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Orange feelings and reparative readings, or how I learned to know alternative organization at Roskilde Festival
Abstract
Taking inspiration from Sedgwick [(2002). “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.” In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, edited by E. K. Sedgwick, 123–152. Durham, NC: Duke University Press], I argue that a turn towards alternative organization(s) must be accompanied by a concurrent turn towards a reparative methodology, in order that critical scholars are able to know an alternative. Based on engagement with Roskilde Festival, I show how easily critical studies become paranoid, precluding surprise and, in turn, alternative understandings, as well as alternative things to understand. Whereas paranoid critical inquiry is informed by the hermeneutics of suspicion, I suggest that reparative readings may come from a place of wonder (MacLure [(2013a). Researching Without Representation? Language and Materiality in Post-Qualitative Methodology.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26 (6): 658–667. doi:10.1080/09518398.2013.788755, (2013b). “The Wonder of Data.” Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies 13 (4): 228–232]). This article contributes to debates in critical management studies about the purpose of and possibility for critical engagement with organizations. By sharing ethnographic moments that mattered to me in their affective capacity to make me experience wonder about critical engagement, I show how a paranoid reader may become reparatively positioned and demonstrate what knowledge may be produced through reparative readings.
... Alternative organizations, understood as associations that manage to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable principles of individual autonomy and collective solidarity (Parker, Cheney, Fournier, & Land, 2014), not only thrive when trust in mainstream organizations is challenged, but actively employ trust as a mechanism for governing their own internal affairs (e.g. Christensen, 2021;Daskalaki, Fotaki & Sotiropoulou, 2019;Husted, 2020;Reedy, King, & Coupland, 2016). Moving from the observation that alternative organizations are currently flourishing to an investigation of how trust operates within such collectives, we seek to conceptualize trust as an 'organizing principle' (McEvily, Perrone, & Zaheer, 2003) that serves a number of important functions for alternatives. ...
... While the existing literature recognizes that trust is essential to alternative organizations, the role of trust is more often implicitly assumed than explicitly acknowledged, let alone explored. Among the studies that do centre trust, Christensen (2021) argues that when the management of a non-profit festival decides to trust volunteers with essential tasks and assignments, this creates a sense of responsibility that motivates the volunteers to exercise their individual autonomy (or, their 'voluntariness') in solidarity with the objectives of the collective. Here, trust flows from the organization to its individual members, endowing the volunteers with the ability and willingness to re-enact the festival year upon year. ...
... The Alternative party is one example, social movements like Occupy Wall Street and Mouvement des Gilets Jaunes another (see Shultziner & Kornblit, 2020). Alternative organizations that operate with more specific objectives such as worker cooperatives (Kokkinidis, 2015b) or non-profit festivals (Christensen, 2021) do not face the same problem of having to reconcile fundamentally irreconcilable identities and interests because they mobilize more homogeneous membership populations. ...
In this paper, we explore the politics of trust in alternative organizations, understood as counter-hegemonic collectives characterized by an equal commitment to individual autonomy and collective solidarity. Although trust is rarely theorized in studies of alternative organizations, it is frequently claimed to be the glue that holds such collectives together. The main purpose of the paper is to substantiate this claim theoretically. Drawing eclectically on Niklas Luhmann and Ernesto Laclau, we argue that trust serves at least two functions in alternative organizations. First, trust serves as an object of identification for people who long for an alternative to the current state of affairs. Such identification rests on the creation of an antagonistic frontier between the organization and its constitutive outside. Here, trust is understood as a way of establishing alternatives by providing space for individual autonomy. We refer to this as the political function of trust. Second, trust serves as a mechanism that renders possible the reconciliation of otherwise irreconcilable interests and identities. Trust fulfils this function by suspending the temporal distance between present and future, thereby creating an extensive ‘moment of undecidability’ in which competing interpretations of what it means to be alternative may coexist. Here, trust is understood as a way of maintaining alternatives by cultivating solidarity between diverse individuals. We refer to this as the depoliticizing function of trust. Combined, these two functions allow people to be ‘different together’, which is often claimed to be the sine qua non of alternative organizing. In conclusion, we hypothesize that both functions of trust may be operative in mainstream organizations as well, although the depoliticizing function is clearly more prevalent.
