Showing papers in "Organization in 2015"
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined how complementary capacities of production and consumption actors generated coalitional power and contributed to creating the Accord for Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, making it binding and convincing more than 180 brand name companies to sign up.
Abstract: Global labour governance has typically been approached from either industrial relations scholars focusing on the role of organised labour or social movement scholars focusing on the role of social movement organisations in mobilising consumption power. Yet, little work has focused on the interaction of the two. Using an exploratory case study of the governance response to the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster, this article examines how complementary capacities of production- and consumption-based actors generated coalitional power and contributed to creating the ‘Accord for Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh’, making it binding and convincing more than 180 brandname companies to sign up. The research has implications for understanding how the interface between production and consumption actors may provide leverage to improve labour standards in global supply chains.
173 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the complex work of human actors and technologies that goes into producing that which appears to us as "transparent" is analyzed, drawing on studies of governance and surveillance.
Abstract: This article analyses the complex work of human actors and technologies that goes into producing that which appears to us as ‘transparent’. Drawing on studies of governance and surveillance, afford...
161 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the limits of dominant approaches lie in their privileging of rationality, penchant for codification, tendency to self-congratulation, predilection to control, affinity to masculinity, blindness to social injustice, and subsumption under corporate goals.
Abstract: Noting that ethics and responsibility in business are well established fields of research and practice, we suggest that the limits of dominant approaches lie in their privileging of rationality, penchant for codification, tendency to self-congratulation, predilection to control, affinity to masculinity, blindness to social injustice, and subsumption under corporate goals. We observe that such lines of thought are blind to affectual relations, care, compassion or any forms of feeling experienced pre-reflexively through the body. We argue that this begs the rethinking of ethics in organizations from an embodied perspective. On this basis, and on the basis on the work herein, we retain the hope that our interaction with each other and with the world, might foster ways of organizational life that resist domination and oppression in favour of the enactment of care and respect for difference as it is lived and experienced.
113 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the process of workers' self-management brought about by a wave of experimentation with alternative organizational forms taking place in Greece since the beginning of the 1990s.
Abstract: This article focuses on the process of workers’ self-management brought about by a wave of experimentation with alternative organizational forms taking place in Greece since the beginning of the cu...
101 citations
TL;DR: This article explored the experiences of eight management consultants in the British office of a global consulting firm over several months and found that the continual promotion of an elite identity within the consulting firm leaves many of the consultants feeling acutely anxious about their status.
Abstract: Critical management scholars have emphasized that organizations’ attempts to regulate employees’ identities can prompt the reproduction or transformation of self-identity. The emotional consequences of identity regulation, however, remain largely unexamined. This article explores the experiences of eight management consultants in the British office of a global consulting firm over several months. Interviews and observations were analysed according to the principles of interpretative phenomenological analysis. The results of the study highlight consultants’ identification with an organizationally inspired elite discourse alongside high levels of commitment and the presence of a counter-intuitive yet significant status anxiety. Drawing on psychological and sociological theories that connect identity and anxiety, this article suggests that the continual promotion of an elite identity within the consulting firm leaves many of the consultants feeling acutely anxious about their status.
99 citations
TL;DR: Crowdsourcing as sourcing by means of ‘global search’ yields four types of values for sourcing actors: creative expertise, critical items, execution capacity, and bargaining power.
Abstract: Crowdsourcing spreads and morphs quickly, shaping areas as diverse as creating, organizing, and sharing knowledge; producing digital artifacts; providing services involving tangible assets; or monitoring and evaluating. Crowdsourcing as sourcing by means of ‘global search’ yields four types of values for sourcing actors: creative expertise, critical items, execution capacity, and bargaining power. It accesses cheap excess capacities at the work realm’s margins, channeling them toward production. Provision and utilization of excess capacities rationalize society while intimately connecting to a broader societal trend twisting consumers’ and producers’ roles: leading toward ‘working consumers’ and ‘consuming producers’ and shifting power toward the latter. Similarly, marketers using crowdsourcing’s look and feel to camouflage traditional approaches to bringing consumers under control preserve producer power.
