Robin Holt

University of Bristol | UB · Business School

Judgment and Strategy makes a passionate plea for an imaginative, open, and altogether more humble understanding of strategic activity. Prompted by a reading of skeptical philosophy, the book defines strategy as the on-going presentation of an organization form to itself and others, and embeds this definition in a discussion of the wider modern pro...

We live in a time of space, also in the study of organization. This review essay reflects on the state and the potential of organization theory’s spatial turn by embedding it in a wider movement of thought in the humanities and social sciences. Reading exemplary studies of organizational spatialities alongside the broader history and renaissance of...

Business schools should be grounded in questions of meaning, not knowledge. Using this basic distinction, inspired by Hannah Arendt, I argue the scientific (e.g., economic and financial theory), moral (e.g., codes of conduct) and practical (e.g., training) forms of knowledge being taught in business schools corrode students' ability to think. They...

Drawing from Michel Foucault’s reading of Immanuel Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?,” and specifically his definition of ascesis , we associate maturity with a capacity for, and interest in, forming the self. On the basis of an empirical study of making vinyl records following the successful commercialization of digital media, we identify micro...

At least since the ancient Greeks, strategists have sought to direct and distinguish organized activity through planned, rational decision-making, through the imaginative creation of vision, or through the assertion of will. In all cases, argue Holt and Zundel, strategy impoverishes, not because it only ever offers limited view of organized life, b...

Why would anyone be interested in the affairs and writings of Martin Heidegger, a largely unlikeable, brusque and severe man (Safranski, 1998: 428), who joined the National Socialist party and who ostracized Jewish colleagues, mentors, and friends? The answer for SAP scholars lies in his claim that the most basic of human relations are grounded in...

Research Summary By following the historical case of the world‐renowned potter Luce Rie, we study the relationships between the accrual of material expertise, entrepreneurial actions, and successful craft venture outcomes. Drawing from Sennett's material consciousness framework and Fisher's resource‐based propositions of effective entrepreneurial a...

Sensemaking provides a compelling account of how meaning emerges by theorizing the organizational enactment of order. In this paper we question the underlying assumption that making sense is equivalent to ordering. We draw from Hannah Arendt’s work to argue that restricting sense to ordering as a means of addressing practical concerns is limiting,...

In this paper, prompted by Robert Cooper's reading of Elias Canetti's 'the sting', we attempt our own reading through Martin Heidegger's notion of the uncanny. We consider how the sting, as a cyclical process of command and its inevitable reversal, permeates attempts to enforce strategic direction in any organizational setting. We then consider how...

Based on an empirical illustration of Onta pottery and more broadly a discussion of the Japanese Mingei movement, we study the intimacy between craft work, ethics and time. We conceptualize craft work through the temporal structure of tradition, to which we find three aspects: generational rhythms of making; cycles of use and re-use amongst consume...

Strategic success is usually associated with having deliberate intentions, prior stated goals and a comprehensively formulated plan for effective execution. This way of thinking is driven by a means-ends logic and underpinned by the cognitivist assumption that conscious thought and consequential reasoning drive effective action: such privileging of...

Chapter 6 reaches the end of our foray into Heidegger’s analysis of technology. The chapter examines Sloan’s memoirs of General Motors and identifies a cybernetic fantasy of control in the ghost-written account, laid bare by the increasing inability of technological systems to reveal anything; and where humans are not even the ordinary fabricators...

Chapter 7 begins the task of unpacking contemporary information technologies. Taking leave from Soshana Zuboff’s critique of surveillance capitalism, we suggest a further step beyond anthropocentric ideas of control. We discuss how organizational forms such as platforms and systems like Enterprise Resource Planning products, have come to ‘run’ orga...

Chapter 8 broaches our understanding of communication systems and their intimacy with strategic practice. Beginning with the general (strategist) Napoleon’s forms of communication–technological warfare and the subsequent reliance on innovation in communication devices, especially those of coding and decoding communications in military conflicts, we...

Chapter 5 details the emergence of machinery and organizational order through industrialization. No longer mere prostheses that allow humans to reach further, lift higher, hit harder or handle materials that would slice or burn skin, machine complexes and industrial installations no longer rely on the human body’s provision of labour force, but can...