... The study of pinkwashing, we suggest, not only extends existing critiques of corporate activism, but may also contribute conceptually to our understanding of the ethics of corporate involvement in progressive causes. As such, the underlying ideology of woke capitalism should, indeed, be queried, but organisational practices of corporate activism may also benefit from being queered (Gibson-Graham, 1996; see also Christensen, 2021). Meaning, we may address corporate Pride partnerships critically and reparatively, productively destabilising currently dominant norms and practices through identification of their relational tensions (Christensen, 2020(Christensen, , 2021. ...
... As such, the underlying ideology of woke capitalism should, indeed, be queried, but organisational practices of corporate activism may also benefit from being queered (Gibson-Graham, 1996; see also Christensen, 2021). Meaning, we may address corporate Pride partnerships critically and reparatively, productively destabilising currently dominant norms and practices through identification of their relational tensions (Christensen, 2020(Christensen, , 2021. To this end, we offer a conceptual framework for studying corporate Pride partnerships as constitutively impure relations that may become ethically productive in and through the tensions that arise when the social ideals of diversity and inclusion of the LGBTI+ movement meet the logic of profit maximisation of corporate partners. ...
Based on a qualitative study of Copenhagen 2021 WorldPride, this article explores collaboration between the local organiser and its corporate partners, focusing on the tensions involved in this collaboration, which emerge from and uphold relations between the extremes of unethical pinkwashing, on the one hand, and ethical purity, on the other. Here, pinkwashing is understood as a looming risk, and purity as an unrealizable ideal. As such, corporate sponsorships of Pride are conceptualized as inherently impure—and productive because of their very impurity rather than despite it. Analytically, we identify and explore three productive tensions where the first involves emergent normativities for what constitutes good, right, or proper corporate engagement in Pride, the second revolves around queer(ed) practices and products that open normativities, and the third centres on the role of internal LGBTI+ employee-driven networks whose activism pushes organisations to become further involved in Pride, developing aspirational solidarity. Reading across literatures on corporate activism and queer organisation, we introduce Alexis Shotwell’s notion of constitutive impurity to suggest that the potential for ethical corporate Pride partnerships arises when accepting the risk of pinkwashing rather than seeking to overcome it.
... On this account, critical scholars tend to fall into a purity trap of our own, or a kind of 'secular holiness' where 'all alternatives and actions are able to be critiqued, nothing is beyond reproach' (King, 2015: 262). This propensity to critique not only the status quo but also all social transformation efforts has been theorized in terms of 'paranoid reading'-a defensive anticipation of injustice and ethical failing (Christensen, 2021;Sedgwick, 2003). King vividly describes how the demands of purity foster paralysis, recounting his time as a manager in the voluntary and community sector while pursuing his CMS PhD: 'I became trapped by the depth and gravity of the critique, exhausted by a seemingly endless range of dilemmas. ...
... Some academics articulate a fear that engaging too much with sociocracy consultants, for instance, holds 'the risk of losing their critical thinking' (King and Griffin, 2023: 12). Here we find a defene of the value of paranoid reading against demands for trust and affirmation (Christensen, 2021;Sedgwick, 2003). This account suggests that the risks of reparative reading are not merely that we will be disappointed-that our intended performatives will fail (Fleming and Banerjee, 2016)-but that our engagement effects unintended performativity (Callon, 2010;Just et al., 2021). ...