92 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue for an approach to embodiment which recognises its inextricable relationship with multiple materialities, and 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 organizing can be understood and which contribute to the denigration, discrimination and dismissal of particular forms of embodiment, including those of non-human Others.
Abstract: 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.
84 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that binaries and their relationship to masculinities operate to constrain the development of corporeal or embodied ethics in organizations, and they seek to advance their deconstruction and dissolution.
Abstract: Arguing that binaries and their relationship to masculinities operate to constrain the development of corporeal or embodied ethics in organizations, this article seeks to advance their deconstruction and dissolution. First it deconstructs the binary by examining the epistemological space between representations of life, language, labour and gender and the assumptions of subjectivity that are their conditions of possibility. Recognising deconstruction to have some limitations in terms of subscribing to rather cognitive and perhaps masculine discourses, the article turns secondly to two literatures that seek to dissolve binary constructions ontologically. By combining epistemological deconstructions and ontological dissolutions, the second of these approaches facilitates the development of an embodied and embedded approach to organizational ethics that disavows dominant discourses of masculinity. The article then has two central objectives of first documenting the dominance of masculine, disembodied binary thinking in organizations and society and second of examining ways through which it may be deconstructed and dissolved so as to enable an embodied ethics of engagement in organizations.
83 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine two blogs written by the spouses of game developers about extreme and exploitative working conditions in the video game industry and the associated reader comments, highlighting that the project-based structure of game development both creates extreme work conditions and inhibits resistance.
Abstract: This article examines two blogs written by the spouses of game developers about extreme and exploitative working conditions in the video game industry and the associated reader comments. The wives of these video game developers and members of the game community decry these working conditions and challenge dominant ideologies about making games. This article contributes to the work intensification literature by challenging the belief that long hours are necessary and inevitable to make successful games, discussing the negative toll of extreme work on workers and their families, and by highlighting that the project-based structure of game development both creates extreme work conditions and inhibits resistance. It considers how extreme work practices are legitimized through neo-normative control mechanisms made possible through project-based work structures and the perceived imperative of a race or ‘crunch’ to meet project deadlines. The findings show that neo-normative control mechanisms create an insularity within project teams and can make it difficult for workers to resist their own extreme working conditions, and at times to even understand them as extreme
70 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a critical discourse analysis identified four interpretive mechanisms used by HRPs that served to exonerate managers from bullying behaviours, thereby protecting the interests of the organization at the expense of an employee advocacy role.
Abstract: In the United Kingdom the majority of those reporting being bullied at work claim their manager as ‘the bully’ (Hoel and Beale, 2006). A global phenomenon, workplace bullying is damaging to those involved and hence their organizations (Einarsen et al., 2003), justifying academic attention and a practical need to develop mechanisms that tackle the phenomenon. Bullying is typically a problem ‘owned’ by Human Resource (HR) departments, yet existing evidence suggests that targets perceive HR practitioners (HRPs) as inactive, hence ineffective, in response to claims (Lewis and Rayner, 2003). However, very little is known about how HRPs themselves interpret and respond to claims of bullying. We address this gap, drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of ‘symbolic violence’ to interpret experiential interview data. Our findings suggest HRPs enact symbolic violence on employees who raise claims of bullying against their managers by attributing managerial bullying behaviours to legitimate performance management practices. A critical discourse analysis identified four interpretive mechanisms used by HRPs that served to exonerate managers from bullying behaviours, thereby protecting the interests of the organization at the expense of an employee advocacy role. These data suggest that, rather than being solely a phenomenon perpetrated by individuals, workplace bullying is often a symptom of managerialist and capitalistic discourses of intensified performance management in organizations, reinforced by the embedding of existing professionalization discourses with the field of Human Resource Management in the UK.
69 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors adopt a critical perspective to study how executive search practices reproduce particular understandings of the ideal executive body and how this disadvantages not only women but also men who are considered not to fit the ideal.
