Christina Garsten

Uppsala University | UU · Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study

This article aims to expand both the analytical gaze of diplomacy studies and anthropological interests in the field of transnational think tanks, advocacy and policy advice. Drawing on ethnographic data from three such organisations, it investigates secrecy practices, focussing on how such practices amount to discreet diplomatic efforts. In a vari...

This paper is based on ethnographic work in organization that form part of what we term the Future Industry - such as think tanks, consultancies and governmental bodies - involved in the charting, description and analysis of geopolitical future scenarios. That is to say, an industry explicitly aiming for organizing the future. This type of activity...

Built on the exclusive funding of 1,000 large transnational corporations, the World Economic Forum is a not-for-profit Swiss foundation, aiming to shape the direction of globalization. Its events are characterized by low degrees of formality and transparency. Research on what this organization does is scarce. This article suggests the term discreti...

Anticipation is part of organizational attempts to manage their future affairs and shape their surroundings. Still, the ways in which organizations engage in anticipation have not been sufficiently conceptualized in the field of organization and management studies. This article conceptualizes organizational ways of shaping and orchestrating futures...

This chapter critiques the anticipatory practices of contemporary organizations, such as think tanks and management consultancies, which offer methods and forecasts about possible and desirable futures. These organizations, the chapter argues, contribute to creating a sense of urgency with respect to the future, capitalizing on the perceived need a...

Commonly, the relationship between corporations and non-for profit organizations, such as foundations, think tanks and private research institutes, is analyzed in terms suggesting that when acting as funders corporations set the frames for the non-for profit organization who, in turn, not only mimics but also serves as to broadcast the views of its...

Much welfare research is based on the assumption that welfare regimes are homogenous entities. Nevertheless, the practice of activation may vary considerably within states. This is especially so in a country such as Sweden where municipalities and state agencies are both involved in activation. This article studies local activation policy and pract...

Markets are often portrayed as being organized by way of rationalized knowledge, objective reasoning, and the fluctuations of demand and supply. In parallel, and often mixed with this modality of knowledge, magical beliefs and practices are prevalent. Business leaders, management consultants, and financial advisors are often savvy in the art of cre...

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, people who had never before had cause to worry about losing their jobs entered the ranks of the unemployed for the first time. In Sweden, the welfare state has been radically challenged and mass unemployment has become a reality in what used to be viewed as a model case for a full employment society....

Over the past decades, higher education has been profoundly restructured across the world. With remarkable consistency educational reforms have been put forward that rest on a particular and similar rationale: to achieve global competitiveness and adapt to the advent of the so-called ‘knowledge economy’. The ramifications for universities have been...

The scholarship of Ulf Hannerz is characterized by its extraordinary breadth and visionary nature. He has contributed to the understanding of urban life and transnational networks, and the role of media, paradoxes of identity and new forms of community, suggesting to see culture in terms of flows rather than as bounded entities. Contributions honor...

The debate on global governance points to shifts in the type and nature of regulation as well as in the set of actors involved. The article introduces a novel way of conceptualizing the changes, namely a move towards post-political forms of regulation (see also Garsten and Jacobsson, 2007). Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s notion of ‘the post-political...

This introduction to the special issue aims to contextualize and critically comment on the current trajectory of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in both scholarly inquiry and business practice. It suggests that we must place it within the milieu of the ongoing economic crisis and the failure of a number of important opportunities to make busi...

Entry Point: Contested Corporate InterestsThe Ascendance of an IdeaAn Agile Assemblage of IdeasTools, Technologies, and the Social Life of StandardsUniversalizing ValuesLooking AheadReferences

The article examines the organisational production and distribution of normatively charged ideas for governing transnational business. Based on the United Nations Global Compact Initiative, it is argued that the UN version of ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) builds on a metanarrative of rationality, involving ideals of transparency and legib...

1. Introduction: Dilemmas of Ethical Organizing (Christina Garsten and Tor Hernes) 2. Risk, Responsibility and Conscience (Tore Bakken) 3. White as Snow or Milk? (Tor Hernes, Gerhard E. Schjelderup and Anne Live Vaagaasar) 4. Does Rule-Based Moral Management Work?: A Case Study in Sexual Harassment (Steve McKenna) 5. Challenges to Leader Integrity...

In an expanding global economy, the notion of ‘transparency’ has gained increasing currency as an organizational goal. In a wide variety of situations, increased transparency is held up as a preferred point of direction for organizations, public as well as private. The notion of transparency implies visibility, possibilities for seeing through, for...

What does 'being flexible' mean in practice? What can the move towards flexible work contracts tell us about organizational change in general and about changing forms of workplace governance and control in particular? This book engages with transforming notions of career and community at a transnational temporary agency.