Chapter 1 covers the raising of consciousness and conscience and the interplay of authenticity and estrangement through a reading of Hannah Arendt, whose work we have found a profound inspiration throughout the book, notably her re-imagining of the ancient Greek city state of Athens and the polis as its political forum. The polis is an idealized sp...

Chapter 3 plays out a philosophical engagement with organization and technology following Martin Heidegger’s well-known association of industrialization with technological enframing in which the question of self-knowing had been thoroughly and perhaps irredeemably concealed. Were it possible to ask such a question, then Heidegger identifies an esse...

Chapter 2 turns to the role of language in the context of strategy, specifically investigating how rhetoric and persuasion can open and close spaces for the airing of opinions freely amongst speakers. It is in creating and expressing opinion (and not truth) in the polis – the space of appearances – that the question of who one is receives its full...

Chapter 9 entangles strategy and cybernetics, as well as links between military funding and research development culminating in a discussion of the organizational force of neural nets and with this the increasing inability to ask questions of existence. Understanding the workings of these apparatuses has long become a matter for a limited number of...

At least since the ancient Greeks, strategists have sought to direct and distinguish organized activity through planned, rational decision-making, through the imaginative creation of vision, or through the assertion of will. In all cases, argue Holt and Zundel, strategy impoverishes, not because it only ever offers limited view of organized life, b...

Chapter 4 presents the epoch of technē, which is marked by the play of the fickleness of nature, luck (tuchē) and the fragility of early human stratagems. Technē is both a means of controlling the world, as well as one of violence. Indicated by humble and pre-scientific inventions such as the almanack, they allow little gains to be wrest from an ot...

At least since the ancient Greeks, strategists have sought to direct and distinguish organized activity through planned, rational decision-making, through the imaginative creation of vision, or through the assertion of will. In all cases, argue Holt and Zundel, strategy impoverishes, not because it only ever offers limited view of organized life, b...

At least since the ancient Greeks, strategists have sought to direct and distinguish organized activity through planned, rational decision-making, through the imaginative creation of vision, or through the assertion of will. In all cases, argue Holt and Zundel, strategy impoverishes, not because it only ever offers limited view of organized life, b...

At least since the ancient Greeks, strategists have sought to direct and distinguish organized activity through planned, rational decision-making, through the imaginative creation of vision, or through the assertion of will. In all cases, argue Holt and Zundel, strategy impoverishes, not because it only ever offers limited view of organized life, b...

Chapter 10 offers a way through, not by opposing poverty, but reframing it. Being poor in world and captivated by its technological environment, marks the regress of humans from homo faber to animal laborans; but while the latter still could locate the self within a cosmic and divine order, all such locating is now forfeit. Our second reading of po...

At least since the ancient Greeks, strategists have sought to direct and distinguish organized activity through planned, rational decision-making, through the imaginative creation of vision, or through the assertion of will. In all cases, argue Holt and Zundel, strategy impoverishes, not because it only ever offers limited view of organized life, b...

The bulk of Management and Organization Studies deals with time as organization. Time is performed, organized, enacted, and as such is a locus of power. In this edited book, we stress the importance of organization as time. Time is an organizing force. The happening and becoming of collective activity, its technologies, its images, keep empowering,...

As we have seen in the context of this rich, edited volume, numerous ways are possible for the exploration of organization as time and the political description of this process as power, emancipation or ethics. A politics of time, at the intersection of critical management studies and process studies, is particularly promising. In this short conclu...

Phenomenologies are an important dimension of Management and Organization Studies (MOS). They are particularly helpful to understand organizing processes as experiences instead of mere representations or objectivations of the world. Yet several misunderstandings still pervade discussions about what they are and what they could bring. This Handbook...

From the perspectives of process philosophy and some phenomenologies, time and temporality can be described as organization and organizing process. In this edited book, contributors discuss the implications of this idea for Management & Organization Studies. In particular, they analyze how power and the politics of organizing can be re-visited by m...

The bulk of Management and Organization Studies deals with time as organization. Time is performed, organized, enacted, and as such is a locus of power. In this edited book, we stress the importance of organization as time. Time is an organizing force. The happening and becoming of collective activity, its technologies, its images, keep empowering,...

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...

With this essay, we identify and resist a sensory imperative in management and organizational research and beyond. We define the sensory imperative as an uncritical embrace of the idea that the senses offer a unique and attractive methodological and political position for studying managerial and organizational life and for challenging dominant form...