It sometimes appears that alternative organizations are doomed to perpetuate the systems they aim to transform, as efforts to avoid co-optation entail retreat from the very engagement social change requires. Scholars then face a dilemma: do we reveal these degenerative processes in existing alternative organizations and reinforce disillusionment, or avoid such critique and endorse ineffectual strategies? To address this question I draw on Erik Olin Wright’s identification of two broad strategies of social transformation adopted by alternative organizations. Symbiotic strategies are those that aim to change the existing system via incremental reform, such as trade unions’ collective bargaining. Interstitial strategies, by contrast, are those more radical approaches that seek to prefigure emancipatory alternative systems, such as mutual aid networks. The first contribution this paper proposes is a mapping of these social transformation strategies to distinct forms of degeneration, understood as inadvertent reproduction of the hegemonic system. Organizations adopting the symbiotic strategy are particularly vulnerable to the more well-studied forms of degeneration that result from partial alignment with the hegemonic system – what I call exposure degeneration. Organizations adopting the interstitial strategy are instead vulnerable to less well-studied forms of degeneration resulting from insufficient engagement with the hegemonic system – what I call insulation degeneration. Although this model may appear to place alternative organizations in a catch-22, I draw a more hopeful perspective from theories of performativity that highlight the relationship between socially transformative agency and social reproduction. Unpacking the necessary impurity of performativity leads to the paper’s second contribution: while both practitioners and scholars of alternative organizations can pursue social transformation only via impure critical performativity, awareness of this constraint can foster reflexivity regarding the agential scope that remains.
... On this account, critical scholars tend to fall into a purity trap of our own, or a kind of 'secular holiness' where 'all alternatives and actions are able to be critiqued, nothing is beyond reproach' (King, 2015: 262). This propensity to critique not only the status quo but also all social transformation efforts has been theorized in terms of 'paranoid reading'-a defensive anticipation of injustice and ethical failing (Christensen, 2021;Sedgwick, 2003). King vividly describes how the demands of purity foster paralysis, recounting his time as a manager in the voluntary and community sector while pursuing his CMS PhD: 'I became trapped by the depth and gravity of the critique, exhausted by a seemingly endless range of dilemmas. ...
... Some academics articulate a fear that engaging too much with sociocracy consultants, for instance, holds 'the risk of losing their critical thinking' (King and Griffin, 2023: 12). Here we find a defene of the value of paranoid reading against demands for trust and affirmation (Christensen, 2021;Sedgwick, 2003). This account suggests that the risks of reparative reading are not merely that we will be disappointed-that our intended performatives will fail (Fleming and Banerjee, 2016)-but that our engagement effects unintended performativity (Callon, 2010;Just et al., 2021). ...
It sometimes appears that alternative organizations are doomed to perpetuate the systems they aim to transform, as efforts to avoid co-optation lead these organizations to retreat from the very engagement necessary for social change. Scholars then face a dilemma: reveal these degenerative processes in existing alternative organizations and reinforce disillusionment, or avoid such critique and endorse ineffectual strategies. This paper thus asks how we can engage in necessary critical work without thereby stifling social change efforts. Erik Olin Wright’s real utopias approach is first used to distinguish two broad strategies adopted by alternative organizations – symbiotic and interstitial – associated with distinct degeneration risks. The former set, exposure degeneration, are well-studied by the alternative organizations literature, but the latter, insulation degeneration, have received less systematic attention. Thus, the first contribution of this paper is the classification of these degeneration risks and the specification of their dialogical relationship. In a second step, the paper draws upon the critical realist morphogenetic approach to understand social change strategies and degeneration risks in terms of structurally conditioned agency in cycles of simultaneous structural reproduction and elaboration. Thus understood, structural reproduction through exposure or insulation degeneration does not necessarily preclude structural elaboration. The second contribution of the paper is therefore a framework for engaging alternative organizations with genuine but constructive critique that accounts for the twin risks they face as well as the promise nevertheless inherent in their diverging strategies.
... 3. When we conducted a rapid review of articles generally inspired by affective ethnography, we found 249 entries, but very few of them were presenting empirical data based on an actual affective ethnography. There are relevant exceptions that enrich affective ethnography with an attention to auto/ethnography (Beavan, 2021), unexpected moment of awkwardness (Sløk-Andersen and Persson, 2021), critical engagement with moments of wonder (Christensen, 2021), dance as affective methodology (Lapiņa, 2021), affective oscillation (Resch and Steyaert, 2020), the transformation of affective dissonance into affective solidarity (Baxter, 2021), and collaborative affective ethnography (Pellegrinelli and Parolin, 2023). 4. For example, Dante in the Canto VIII writes: ...
