

From bodies as ‘meat’ to bodies as ‘flesh’: the expression of performance management as ‘sacrificial acts’ within professional rugby

Abstract: In this article, we argue that to extend the research on performance management we need to examine further how organisational members interweave the technology of such management into their work. Using Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, we question the notion that technology acts on bodies in a linear manner as ‘meat’ to be manipulated. His reversible ontology suggests that these materials can be woven into the flesh of organising in a multitude of ways. Specifically, we refer to professional rugby, and the manner in which its players utilise the technology of performance management, to forge a localised expression of sacrifice. We suggest that this expression provides a means for players to define and evaluate themselves against ‘good rugby’. As forms of evaluation may vary in organisations, we recommend that researchers do not solely associate performance management with metrics but also look to other, more localised, expressions to inform their work.

Augustus Melmotte In Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now: Characterizing the swindler as an important cultural and organizational figure

Abstract: The current paper revisits Anthony Trollope's Victorian novel, The Way We Live Now, focusing on the main character of Augustus Melmotte. The paper analyzes the novel and its literary figure of a co...

Cutting my dick off

Abstract: This essay considers how transgender and non-conforming people and their bodies are medically organised in society by surgery. The surgical normalisation of these bodies is not however enough for some in society. ‘Once a man, always a man’ claim those who oppose and abuse TGNC people and the UK daily press, radio and TV routinely encourage and facilitate this abuse. This essay focuses on themes of genitalia, tattoos, self-harm, self-mutilation and auto-castration to understand how and why society and medical practices seem to be obsessed with normalising bodies. It does so in relation to one body, that of a non-binary individual. That body is my own and it is my hope that this essay will open up and add to literature on trans folk in organisational discourse whilst also introducing the issues of gender dysphoria and ‘self-mutilation’ as themes for further organisational research and debate.

‘Spirits, dancing in the flesh’: choreography and organisation

Abstract: The body in organisations has received considerable scholarly attention, whilst the moving body and the ‘flesh’ has largely been overlooked. ‘Flesh’ for Merleau-Ponty connects the body and ...

One-dimensional times: a dialectical response to the Irish Times’ coverage of the global financial crisis

Abstract: A growing literature claims that critique of neoliberal capitalism after the global financial crisis (GFC) has been ‘captured’ within the logic of capital. Such research argues that ‘capture’ is achieved through a process whereby critique of neoliberalism is transformed into arguments for more neoliberalism. This creates a one-dimensional ‘recovery’ discourse. Drawing on Marcuse’s theory outlining ‘one-dimensional society’ and critical discourse analysis, this study assesses the relevancy of such claims for an Irish medium, the Irish Times, through an examination of GFC-related discourse during 2009–2010. This study finds that economic discourse in the Irish Times is captured when organisational bias allows pro-neoliberal actors from business and government privileged access to discourse production. We engage a call from organisation studies for a dialectical reading of captured discourse. We end with a discussion of the limits of this reflexive approach to capitalism’s contradictions for disrupti...

This Sporting Life: the antithetical novel's revelation of the organization and work of sport

Abstract: The novel This Sporting Life by David Storey is used in this article as fictive, ethnographic data to explore the relationship between sports work, industrial organization, identity, and the management of the body. Drawing upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu on sport, and rugby specifically, and the relationship between sport, the body, class and rationalization this paper argues that David Storey provides a vivid, if pessimistic, fictional, and semi-autobiographical account of the ways in which sports, and sports work specifically, is driven by management discourses of rationality and control. We examine how this functions as class exploitation where labour is embodied and expended as a form of bodily capital. Lastly we offer a critique of the precarious social mobility that sports work promises. Through Storey’s Rugby League playing fictional anti-hero–Art Machin–we explore the central struggle between social structures and individual agency.

Volunteers as monstrous workers: ‘monsters’ in UK live-action roleplay game organizations

Abstract: This paper examines volunteers as workers in the leisure activity of festival-scale UK live-action roleplaying. The descriptive term ‘monsters’ is native within the field, referring to volunteer ro...