Business schools should be grounded in questions of meaning, not knowledge. Using this basic distinction, inspired by Hannah Arendt, I argue the scientific (e.g., economic and financial theory), moral (e.g., codes of conduct) and practical (e.g., training) forms of knowledge being taught in business schools corrode students' ability to think. They...

How objects organize, how organization is technologically mediated.

The current understanding of entrepreneurial action is grounded in time, but the different facets of this time remain to be sufficiently explored. We argue that entrepreneurial action has two temporal dimensions: world time and human time. World time reveals the prior contextual conditions giving rise to entrepreneurial actions that generate subseq...

A narrative study of entrepreneurship in which the transgressive force of what Joseph Schumpeter calls 'creative destruction' is traced through the production of luxury objects emerging ,from the Meissen porcelain works. It is a narrative in which luxury and entrepreneurship are brought together, somewhat uneasily, under the forces of obsession, ad...

Toilets, a neglected facility in the study of human relations at work and beyond, have become increasingly important in discussions about future experiences of gender diversity. To further investigate the spatial production of gender and its potential expressions, we transformed a unisex single-occupancy toilet at Uppsala University into an all-gen...

The new world of work is being characterized by the emergence of what are, apparently, increasingly autonomous ways of working and living. Mobile work, coworking, flex of-fice, platform-based entrepreneurship, virtual collaborations, Do It Yourself (DIT), re-mote work, digital nomads, among others trends, epitomize ways of organizing work practice...

Theme and objectives of OAP 2021 Time and temporality have long been central issues in Social Sciences and in Management & Organization Studies (MOS) in particular. Designing the Gregorian calendar was both theologically and politically meaningful for the Catholic Church. Likewise, many ‘temporal’ artifacts, such as the mechanical clock, time cloc...

This essay puts to work the idea that Bolaño’s novels are interventions into a world organized utterly by business strategy and its handmaiden, dictatorship. As interventions these novels bear witness to our complicity with the prevailing distributions of what can be said and felt in this world. Who wants power? Who writes strategy? Who writes on s...

Our most basic relationship with the world is one of technological mediation. Nowadays our available tools are digital, and increasingly what counts in economic, social, and cultural life is what can be digitally stored, distributed, replayed, augmented, and switched. Yet the digital remains very much materially configured, and though it now permea...

Call For Papers of the 4th Dauphine Phenomenology Workshop. Université Paris-Dauphine, September, 25th 2020. DRM, M&O and MOST teams

In this special issue, our focus is primarily on the opening up, the move away, the declassification, the entrance of the unthought into action as free movement without denying the need for such processes to become well-managed ones, securing economic capacity for the politics of new action – freeing entrepreneurship again from its policing state o...

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: th...

Entrepreneurship is a generative and transformative process of altering convention where personal/social history, assets, technologies, and trading activity are gathered in organizational form. How entrepreneurs frame this process, and are, in turn, organised by this process, constitutes the entrepreneurial experience. Typically this framing has be...

We argue that the more time is being attended to in organization studies, the more it is concealed. The time being concealed is not the time of clocks or the linear passage of past, present and future, it is not the time of temporal structures, and it is not the time of processual flow by which all substance is held as little more than a temporary...

Smaller firms form an important part of any economy. In the United Kingdom, there are 4.3 million firms and 99.8% have less than 250 employees. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) account for 50% of all UK economic activity and 58.7% of private sector jobs (Tilley and Tonge 2003; SBS 2007). In addition to their contribution in GDP terms, smal...

Communities and platforms pervade all aspects of the collaborative economy. Yet they exist in apparent tension. The collaborative economy is grounded in communities. These are typically characterized by isonomic relations in which the singularity of members finds its distinctiveness in being woven into mutual, collective endeavour. Yet the collabor...

Satire, especially in visual form, has long played a significant role in balancing the powers of those in control of societies, communities or organizations. Focussing on the cover of the ‘survirors’ issue’, the first publication of the French satirical magazine ‘Charlie Hebdo’ following a deadly terror attack on its staff, we explore how incongrui...

With this special issue, we seek to rethink control and surveillance by developing a more materialized, spatialized, embodied and temporalized view in relation to new work practices that can supplement and so counterbalance a vision these being purely virtual and digitally enabled. By such we refer to theoretical analyses and contributions that emp...