Abstract: In this article, we adopt a critical perspective to study how executive search practices reproduce particular understandings of the ‘ideal’ executive body. We show how this disadvantages not only women but also men who are considered not to fit the ‘ideal’, and further demonstrate how search practices are embodied: how aesthetics, the senses and a sensorial way of knowing permeate the practices through which candidates are evaluated. We identify discourses on embodied co-presence, capabilities and voice in search consultants’ talk, and specify how notions of the ‘ideal’ executive body and embodied search practices become intertwined. We offer this contribution to the discussion on the body, gender and management and to research on executive search practice.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose a new way of approaching the topic of ethics for management and organization theory, drawing on the work of Bracha Ettinger to re-think and extend existing understandings.
Abstract: In this article, we propose a new way of approaching the topic of ethics for management and organization theory. We build on recent developments within critical organization studies that focus on the question of what kind of ethics is possible in organizational contexts that are inevitably beset by difference. Addressing this ‘ethics of difference’, we propose a turn to feminist theory, in which the topic has long been debated but which has been underutilized in organization theory until very recently. Specifically, we draw on the work of Bracha Ettinger to re-think and extend existing understandings. Inspired by gender studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy and art, Ettinger’s work has been celebrated for its revolutionary re-theorization of subjectivity. Drawing on a feminist ethics of the body inspired by psychoanalysis, she presents a concept of ‘trans-subjectivity’. In this, subjectivity is defined by connectedness, co-existence and compassion towards the other, and is grounded in what Ettinger terms the ‘matrixial borderspace’. An ethics of organization derived from the concept of the matrixial suggests that a different kind of ethical relation with the Other is possible. In this article, we demonstrate this through examining the issue of gender in the workplace. We conclude by outlining the implications of this perspective for rethinking ethics, embodiment and gender, and in particular for the development of a corporeal ethics for organization studies.
TL;DR: This paper explored extreme work via a broader discussion of related notions of "edgework" and "extreme jobs" and suggested two main reasons why extremity is moving into everyday organizational domains; the first relates to the acceleration and intensification of work conditions and the second to the hypermediation of, and increased appetite for, extreme storytelling.
Abstract: The label ‘extreme’ has traditionally been used to describe out-of-the-ordinary and quasi-deviant leisure subcultures which aim at an escape from commercialized and over-rationalized modernity or for occupations involving high risk, exposure to ‘dirty work’ and a threat to life (such as military, healthcare or policing). In recent years, however, the notion of ‘extreme’ is starting to define more ‘normal’ and mainstream realms of work and organization. Even in occupations not known for intense, dirty or risky work tasks, there is a growing sense in which ‘normal’ workplaces are becoming ‘extreme’, especially in relation to work intensity, long-hours cultures and the normalizing of extreme work behaviours and cultures. This article explores extreme work via a broader discussion of related notions of ‘edgework’ and ‘extreme jobs’ and suggests two main reasons why extremity is moving into everyday organizational domains; the first relates to the acceleration and intensification of work conditions and the second to the hypermediation of, and increased appetite for, extreme storytelling. Definitions of extreme and normal remain socially constructed and widely contested, but as social and organizational realities take on ever more extreme features, we argue that theoretical and scholarly engagement with the extreme is both relevant and timely.
TL;DR: In this paper, a typology of empty labour is suggested according to sense of work obligation and potential output in order to set the phenomenon of workplace time-appropriation into a theoretical context in which wasteful aspects of organization and management are taken into account.
Abstract: Based on 43 interviews conducted with employees who spend around half of their working-hours on non-work related activities such as ‘cyberloafing’, a typology of empty labour is suggested according to sense of work obligation and potential output in order to set the phenomenon of workplace time-appropriation into a theoretical context in which wasteful aspects of organization and management are taken into account. Soldiering, which emanates from a weak sense of work obligation in the individual, may entail aspects of resistance, but there are also less voluntary forms of empty labour deriving from a lack of relevant work tasks. All types of empty labour are, however, bound up with the simulation of productivity. Therefore, they ironically serve to maintain the capitalist firm’s reputation for efficiency.
TL;DR: The authors examines the current fetishizing of the ABS guide in general, and the magical "4" rating in particular, and raises questions regarding the current fixation on the rating using additional data within the guide.