There are atmospheres that happen in a more or less recurrent way within an organization even if they take a different form at any new occurrence. One example is the affective atmosphere called The Sunset Syndrome that takes place in a nursing home dedicated to people with Alzheimer's disease. In similar settings, care practices are intertwined with the use of coercion, and the use of coercion affects both the receivers of it and those who exerts it. Containment of the anxieties becomes a force inside an affective atmosphere understood as a field of forces. The article offers an affective ethnography of the multiple forms that the atmosphere takes according to how people, materials, discourses, and knowledges enter into a choreographic movement according to specific orientation. The Sunset Syndrome's shape varies according to how care, coercion, and containment become entangled in care practices. The contribution that an affective ethnography offers to the study of atmospheres is focused on their affective, material, and organizational dimensions, often misrecognized in organization studies.
... This style of doing affective ethnography has been taken up and enriched with an attention to unexpected moment of awkwardness (Sløk-Andersen and Persson, 2021), critical engagement with moments of wonder (Christensen, 2021), affective resistance (Marsh and Sliwa, 2022), affective oscillation (Resch and Steyaert, 2020), the transformation of affective dissonance into affective solidarity (Baxter, 2021), embodied meaning-making (Pors, 2021), ethical enchantment (Bell et al., 2021), and collaborative affective ethnography (Parolin and Pellegrinelli, 2023). However, the attention to space/place remains rather under track and becomes more precise only in reference to entrepreneurial hubs co-constructing entrepreneurial identity (Katila et al., 2019), or cultural events as film festivals (De Molli et al., 2020), urban art (Michels and Steyaert, 2017), or patient community interactions on Twitter (Vidolov et al., 2023). ...
Purpose
The article contributes to affective ethnography focussing on the fluidity of organizational spacing. Through the concept of affective space, it highlights those elements that are ephemeral and elusive – like affect, aesthetics, atmosphere, intensity, moods – and proposes to explore affect as spatialized and space as affective.
Design/methodology/approach
Fluidity is proposed as a conceptual lens that sits at the conjunction of space and affect, highlighting both the movement in time and space, and the mutable relationships that the capacity of affecting and being affected weaves. It experiments with “writing differently” in affective ethnography, thus performing the space of representation of affective space.
Findings
The article enriches the alternative to a conceptualization of organizations as stable entities, considering organizing in its spatial fluidity and in being a fragmented, affective and dispersed phenomenon.
Originality/value
The article's writing is an example of intertextuality constructed through five praxiographic stories that illustrate the multiple fluidity of affective spacing in terms of temporal fluidity, fluidity of boundaries, of participation, of the object of practice, and atmospheric fluidity.
... By showing how the Other is created through aff ective processes of inclusion and exclusion, Ahmed encourages diversity scholars to relate diff erence to potentiality for norm-transgression rather than to something to be contained, thereby off ering another critical contribution to the fi eld of organizational scholarship. As another example, while not a central concept in Christensen's (2021 ) study of alternative organization within the context of Denmark's Roskilde Festival, aff ect here works as a conceptual tool , enabling Christensen to analyse an LGBT+ community's staging of a spontaneous pride parade in the festival's camping area as a "queer use" ( Ahmed, 2019 ) of the festival space. The parade "released potential by putting the camping sites to a use diff erent from what was intended" ( Christensen, 2021 , p. 165), the point being that this particular use of the camping area is queer only because the festival space is not, and the aff ect of being othered and feeling alien brings this to the fore. ...