'In the expanding academic literature on accountability, there remains significant ambiguity about the scope and content of this concept. Boström and Garsten have performed an invaluable service to scholars by providing a fresh focus on how accountability is actually organized in practice. Their intelligently edited collection pulls together a rang...

This book argues that transparency is a concept that has gained increasing currency and favour as an organizing principle and administrative goal in recent years. Calls for transparency have been directed towards states, markets, corporations and national political processes as well as towards large institutions such as the European Union. Focusing...

In my office, I had for quite some time the following poster ad glued to the wall: The 6 stages of dealing with an overwhelming work load. Denial: Work load. What work load? Avoidance: I think I have some vacation coming up. Desperate reasoning: If work = mass x force, then if I decrease my mass… Panic: I can’t do it! I’m going to be fired! Accepta...

In a volume on the significance of the cultural study of work, Harper and Lawson (2003: p. xvi) state: ‘There is no greater issue in the current configuration of work than globalization.’ Without doubt, globalization is a force to be reckoned with in the world of work. Economic relations are becoming increasingly globalized and the mobility of fina...

Transformations in career and community can fruitfully be studied by addressing the practices that act upon people and their behaviour in specific domains of work, and the perspectives that underpin these practices. Attempts to reorganize and manage organizational and labour market change and to secure the engagement of people presuppose particular...

The concept of community usually brings to mind ‘rather more tangible, small, face-to-face entities, unproblematically situated in space’, as Hannerz phrases it (1995: 92). As for work communities, we have tended to associate them with—spatially—relatively bounded groups of people and ideas, connected to each other through inter-dependencies of var...

Being flexible—can we conceive of this stance as a blueprint for a desired life and form of work? Flexibility comes with a bundle of positive imaginings attached to it: freedom, empowerment, dynamism. It also comes with a set of requests for less attractive notions: preparedness, adaptation and regulation. Somewhere in-between, flexible employees h...

Imagine a job that takes you places you have never been before. A job that invites you to meet interesting, new people. A job beyond the monotony and drudgery of doing the same thing over and over again. That offers you freedom and flexibility. This is what temporary, flexible work in its imaginary version may be like, or what it promises to be. No...

It is 8.10 a.m. on a Tuesday morning in November. The phone rings. As Susan is expecting a call, she quickly picks up. It’s Lissie, her assignment coordinator at the Olsten Stockholm office. Lissie has found a new assignment for Susan. Is she interested? The assignment is with a telecommunications company located about ten kilometres outside of Sto...

Megan is on her way to the Office Angels temping agency in Leeds. It is a chilly spring morning, and the streets are buzzing with the energy of the early morning traffic. She hurries her steps towards the Headrow office. She wouldn’t want to be late for her first meeting with the temporary staffing agency. Having left secondary school last year and...

When trying to understand what organizations and their actors are all about, what plots are being developed and dealt with, and what is actually at stake in organizational processes, we may ask: What can we learn from playwrights and writers? What can they tell us that we have not yet realized? Or, what might they reveal that our methodological too...

Abstract Transnational corporations increasingly seek to present a vision of social responsibility alongside the business vision. This reflects greater awareness of ‘the world as one single place’, of global risk scenarios, and the politics of doing business. There are also demands for greater transparency and accountability in corporate actions by...

This paper addresses aspects of 'market culture' as it is expressed in media discourse and among financial traders and corporate managers. Particular focus is placed on their perspectives on risk and responsibility. It is suggested that the ideas and actions of financial traders and corporate leaders contribute in significant ways to the structurin...

In the world of organizations, a long term, permanent employment relation has been vital in the maintenance of organizational boundaries. It has provided a base for organizational action as well as a sense of loyalty and community. As organizational fashions and new ways of organizing production lead organizations to change, this model of relations...

In the modern world, there is no shortage of people who know what is best for others. Self-appointed experts, consultants, and organizations try to convince states, corporations, and individuals that they would be better off if they only followed some specific rules about what to do. These rules are presented as being voluntary and advisory. They a...

This paper is a contribution to the analysis of intra-organizational trust. From a discussion of concepts of trust, we suggest that trust is something which is constructed for and by people in organizations, thereby producing some degree of predictability. Trust is a precarious social accomplishment enacted through the interplay of social or discur...

As organizations change to become more flexible and transient, the use of a flexible workforce becomes an attractive solution. Temporary employees are here tentatively viewed as being `betwixt and between' organizational structures, in transit between the relatively fixed positions of full-time, regular employment. Building on previous fieldwork an...

In the face of widespread organizational change which some claim heralds the demise of bureaucracy, and in the context of the cultural and intellectual uncertainties of postmodernism, how do people in organizations respond? In this paper, we explore the role of `How To' books for managers in the elaboration of these responses. How To books may be r...