Robin Holt and Mike Zundel describe their use of another unconventional source of data-a television fictional crime series. They argue that the boundaries between 'soft fiction' and 'hard fact' are blurred, and that fictional accounts can generate insights into aspects of organizational and social life more effectively than conventional methods. Th...

We examine how visual metaphor can reveal the tacit assumptions entrepreneurs use to make sense of their lives. While metaphor is often equated with linguistic metaphor, here we argue that metaphors created through the modality of drawing can offer a more nuanced insight into how entrepreneurs make sense of their entrepreneurial identity. From an a...

This is a draft of a chapter that has been accepted for publication by Oxford University Press in the forthcoming book [Handbook of Organizational Paradox: Approaches to Plurality, Tensions and Contradictions ] by/edited by (Marianne W. Lewis Wendy K. Smith Paula Jarzabkowski and Ann Langley ) due for publication in [2017].

This special issue proposal encourages submissions investigating the socio-political nature of entrepreneurship processes. As the creation of new organizational form, entrepreneurship challenges the established, settled, institutionalized, habituated nature of what already has been organized. By opening up and moving in the in-between spaces of an...

We challenge the obvious and easy association of enterprise and entrepreneurship. We do so by arguing that entrepreneurship is inherently social and collective, something that is concealed when held up as example of enterprising behaviour. We use as an illustrative case the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, an example of entrepreneurship that has little to...

Craft and industrial manufacture are often seen as dichotomous, with craft being marginalized during the process of industrialization. We want to look beyond this position, searching for craft in places where it has gone unnoticed and where it might have bloomed anew in the interstices created by industrialization. We explore these questions by stu...

Organizations frequently draw on history as a resource, for instance when attempting to establish or maintain identity claims. However, little has been done to review the advantages and problems of such use of history and it is not clear how using history impacts on the appreciation of history itself and, ultimately, on the insights that may be gai...

Process studies put movement, change and flow first; to study processually is to consider the world as restless, something underway, becoming and perishing, without end. To understand firms processually is to accept but also – and this is harder perhaps – to absorb this fluidity, to treat a variable as just that, a variable. The resonance with entr...

Little attention has been given to the ethics of fashion consumption despite the often trenchant critique of the fashion industry for intensifying cycles of production, consumption, and disposal and encouraging in consumers a superficial sense of identity and the good life through apparel. In this article, we suggest that although relationships wit...

Independent contractor status of NHS general dental practitioners (GDPs) and general medical practitioners (GMPs) has meant that both groups have commercial as well as professional identities. Their relationship with the state is governed by a NHS contract, the terms of which have been the focus of much negotiation and struggle in recent years. Pre...

Do institutional logics predict interpretation of contract rules at the dental chair-side?, Social Science & Medicine (2014), doi: 10.1016/ j.socscimed.2014.10.020. This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript...

The article analyzes the television series "The Wire," focusing on elements of the series of interest in relation to management science. The authors discuss strengths of the show as fiction, including the density of its portrayal of urban life and its avoidance of closure. Other topics include the management styles portrayed by the show's character...

Institutional theory provides a dynamic view of health care contracting. Responses to contracts at the micro-level (interpreting contract rules at the dental chair-side) and macro-level (co-operating with/resisting dental service purchasers) are seen as part of a process of institutional change. Institutional logics, which describe the patterns of...

We investigate the role and influence of the biological metaphor ‘growth’ in studies of organizations, specifically in entrepreneurial settings. We argue that we need to reconsider metaphorical expressions of growth processes in entrepreneurship studies in order to better understand growth in the light of contemporary challenges, such as environmen...

This chapter explains a method new to entrepreneurship inquiry and a recent introduction to management inquiry, the systematic literature review (SLR). It discusses the current status of entrepreneurship research and shows that it has been criticised for being fragmented when drawing evidence from its wide disciplinary base. The paper argues for gr...

We critique and extend theory on organizational sensemaking around three themes. First, we investigate sense arising non-productively and so beyond any instrumental relationship with things; second, we consider how sense is experienced through mood as well as our cognitive skills of manipulation based on standard categories, frames or narratives an...

We investigate the organisational field of general dental practice and how agents change or maintain the institution of values associated with the everyday work of health care provision. Our dataset comprise archival literature and policy documents, interview data from field level actors, as well as service delivery level interview data and seconda...