Search

Prompted by the recent prominence of the notion of atmosphere in the study of organization, in this paper we take a step back to discuss and reflect the underpinnings of atmospheric theory and their implications for knowing, theorizing and studying organizational atmospheres. To do so, we sketch a genealogy of the atmospheric. Drawing upon the wider remit of atmospheric thought in social and cultural theory, we then discuss the onto-epistemological, methodological and political implications of organizational atmospherics, suggesting a vocabulary and sensibility for future atmospheric inquiries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moreover, the emphasis was on doing rather than showing, reframing the site of exhibition into a space for a host of collective practices of organizing in the form of craft making, partying, workshops and discussion forums, or just hanging out. To Ruangrupa, this curatorial impetus stems from their own self-made trajectory into collective art-making and community organizing, forced by local Indonesian circumstances, and somewhat defying any precursor to their practice. Contemporary art as collective organizing, it transpired, not only engulfs one in organizational experiments, in practices and atmospheres of organizing as part and parcel of art "works.". [Extracted from the article]

Organization and management are the perpetual, and perpetually fraught and resisted, ordering of sense experience. However, banning the senses into the outside of thought, and of organizational analysis, was -- and to a large degree still is -- the default and mostly implicit and unquestioned mode of thinking and studying organization and management. Introducing the special issue on 'The Senses in Management Research and Education', this essay historicizes and contextualizes the neglect of the senses, dwells upon possible reasons for keeping the sensory at bay and discusses recent attempts to remedy this situation. The contributions to the special issue are introduced into this context. In conclusion, we speculate on what might happen next. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We advance ten theses on the nature of technology and organization studies. We suggest there has been very little theorizing and reflection on technology (as technology) in the study of organization. Though technology has been addressed extensively, it is nearly always as a tool deployed for organizational ends; technology itself is assumed to have no consequence. In contrast, the ten theses state, in various ways, what it is to think organization through the mediation of technology, and to think of technology as more than an array of (mute) material objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigating the structural transformation of the public sphere should reckon with the secret and its modes of organization. The expansion of secrecy effected by the infrastructures, platforms, and applications of media technology is constitutive for the emergence and transformation of 'digital publics'. Offering a rereading of Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere that is attuned to the organizational principle of secrecy, this paper discusses current notions of mediated publics in juxtaposition with the redoubling of media-technological and organizational secrecy at work in platform society. How are illegibility, opacity and unavailability organized? Instead of assuming accountability, publicity and transparency as epistemological a priori, investigating the transformation of the public sphere would benefit from adopting epistemes of secrecy and opacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Art and entrepreneurship both demonstrate a particular power to experiment with how the social is apprehended, organized and inhabited. How can we then understand and theorize the particular power of art understood as entrepreneurial organizing? In this paper, we develop the concept of artistic entrepreneuring. It is based on contemporary art's wide-ranging 'organizational turn', where art becomes organization by experimenting with forms and processes of emancipatory organizing. Interweaving art theory, examples of art's organizational turn and a processual understanding of public entrepreneurship, we conceptualize artistic entrepreneuring as fundamentally aesthetic, necessarily sited and invariably political, and we discuss the implications for entrepreneurship studies and research on the aesthetics and politics of organizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we connect with recent attempts to rethink management learning as an embodied and affective process and we propose walking as a significant learning practice of a pedagogy of affect. Walking enables a postdualist view on learning and education. Based on course work focused on urban ethnography, we discuss walking as affect-pedagogical practice through the intertwined activities of straying, drifting and witnessing, and we reflect upon the implications for a pedagogy of affect. In conclusion, we speculate about the potential of a pedagogy of affect for future understandings and practices of management learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Novels espouse an epistemological freedom that is beyond even experimental forms of scholarly research and writing. Precisely this freedom makes novels so conducive to thought. Their enduring presence in organization studies demonstrates literary fiction's power of conveying how things are, might be, or can be thought of; of inventing new ways of seeing; of enabling different vocabularies as well as staging and transmitting specific affects. In this paper, we trace the mutual 'contamination' between the novel and organization studies as well as discuss different modes of engaging prose fiction, drawing on Rancière's ethical, representative and aesthetic regimes of art. With a special nod to Kafka's novels and stories and also McCarthy's Satin Island, we outline the contours of a literary study of organization and introduce the special themed section on 'The Novel and Organization Studies'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital media are pervasive, ubiquitous and mundane constituents of organization. Organized life relies on, and is propelled by, technologies that store, transmit and