What lives amongst loss? This study employs spectral reading practice to thematically analyze the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) produced within the Canadian blogosphere during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the extent of loss that the pandemic brought, the findings of this study reveal that SoTL practitioners continued to embrace positive affectivities and “what works” in their reflective research about the experience of teaching and learning during crisis times. The four revealed themes—endless possibilities, teaching as care, care ethics, and community awe—point towards a hardening disciplinary and methodological characterization of SoTL (or what I refer to as a “SoTL attitude”) that is rooted in qualities of appreciation, generosity, and reparation. Overall, this work contributes to examinations of SoTL as an evolving disciplinary area, providing unique insights into its surprisingly cohesive response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A must have collection for all those studying and teaching event management and event tourism.
Queer parrhesia is an activist mode of speaking truth to power that destabilizes dominant societal positions and their opposition. We develop this concept and illustrate one of its registers, parodic paranoia, through a close reading of the whistleblower and transactivist Chelsea Manning’s bid to run for U.S. Senate in the 2018 Democratic primaries. Hacktivism and transactivism, we show, constitute rhetorical manoeuvres by which Manning performs (as) a subject position that combines an ethics of paranoia with an aesthetics of parody to enact politics as unusual. Beginning from Manning’s parodic paranoia, we conceptualize queer parrhesia as an inherently transgressive political style and discuss its performative potential for dismantling current social orders and imagining less orderly alternatives. The productive potential of queer parrhesia, we conclude, can only be realized when the subject position of the parrhesiastes is put at risk, gaining strength from its performative vulnerability and, indeed, failure.
Med baggrund i 61 gruppeinterviews fra Roskilde Festival i 2019 giver forfatterne en karakteristik af grænseoverskridende adfærd ud fra festivaldeltagernes erfaringer. Rapporten giver desuden indsigt i, hvordan den grænseoverskridende adfærd reproduceres gennem normative forventninger, ritualer og lege. Den giver også et indblik i de tryghedsstrategier, som nogle festivalgæster praktiserer for at foregribe oplevelser med grænseoverskridende adfærd.
This article introduces a new label, ‘Affective Ethnography’, and grounds it within the debates on post-qualitative methodologies and affective methodologies. Affective ethnography is theorized as a style of research practice that acknowledges that all elements—texts, actors, materialities, language, agencies—are already entangled in complex ways, and that they should be read in their intra-actions, through one another, as data in motion/data that move. I discuss three pillars for affective ethnographies that relate to researchers’ presence in doing fieldwork and their bodily capacity to affect/be affected. The first is embodiment and embodied knowing. Doing fieldwork implies the ability to resonate with, becoming-with, and the capacity for affective attunement. The second aspect relates to place as flow, and process—to placeness. The third relates to affect as the power to act and therefore to the presence in the fieldwork of the capacity to ‘make do’, either intentionally or unintentionally.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to critically reflect on the affective entanglement of both researcher and practitioners in a study of workplace diversity with a transformative agenda.
Design/methodology/approach
Events and experiences related to interventions in a municipal center are presented. The study is embedded in critical diversity research and applies engaged ethnographic methods.
Findings
The researcher reflects on how interventions designed to challenge the status quo faced difficulties while considering the impact of the research entry point, efforts to mobilize organizational members in favor of a diversity agenda and the micro-politics of doing intervention-based research.
Practical implications
The study reflects on how “useful” research with an allegedly emancipatory agenda might not be considered favorable to neither majority nor minority employees. The notion of affectivity is applied to deal with the organizational members’ multi-voiced response to the change efforts, as well as how the researcher’s position as researcher-change agent critically shaped the fieldwork experiences and their interpretation.
Originality/value
Few critical diversity scholars engage with practitioners to produce “useful” research with practical implications. In doing so, this paper contributes to critical diversity methods by exploring why presumably emancipatory initiatives apparently did not succeed, despite organizational goodwill. This involves questioning the implied assumption of the inherent “good” of emancipation, as well as notions of “useful research.”