Abstract: The emergence of journal quality lists such as that issued by the UK’s Association of Business Schools (ABS) has instigated a wave of ‘journal list fetishism’ throughout the business school sector. Business school deans and research managers have become fixated on whether the publication records of current staff and new applicants include the requisite number of ‘hits’ in the best ranked journals. Little attention is paid to additional measures of research quality, or to the broader context within which the research has been produced. This paper examines the current fetishizing of the ABS guide in general, and the magical ‘4’ rating in particular (the symbolic token for top journals). It begins by looking at how ‘trust in numbers’ may have assisted the uptake of the ABS guide through developing a perception of ‘trustworthiness’ and then raises questions regarding the current fetishizing of ‘4’ ratings using additional data within the ABS guide.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors report on qualitative research carried out in England in 2013, where participants were five organizational directors and two senior managers who had worked with six corporate psychopaths, as determined by a management psychopathy measure.
Abstract: This article reports on qualitative research carried out in England in 2013. Participants were five organizational directors and two senior managers who had worked with six corporate psychopaths, as determined by a management psychopathy measure. The corporate psychopaths reported on displayed consistency in their approach to management. This approach was marked by high levels of abusive control. The corporate psychopaths were seen as being organizational stars and as deserving of awards by those above them, while they simultaneously subjected those below them to extreme behaviour, including bullying, intimidation and coercion. The corporate psychopaths also engaged in extreme forms of mismanagement characterized by poor personnel management, directionless leadership, mismanagement of resources and fraud.
TL;DR: In this paper, a review sets extreme jobs in the context of the institutional, occupational, organizational and individual drivers of long hours and work intensification and identifies the consequences for gender equality, human sustainability and long-term productivity.
Abstract: This review sets extreme jobs in the context of the institutional, occupational, organizational and individual drivers of long hours and work intensification and identifies the consequences for gender equality, human sustainability and long-term productivity. We suggest that extreme jobs derive not from the ‘nature’ of managerial and professional work but from working practices and occupational discourses which have developed to suit the gendered norms of ‘ideal workers’. These practices and discourses encourage long hours rather than working-hours choices. Extreme jobs extend the gendered division of labour and increase the separation of work and non-work spheres; they are a structure of gender inequality. This review suggests that future research should seek to identify alternative but business-neutral working practices which contest the extreme ‘nature’ of managerial and professional work, measure the social value of non-work activities and deepen our understanding of the personal and social significance of non-work identities other than motherhood, and disentangle situational motivation, work passion and workaholism as motives for devoting long hours to work so that impacts on well-being and productivity can be more clearly understood.
TL;DR: The actor dimension of institutional-based trust is an underexplored issue in the literature as discussed by the authors, and it is suggested that actors who engage in (robust, local) sensemaking activities are better at (re)producing institutionalbased trust, particularly in situations when institutions are relatively unstable, unfamiliar to the actors and ambiguous, sensemaking strategies directed towards exploring the institutional foundations of trust at a local level can be an important basis of interpersonal trust-relations.
Abstract: Institutional-based approaches to trust can explain how trust logics can exist in a societal context as compared to logics of distrust. Strong institutions in the form of regulative, normative and cognitive structures can enable and inspire trust-relations among people at the interpersonal and inter-organizational level. We suggest, however, that the actor-dimension of institutional-based trust is an underexplored issue in the literature. Quoting Fligstein, institutional theory needs to explain how �some social actors are better at producing desired social outcomes than are others� (Fligstein, 1997: 398). While Fligstein refers to actors who engage in �robust or local action� we argue that actors who engage in (robust, local) sensemaking activities are better at (re)producing institutional-based trust. Particularly in situations when institutions are relatively unstable, unfamiliar to the actors and ambiguous, sensemaking strategies directed towards exploring the institutional foundations of trust at a local level can be an important basis of interpersonal trust-relations. First, based on a summary of studies of institutional-based trust we argue that an unresolved issue is how institutions more precisely form the basis for trust-relations. Second, we explore how sensemaking may serve as a bridge between institutional contexts and interpersonal trust processes. Based on Weber and Glynn�s (2006) model of relations between institutions and sensemaking, we argue that institutions are �emerging� rather than �impacting�. The relevance of this view of sensemaking for bridging institutional-based and interpersonal trust processes is illustrated by reviewing a case study on how trust is created in a politically turbulent and foreign environment.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors develop an embodied understanding of ethics in organizations, which is different from the Levinasian and "im/possible" ethics of recognition, which separates ethics and embodiment.