Carne – flesh and organization

Abstract: This special issue emerges from the 35th Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism which we co-organized and which was held at the Faculty of Economics, Management Department, Universita’ degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza in Rome in July 2017. The conference and the issue alike were inspired by the longstanding use of the notion of flesh in academic investigations of the more or less porous boundaries between the self, others and the world around us. Flesh, these works suggest, is both ontologically slippery and definitionally elusive. For Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962), flesh reconnects the viewing and the visible, the touching and the touched, the body and the world. Perception itself is a fleshly – auditory, visual, gustatory, haptic, olfactory – activity. Moreover, as Antonio Strati (2007) points out in his discussion of the connections between practice-based learning and ‘sensible knowledge’ in organizations, when we perceive others, we always perceive them as fundamentally corporeal. Equally, the world acts upon our flesh, so that what or whom we touch, see, smell, taste and hear may also touch, see, smell, taste and hear us. Elsewhere, Michel Foucault locates modern western scientia sexualis as having its origins in the earliest years of Christianity and its confessional regime which seeks to unearth ‘the important secrets of the flesh’ (1977, 154) as the deepest truths of the human subject. In this reading, flesh is the natural body, always and irrevocably bound to sin and to death. Cherríe Moraga (2015, 19), on the other hand, identifies a theory in the flesh as ‘one where the physical realities of our lives – our skin colour, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings – all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity’. In a very different feminist analysis, Judith Butler (1990, 96, 33) defines gender as the ‘styles of the flesh’ which ‘congeal over time’; whereas Vicki Kirby (1997) takes her and other feminist poststructuralists to task in Telling Flesh for their overstatement of the cultural inscription of the body. Kirby argues that ‘once you are seriously displacing the nature/language opposition, you have to be arguing that nature, far from being written on, and insofar as it cannot be said to “lack language”, “must be articulate”’ (page 90). Elspeth Probyn (2001), on the other hand, provides a dazzling array of ways to understand skin both materially, metonymically and metaphorically – it protects and is vulnerable, it can be bruised and breached, it is porous, it expands and retracts, it devours and is devoured, it has colour, texture and sensation. Organization studies scholars have, nonetheless, perhaps been somewhat neglectful of flesh in our various endeavours. Whilst for the last three decades or so we have paid a great deal of attention to the body (e.g. Wolkowitz 2006; Bell and King 2010; Fotaki, Metcalfe, and Harding 2014; Moore 2017), we have largely overlooked flesh. This backdrop was our metaphorical gauntlet, thrown down to encourage submissions addressing the connections between flesh and organization. We were very lucky to attract a high number of extremely interesting submissions to the issue, which we then had to work to whittle down to the four which appear here. Interestingly, although not atypically for conference special issues in this journal, only one of these was presented at the conference itself. All four are empirical and two make detailed use of Merleau-Ponty. Two use variants of ethnography and the other two artsbased methods. However, beyond that the papers are extremely diverse in their subject matter – professional sport, people who identify as transgender and gender non-conforming, hotel work and fat workers.

Jamming the jamming: Brazilian protests as an illustration of a new politics of consumption

Abstract: Based on a reflexive and critical analysis of the citizen protests that pervaded Brazilian cities in June 2013, in this article we argue that a significant part of the demonstrators’ dissatisfactio...

LGBT+ Perspectives: the University of Essex reader

Abstract: The edited book by Ilaria Boncori (University of Essex) gathers together a collection of subject narratives on gender and equality issues in organizations. The book addresses forms of gender inequa...

Wildfire forecasting: between criminal act and unintentional events

Abstract: Forecasting represents the new credo in the reorganization of risks prevention. What does the introduction of such technology mean in terms of fire-fighting practice and policy? By applying Practice-Based Studies, forecasting practice emerges as a form of practical knowledge resulting from the alignment of the forecasting tool with foresters’ former competences, expertise, practices and tools. The acknowledgement of practical and scientific knowledge linked to forecasting allows the identification of the different organizational cultures linked to fire-fighting. For foresters wildfire is mainly a criminal act and forecasting a policing activity. This use of the artefact silences alternative approaches to wildfire-fighting such as the prevention of unintentional acts. While forecasting technology may reproduce forms of blindness in the future, anticipation becomes then an interesting research objet, embedded in dominant professional cultures and forms of knowledge.