In recent educational reforms, policy papers present students’ desire and motivation for learning as decisive issues. The documents indicate that motivation has become a crucial issue for governmental intervention and results in a number of motivational technologies. Envy, once perceived as a mortal sin, is shown as integral of the ambiguous affective economy following the wake of the motivational technologies used to translate the Danish school reform of 2014 into everyday class rooms. Grasping and following the invidious complex as performative effects of the intra-action of policy, motivational technologies, and student bodies is a way of researching the implementation of a reform beyond the already designed tales of the reform. The point of formulating envy as an affirmative critique is not to debunk visual devices or motivational technologies. Rather, it is to provide a more complex understanding of, and the possible consequences of, certain ways of reforming learning and motivation, and to show how affects and gut feelings are both a motivating force and a disruptive one, that can generate an immanent and hopeful critique.
The present essay examines the festival as a form of organizing and as a metaphor for contemporary organizations. Drawing upon classical and contemporary perspectives on festival, we focus on social ambivalences and how these are enacted and mediated through festivals. Specifically, we argue that festivals mark a tension between linear and cyclical dimensions of social time. Next, we argue that formal institutional and communitarian principles are mediated through festival. Finally, we argue that festivals mark a tension between reflexivity and social critique on the one hand and mass spectacle on the other, and problematize the notion of bodily enjoyment as a form of social consciousness. We discuss the implications of these three ambivalences-in the notion of time, the notion of community, and the notion of reflexivity-for contributing to http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/orgstudies Organization Studies Abstract The present essay examines the festival as a form of organizing and as a metaphor for contemporary organizations. Drawing upon classical and contemporary perspectives on festival, we focus on social ambivalences and how these are enacted and mediated through festivals. Specifically, we argue that festivals mark a tension between linear and cyclical dimensions of social time. Next, we argue that formal institutional and communitarian principles are mediated through festival. Finally, we argue that festivals mark a tension between reflexivity and social critique on the one hand and mass spectacle on the other, and problematize the notion of bodily enjoyment as a form of social consciousness. We discuss the implications of these three ambivalences-in the notion of time, the notion of community, and the notion of reflexivity-for contributing to contemporary organizational discussions.
Critical Management Studies has long been engaged in discussions about the purpose of critique and the possibilities of engagement. A recent expression calls for Critical Management Studies to moderate its ‘negative’ critique of management and instead use words like care, engagement and affirmation in order to enable ‘progressive’ engagement with managers. This ‘performative turn’ has been poorly received by some who see it as a dilution of radical intent. We argue for a middle ground between the antagonistic versions of Critical Management Studies that appear to want to oppose management, and ‘performative’ scholars who appear to accommodate with managerialism. We do this by planting the debate firmly within an empirical setting and a crisis that the first author experienced as a ‘critical scholar’ when conducting an ethnography at a sustainable financial services firm. In order to do this, we explore Chantal Mouffe’s concept of agonism to establish a particular mode of political engagement that acknowledges a space between being ‘for’ and being ‘against’. We conclude by suggesting that the exploration of alternative forms of organization and management, themselves already involved in struggle against a hegemonic present, should be the proper task of a discipline that wishes to engage with the present and remain ‘critical’.
This paper explores the relation between poststructuralist theorising and new materialism with a particular focus on the work of Barad. Tracing the lines of thought, particularly as they relate to ethics, through the works of Foucault, Butler, Cixous and Deleuze the paper finds a range of concepts that anticipate and link directly with Barad’s work. Barad’s emphasis on the agency of matter, and on how matter is made to matter, is found to be new. The different analytic work that can be done with these various philosophers is explored through three intra-active entanglements; first, among preschool children and a rock, second, between a girl and a chimp raised as her twin, and third, between humans and cows.
Organization theorists have predominantly studied identity and organizing within the managed work organization. This frames organization as a structure within which identity work occurs, often as a means of managerial control. In our paper our contribution is to develop the concept of individuation pursued through prefigurative practices within alternative organizing to reframe this relation. We combine recent scholarship on alternative organizations and new social movements to provide a theoretical grounding for an ethnographic study of the prefigurative organizing practices and related identity work of an alternative group in a UK city. We argue that in such groups, identity, organizing and politics become a purposeful set of integrated processes aimed at the creation of new forms of life in the here and now, thus organizing is politics is identity. Our study presents a number of challenges and possibilities to scholars of organization, enabling them to extend their understanding of organization and identity in the contemporary world.