Abstract: Recent attempts to develop an embodied understanding of ethics in organizations have tended to mobilize a Levinasian and “im/possible” ethics of recognition, which separates ethics and embodiment f ...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the ramifications of the rise of the consumer and the hegemony of global markets for the nature of organizations and their management, the employees and the labour process, and the consumers themselves as they increasingly find themselves doing work, usually unpaid, on behalf of organizations.
Abstract: The last 20 years or so have seen a far-reaching reconfiguration of the characters that dominate the world of organizations. For much of its life, the study of organizations was dominated by two central characters, the manager and the worker, whose relationship with all its tensions, conflicts and accommodations unfolded with within a broader environment of markets, governments, shareholders, social institutions, technological forces and so forth. In recent years, however, there has been a substantial movement to change the two-actor show into a three-actor show, the organizational dyad into a triad. The newcomer to the stage has been the consumer, a character whose whims, habits, desires and practices are no longer seen as impacting on' the activities of managers and workers from the outside, but increasingly as defining them. This introduction to the Special Issue on Organizations and their Consumers' examines the ramifications of the rise of the consumer and the hegemony of global markets for (1) the nature of organizations and their management, (2) the employees and the labour process and (3) the consumers themselves as they increasingly find themselves doing work, usually unpaid, on behalf of organizations. (Less)
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present an ethnographic study of a collaborative marketing program organized by the carmaker Alfa Romeo that engaged Alfisti, the enthusiastic consumers of the brand.
Abstract: Consumers have entered the world of contemporary organizations. They are even being reconsidered as workers. This article contributes to the body of literature on this theme by focusing on collaborative marketing, which is the organization of marketing work conducted jointly by marketing professionals and consumers. This article draws on the ethnographic study of a collaborative marketing programme organized by the carmaker Alfa Romeo that engaged Alfisti, the enthusiastic consumers of the Alfa Romeo brand. Previous research has analysed work carried out by consumers. This article instead analyses the organization of consumer work and what marketing professionals do to integrate consumer work into their marketing work. This article concludes that marketing professionals control working consumers as if they were wage labourers, which most consumers do not appreciate. Conversely, working consumers compel marketers to engage in social and emotional labour, which marketers are not accustomed to and try to limit.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explored two research questions that seek to define extreme work in policing and understand how it is maintained and reproduced: (1) what drives extreme work and why it is accepted, especially when it is not preferred, not paid for and has detrimental effects on health and wellbeing; (2) institutional maintenance through which over-work is intensified via the extra demands imposed by austerity; (3) is maintained through work practices, a strong professional identity and a masculine police culture; but (4) is not "normalized" in the sense of being embraced or
Abstract: Using rich and extensive data collected from police Inspectors over an extended period (2011–2014), this study explores two research questions that seek to (1) define extreme work in policing and (2) understand how it is maintained and reproduced. For some, by definition, the work of the emergency services is understood to be extreme, but the urgent and dangerous elements of policing form only a small part of an Inspector’s job and for these incidents they are well-trained in advance and well-cared for afterwards. When police Inspectors describe their work in times of austerity, it is not the emergency aspects that they experience as extreme work. Rather, it is the intensity of work over long hours above contract, which are both involuntary and unrewarded. In seeking to understand what drives extreme work and why it is accepted, especially when it is not preferred, not paid for and has detrimental effects on health and wellbeing, we uncover a process of institutional maintenance through which over-work: (1) is intensified via the extra demands imposed by austerity; (2) is maintained through work practices, a strong professional identity and a masculine police culture; but (3) is not ‘normalized’ in the sense of being embraced or celebrated by police Inspectors.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that older age inequality within and across working life is the result of vampiric forms and structures constitutive of contemporary organizing, rather than assuming ageism occurs against a backdrop of neutral organizational processes and practices.