process data and are based on networked computation. How can we understand and explore the fundamental mediatedness of organization? This article contextualizes and introduces the special issue on 'The organizational powers of (digital) media' by staging an encounter between organization theory and media theory. In provoking investigations of the power and effects of technological mediation in its many guises, not least in regard to digital or computational media, this encounter ushers in a 'medial thought' of organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of 'media' can provide an anchor point for developing organizational theories about information and communication technologies, materiality, communication, and organizational change. However, to date, organizational research often takes the meaning of the term media for granted. This article therefore explores various conceptions of media, outlining how such theories can be used for advancing the conception of media in organizational research. Using three ideal-typical branches of conceptions of media, we explore key concerns regarding media in existing literature outside of organizational research. First, the culture and power branch problematizes how cultural practices and power structures are inscribed through media; second, the technology and infrastructure branch emphasizes the inherent 'eigenlogik' of media technology; and third, the process and change branch explores how existing economic and aesthetic conventions in media persist over time. Using organizational media in general and enterprise social media in particular we discuss how each of these three ideal-typical branches offer pathways for organizational research. Specifically we argue for shifting the use of the term media beyond merely describing tools for communication as media theories offer insights for understanding the long-term consequences of materiality and ontological co-constitution within sociomaterial assemblages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the presence of noise in processes of communication and organisation in social movements. While the concept of noise has always had a role in discussions of communication, it is in light of the influence and use of social media that it comes to the fore as crucial in terms of how we understand communication. Rather than being a factor that interferes with effective communication, we will argue that noise is in fact inseparable from the experience of receiving information and organising through social media. Furthermore, the emergence of different 'nuances' of noise tells us something about different dynamics of self-organisation via social media. This article analyses the online forms of organisation of the 15M movement and the experiences of Dutch radical left activists to inform a better appreciation of the radical potential of a certain variant of noise: pink noise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue technology and organization are inherently spatial phenomenon. We conceptualize this conjunction as atmosphere: a gathering of mood, human practice, material and environmental conditions, and values that has sufficient coherence and distinction to constitute a distinct interior. Atmospheres, however, are not entirely stable and present: the interior is porous to outside influence, and the interior is never wholly ordered. We show this through the study of digitally mediated architectural design practice. We find the technological mediation of atmospheres is constituted in sensory and affective spatial arrangements, and not in rationally calculated configurations of assets and goals. An atmosphere is inherently aesthetic. This allows us to gesture toward a definition of organization as technologically mediated spatial struggle to reconcile interior coherence with outward exposure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a study of the so-called GamerGate controversy, this article argues that a new dynamic of affective intensification is currently instating itself in the digital organization of not only highly collaborative industries, such as that of gaming, but of society as such. This dynamic may best be understood and conceptualized through reconsiderations of the notions of affective economies and affective labour. The affective constitution of digital organization is a process of affective intensification that not only works like an economy but is directly productive of economic value, and not only involves human emotionality but technological affectivity as well. Guided by the notions of assemblage, affordance and agency, the article offers a conceptual framework for studying affective intensification in and as socio-technical processes of value production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence can provide organizations with prescriptive options for decision-making. Based on the notions of algorithmic decision-making and user involvement, we assess the role of artificial intelligence in workplace decisions. Using a case study on the implementation and use of cognitive software in a telecommunications company, we address how actors can become distanced from or remain involved in decision-making. Our results show that humans are increasingly detached from decision-making spatially as well as temporally and in terms of rational distancing and cognitive displacement. At the same time, they remain attached to decision-making because of accidental and infrastructural proximity, imposed engagement, and affective adhesion. When human and algorithmic intelligence become unbalanced in regard to humans' attachment to decision-making, three performative effects result: deferred decisions, workarounds, and (data) manipulations. We conceptualize the user interface that presents decisions to humans as a mediator between human detachment and attachment and, thus, between algorithmic and humans' decisions. These findings contrast the traditional view of automated media as diminishing user involvement and have useful implications for research on artificial intelligence and algorithmic decision-making in organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including Tom McCarthy’s most recent novel, Satin Island; conflation of computing power with transparency; and the sociology of secrecy and secret societies.