Abstract: This article argues that older age inequality within and across working life is the result of vampiric forms and structures constitutive of contemporary organizing. Rather than assuming ageism occurs against a backdrop of neutral organizational processes and practices, the article denaturalizes (and in the process super-naturalizes) organizational orientations of ageing through three vampiric aspects: (un)dying, regeneration and neophilia. These dimensions are used to illustrate how workplace narratives and logics normalize and perpetuate the systematic denigration of the ageing organizational subject. Through our analysis it is argued that older workers are positioned as inevitable ‘sacrificial objects’ of the all-consuming immortal organization. To challenge this, the article explicitly draws on the vampire and the vampiric in literature and popular culture to consider the possibility of subverting existing notions of the ‘older worker’ in order to confront and challenge the subtle and persistent monstrous discourses that shape organizational life.
TL;DR: The authors analyzed the emotions of work in postcolonial spaces, where enduring racial tensions, arising from white privilege, continue to shape people's experiences, and applied a postcolonial perspective to illustrate that colonial dynamics and attendant power relations are daily reproduced or subverted at work.
Abstract: This article analyses the emotions of work in postcolonial spaces, where enduring racial tensions, arising from white privilege, continue to shape people’s experiences. Based on a close scrutiny of two interview extracts from field work in India, the article applies a postcolonial perspective to illustrate that colonial dynamics and attendant power relations are daily reproduced or subverted at work. Postcolonial arguments are extended to organizational emotions, by demonstrating how everyday narratives, including those told to researchers, uncover a wide range of experiences of race that may go unnoticed or may not surface through more structured methods. Ambivalence and subversion feature in these extracts as core experiences of emotionally charged postcolonial relations, which are often reproduced or experienced unconsciously. The enduring legacies of colonial history on organizational spaces are discussed, with implications for the emotions of working across racial and geographic boundaries. In a globalized work environment, such legacies may go unnoticed, but their effects are manifest in individual experiences.
TL;DR: In this article, a study of high contact sports such as rugby league can illuminate a discursive space in which the production of organized, docile, masculine, bodies, engaged in emotional labour are crafted and mobilized through disciplinary practices.
Abstract: In the article I argue that a study of high contact sports, such as rugby league, can illuminate a discursive space in which the production of organized, docile, masculine, bodies, engaged in emotional labour are crafted and mobilized through disciplinary practices. Participants from a rugby league football club and their trainers have been interviewed and observed as part of a larger ethnographic study. The analysis provides a contrast to and develops understanding from studies of the organized female body, which have long argued that they are subject to disciplinary forces in the workplace (e.g. Trethewey, 1999), by illustrating how masculine bodies may also be made docile in particular organizational contexts. The article explores the organization of masculine bodies in professional sport as an example of the production of masculinity in a work environment. I conclude by suggesting that these masculine bodies are worked upon to be fit for organizational purpose in a similar way to how women’s bodies ar...
Abstract: This article focuses on how the categories of ‘normal’ and ‘extreme’ in the context of work might be renegotiated through the development of human enhancement technologies which aim to enable the human body to be pushed beyond its biological limits. The ethical dimensions of human enhancement technologies have been widely considered, but there has been little debate about their role in the broader world of employment—nor, conversely, the recognition that prevailing employment relationships might shape the development and uptake of such technologies. Addressing the organisation of work within ‘advanced’ capitalist economies, this article considers the arguments for the potential use of cognitive enhancers, so-called ‘smart drugs’, in various domains of work such as surgery and transportation. We argue that the development of human enhancement technologies might foster the normalisation of ‘working extremely’—enabling longer working hours, greater effort or increased concentration—and yet at the same time promote the conditions of possibility under which workers are able to work on themselves so as to go beyond the norm, becoming ‘extreme workers’. Looking at human enhancement technologies not only enables us to see how they might facilitate ever greater possibilities for working extremely but also helps us to understand the conditions under which cultures of extreme work become the norm and how workers them/ourselves accept or even embrace such work.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the ways in which the aesthetics of employees' bodies are used as a site of control and resistance, processes which are activated through ethnic and gendered practices.