Colour is inescapable. It fills and forms the world, shaping what can be felt and known, desired and expressed. It thus becomes social technology and organizational tool. At the same time, however, colour betrays, undermines and subverts the attempts to manage it. Based on an understanding of colour as aesthetic force and medium of transformation, the essay presents a montage of scenes that set up encounters with what colour does: how it affects organization and how it is affected by organization; how it organizes what is given to perception, knowledge and organization itself and how it is reorganized in return. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we seek to open up the study of affect and organization to colour. Often simply taken for granted in organizational life and usually neglected in organizational thought, colour is an affective force by default. Deploying and interweaving the languages of affect theory, critical theory and organization studies, we discuss colour as a primary phenomenon for the study of ‘critical affect’. We then trace colour’s affect in conditioning the unfolding of organization in two particular ‘colour/spaces’ – Adorno’s grey and Taussig’s blue of our title – and discuss both its ambiguity and critical potential. Finally, we ponder what colour might do to the style of an organizational scholarship attuned to affect, where sentences blur with things and forces more than they seek to represent them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If the study of public entrepreneurship is directed at processes of social transformation, then it invariably encounters the manifold experiments of contemporary art and their socio-political effects. This short paper seeks to throw this encounter into sharper relief. After contextualizing the relation of art and social transformation, an example of a recent artistic intervention is presented. In conclusion, it is argued that art’s paradoxical potential to identify and disidentify with forms of life offers fictions of the possible: ambiguous, performative and preliminary reorderings of what can be perceived, expressed and done. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gathered, gathering, stripping, then stacking. Stacking, restacking, moving, and shifting. Piled lath, piled old-growth piles, potent and latent, piled histories, accumulations, and other such notions. Neatly and sometimes not so neatly, the gathered things start to suggest forms. We see the forms, and our need (ambition) sometimes determines what happens with the pile. The piles. The stacks are alone at the studio. The result of lots of hands and hammers, pull bars and moving straps, time spent thinking, dreaming, and sorting. We are the hunter-gatherers, ever funding the accumulated, the forgotten - the oh so stackable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the aesthetics of the uncanny to inquire into and perform affective sites of organizing that are imbued with feelings of uncertainty and uneasiness. We argue that the uncanny forms an ‘unconcept’ that allows us to think and apprehend ‘white spaces’ of organization not as new or other spaces but through a process of relating intensively with the conventional places, streets and squares that form the backdrop to everyday life. We also make use of the notion of ‘unsiting’ to show how organizational research is able to enhance our appreciation of the aesthetic dimension of organization in ways that expose and undermine that which has become familiar and taken-for-granted. Based on an artistic intervention by the theatre collective Rimini Protokoll, we encounter and analyse such processes of unsiting through the affective and spatial doublings at work in the organization of urban space. Theorizing the organizational uncanny opens up new sites/sights in organization by forging an interconnection of the recent affective, spatial and aesthetic ‘turns’ in organizational theory. To do this demands what we call scholarly performances that involve the witnessing and enacting of everyday sites of organizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article connects to and extends the attempts to bring space back into critical organizational theory, which, we argue, has mainly been based on the socio-spatial perspective as pioneered by Henri Lefebvre. Taking issue with the various ways in which Lefebvre’s work can be interpreted, we develop an alternative route. Adopting a mode of non-representational theorizing as outlined in human geography, we propose the concept of ‘spacing’, which orients the understanding of organizational space towards its material, embodied, affective and minor configurations. In discussing the consequences of such a performative approach to space for the practice and craft of organizational scholarship, we argue that our conceptual opening entails a move from representational strategies of extracting representations of the (organizational) world from the world to embodied apprehensions of the everyday performing of organizational space. What can be termed the enactment of organizational geographies in slow motion is inspired and illustrated by the video ‘The Raft’ conceived by the artist Bill Viola. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article responds to recent calls for rethinking management education and fostering a spatial understanding of educational practices. We propose to introduce Foucault’s notion of heterotopic space and the spatial thought of Lefebvre into the debate about the current and future state of business schools. In particular, we conceptually and empirically discuss the potential for understanding space in a way that addresses its productive force, its multiplicity and its inherent contradictions. Using the example of an experimental teaching project dedicated to the conception and physical design of a city of the future, we reflect upon the possibility of the emergence of ‘other’, heterotopic spaces within an institution of management learning. Our findings suggest that spatial interventions facilitate critically affirmative engagement with the business school by offering an imaginative approach to management education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Our paper adopts a paradoxical mode of analysis in order to reconstruct the inherently paradoxical constitution and conceptualisation of work as function and/or meaning in itself. The effects of this dichotomisation of work also underlie the current debate on so-called social and artistic critiques of capitalism, to echo Boltanski and Chiapello's distinction in The New Spirit of Capitalism, and the diagnosis of how artistic practices and claims are subsumed under the logic of capitalist organization. It is here that we situate the thesis of play's incorporation into capitalist development. Unfolding an understanding of work that acknowledges and keeps open the play of paradoxes that produces 'work', we problematize the diagnosis of the unavoidable incorporation of play. The insolubility of paradox and the paradoxical constitution of work reopen rather than foreclose the question of play and thus the possibilities and capacities of artistic critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of our article is to reflect upon intervention as a threshold where art and action research meet. For this, we will relate calls to apply the capacity of the performing arts to the social sciences to examples of neo-avant-garde art practices which show a renewed interest in (intervening into) the everyday production of public space. We recount and analyze two vignettes of artistic interventions to illustrate the politico-aesthetic power of art to interfere with how the social is assembled and to provoke new constellations of what is visible and sayable. Such experimental forms of engaging with the public raise the issue of a minoritarian politics of participation. Rather than being just another tool in the researcher’s toolkit, taking into account these practices can illustrate and inform certain dimensions of what could be called performative action research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to reflect upon the politics of and in organizational transformations in the wake of the fall of the Berlin wall and Germany's reunification. Design/methodology/approach - The paper juxtaposes a political-philosophical perspective informed by Rancière - what we call a dramaturgy of politics - with the findings of an ethnographic study conducted in the Berlin State Library in 2002/2003. Findings - The paper outlines a reading of the event of November 9, 1989 and its aftermath as a dissensual event of politics proper, i.e. the emergence of a new political subjectivity, followed by a consensual process of social organization. In the state library, both the consensual "fantasy of the organizational One" as well its disruption are causing struggles over what is visible and sayable. A dramaturgy of politics thus encourages us to add our voices to the specific time-spaces in which an excess of words, signs and forms alters the configuration of what is visible and expressible. Research limitations/implications - The usual disclaimers about the limits of ethnographic research apply. The paper calls for further inquiries into the dramaturgy of organizational politics. It also reflects upon the "Western gaze" and the problematic of "speaking for" the presumably dominated. Originality/value - It is hoped that the paper contributes to the understanding of the politics of organization (theory) by outlining an alternative conceptual approach and confronting it with ethnographic findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to explore (a vocabulary for) the potential effects of urban artistic interventions on the configuration of city space. It engages with a particular art project that took place in Vienna, Austria, in the summer of 2000. Through juxtaposing descriptions of the particular time space of the intervention with reflections on how the ensuing excess of spatial trajectories disrupts urban orders, I seek to illustrate the potential of art to reorganise what is visible and expressible, and ponder the question whether such 'provocations in situ (...)' can 'recompose political spaces, or if they must be content to parody them' (Ranciere). Constructed as a dialogue between empirical narratives and conceptual reflections, the form and the style of this paper attempt to embrace the ambiguity and openness unleashed by the performance/installation in question and 'to stay within the compass of [its] force and imagination' (Taussig). Resisting interpretative closure and exacerbating spatial multiplicity, or so I will try to show, constitutes a powerful effect of politically engaged urban art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary & Nonprofit Organizations is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to explore Thomas Pynchon's novel Against the Day as a symptomatology of organization and examine the (un)easy relationship between the novel and organization. Design/methodology/approach - The novel is explored through three interrelated readings: first, the novel is considered as a representation of the gruesome nature of capitalist ordering; Second, the novel's textual strategies are examined to consider its co-implication and knotting into the very logic of organization it abhors; Third, the novel is read as a search for other spaces haunting the broken machine of capitalist organizing. Findings - The paper shows how Pynchon's writing and critique of capitalist organizing occupies an indeterminate space characterised by the ambivalence of ambivalence, where deciding upon its final meaning is a reductivist strategy ill suited to this complex text. Instead the novel functions through a complex process of displacement and emplacement. Originality/value - Theoretically, the paper extends further the understanding of the relationship between literature and organization, challenging reductivist readings of this relationship to explore how the novel simultaneously emplaces and displaces the reader so that critique, as well as convention, are thoroughly unsettled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Volunteering is regarded as an increasingly important phenomenon and the ‘employment’ of volunteers as one of the typical traits of nonprofit organizations. However, the consequences of volunteering for everyday practices of NPO-leadership, i.e. the question of how non-paid employees are treated in settings where formal power is lacking, have so far not received the attention they deserve. Our paper discusses practices for leading without formal power by presenting findings from an empirical research project. Using a Grounded Theory approach, we identify five interrelated practices that question conventional notions of transformative or charismatic leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon recent developments in “post‐dramatic theatre”, this article inquires how the aesthetics and art of theatre has been justified and used in the organisational context and tries to re‐imagine possible relations between theatre and organisation. Referring to the simultaneously provocative and self‐reflective staging of Dostojevski’s “The Idiot” by the German director Castorf, we suggest to break up an all‐too‐easily established relationship between theatre and organisation and to demand that the “art” of theatre in organisations requires a performative demonstration that there is always an other way of organising. A carnivalesque relationship between theatre and organisation is conceived as a performative (and, hence, political) assemblage playing out hybridity, riskiness, and irony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the state of research on multi-purpose hybrid voluntary organizations. The three fallacies that characterize much thinking about non-profit organisations are the fallacy of essentialism, the unified actor fallacy and the fallacy of direct effects. The narrow categories of non-profit service organisations and how they are supposed to function according to political economy/institutional theory were also outlined in the article. According to the authors, emphasis on organisations as hybrids simultaneously pursuing different goals is especially important and to be applauded.