Abstract: This article explores the ways in which the aesthetics of employees’ bodies are used as a site of control and resistance, processes which are activated through ethnic and gendered practices By exploring three resistance strategies used by Israeli combat soldiers, we demonstrate the construction of competing identities of military masculinity We demonstrate how, by activating a process of self-ethnicization, Israeli soldiers use an ethnic identity that empowers them and challenges the ‘appropriate‘ professionalism expected from them This process illuminates the interrelations between ethnic and masculine identities, and emphasizes the dynamic and fluid nature of the constructing of identities within organizations
TL;DR: Inspired by the insights of Franz Kafka, the authors explores the problem of "distance" in a UK bank, particularly by focusing on one of its back-office processing centres, and highlights the need to create ways of organizing and being that promote empathy with "others".
Abstract: Inspired by the insights of Franz Kafka, this article explores the problem of ‘distance’ in a UK bank, particularly by focusing on one of its back-office processing centres. Distance refers to a way of not seeing those below us in the hierarchy; this might mean that we act in ways that display little thought or concern for the experiences of others. It is argued that the ‘distance’ created between human beings through bureaucratic ways of organizing is potentially debilitating. Academic accounts often strive for objectivity and, in doing so, they tend to stand at a distance from the suffering of those they seek to represent. By contrast, fiction elucidates distance in a more emotional, passionate and, therefore, engaged and engaging way. This article draws on Kafka because his work is subversive and it highlights the need to create ways of organizing and being that promote empathy with ‘others’. Nevertheless, this is not to suggest that distance can be eliminated because it is fundamental to how we develop our sense of self and it is ingrained within processes of rationalization. The article is distinctive because although numerous accounts have used fiction to theoretically analyse organizations few have sought to use fiction to analyse empirical material.
TL;DR: In this article, an analysis of video material produced by the film company Zentropa about their apparently eccentric Managing Director, Peter Aalbaek, is presented, which foregrounds the managerial body as a signifier in its own right.
Abstract: This article explores how an allegedly ‘non-hierarchical’ and aestheticized managerial practice reconfigures power relations within a creative industry. The key problematic is ‘governmental’ in the sense suggested by Michel Foucault, in as much as the manager’s ethical self-practice—which involves expressive and ‘liberated’ bodily comportment—is used tactically to shape the space of conduct of others in the company. The study foregrounds the managerial body as ‘signifier’ in its own right. Empirically, this is done through an analysis of video material produced by the film company Zentropa about their apparently eccentric Managing Director, Peter Aalbaek. Contrary to much of the literature discussing embodiment and ethics in organization studies, we do not identify an ‘ethics of organization’ dominated by instrumental rationality, efficiency and desire for profit which is ostensibly juxtaposed to a non-alienating, embodied ethics. Rather, when the body becomes invested in management, we observe tensions, t...
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the Bush Administration attempted to legitimate the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" by making torture normal work, thus using a formal system of power that is publicly respected to validate and normalize their actions.
Abstract: During the War on Terror, the Bush Administration authorized the US Central Intelligence Agency to employ ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ to extract intelligence from alleged terrorists. Many organizations contended that ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ were torture. Given that torture is morally reprehensible, the policy was constantly contested. This article argues that the Bush Administration attempted to legitimate the use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ by making torture normal work. The Bush Administration did so by designating torture as legal, thus using a formal system of power that is publicly respected to validate and normalize their actions. Furthermore, by embedding torture in mundane organizational practices and rationalities, ‘enhanced interrogation’ was made to appear to be as ordinary as any other federal program. Hence, the article demonstrates how the legal system, as well as commonplace aspects of organizations can be employed by political elites to attempt to manage controversy around extreme policies by making them appear normal. However, a discourse of normality did not necessarily remove the taint from torture or create the results the political elites desired.