This article argues that recent calls in this journal and elsewhere for Critical Management Studies scholars to embrace rather than reject performativity presents an overly optimistic view of (a) the power of language to achieve emancipatory organizational change and (b) the capability of lone Critical Management Studies researchers to resignify management discourses. We introduce the notion of failed performatives to extend this argument and discuss its implications for critical inquiry. If Critical Management Studies seeks to make a practical difference in business and society, and realize its ideals of emancipation, we suggest alternative methods of impact must be explored.
John Austin introduced the formulation ‘performative utterance’ in his 1962 Book How to Do Things with Words. This term and the related concept of performativity have subsequently been interpreted in numerous ways by social scientists and philosophers such as Lyotard, Butler, Callon or Barad, leading to the coexistence of several foundational perspectives on performativity. This paper reviews and evaluates critically how organization and management theory (OMT) scholars have used these perspectives, and how the power of performativity has, or has not, stimulated new theory-building. In performing a historical and critical review of performativity in OMT, our analysis reveals the uses, abuses and under-uses of the concept by OMT scholars. It also reveals the lack of both organizational conceptualizations of performativity and analysis of how performativity is organized. Ultimately, our aim is to provoke a ‘performative turn’ in OMT by unleashing the power of the performativity concept to generate new and stronger organizational theories.
John Austin introduced the formulation ‘performative utterance’ in his 1962 book How
to Do Things with Words. This term and the related concept of performativity have
subsequently been interpreted in numerous ways by social scientists and philosophers
such as Lyotard, Butler, Callon and Barad, leading to the coexistence of several foundational
perspectives on performativity. This paper reviews and evaluates critically how
organization and management theory (OMT) scholars have used these perspectives,
and how the power of performativity has, or has not, stimulated new theory-building.
In performing a historical and critical review of performativity in OMT, the authors’
analysis reveals the uses, abuses and under-uses of the concept by OMT scholars. It
also reveals the lack of both organizational conceptualizations of performativity and
analysis of how performativity is organized. Ultimately, the authors’ aim is to provoke
a ‘performative turn’ in OMT by unleashing the power of the performativity concept
to generate new and stronger organizational theories.
In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of ‘critical performativity’, a concept designed to debate relationships between theory and practice and encourage practical interventions in organizational life. Notwithstanding its laudable ambition to stimulate discussion about engagement between CMS researchers and practitioners, we are concerned that critical performativity theory is flawed as it misreads foundational performativity authors, such as Austin and Butler, in ways that nullify their political potential, and ignores a range of other influential theories of performativity. It also overlooks the materiality of performativity. We review these limitations and then use three illustrations to sketch out a possible alternative conceptualization of performativity. This alternative approach, which builds on Butler’s and Callon’s work on performativity, recognises that performativity is about the constitution of subjects, is an inherently material and discursive construct, and happens through the political engineering of sociomaterial agencements. We argue that such an approach – a political theory of organizational performativity – is more likely to deliver on both theoretical and practical fronts than the concept of critical performativity.
Drawing from a qualitative, empirical study of work experiences in a North American organic supermarket, we introduce the notion of ‘enchanting work’, a polyvalent concept referring to the aura found in certain forms of service work in contrast to the disenchantment commonly associated with service work. Enchanting work, because of its unique stance vis-à-vis workplace critique and commitment, can inform the study of work by moving beyond the dichotomy of meaningful versus alienated work. Our findings show how enchanting work can be found at three different analytical moments to 1.) infuse otherwise mundane work processes with meaning, 2.) obscure organizational control mechanisms and divert attention from precarious work conditions, and 3.) recruit the participation of workers for creating an enchanted workplace. We discuss the implications of our results for understanding contemporary worlds of work and explore both the emancipatory and ideological ramifications of enchanting work
This paper is an attempt to articulate some general principles which might guide anarchist thinking about organized alternatives to market managerialism and might be read as a sort of manifesto for defining 'the alternative'. That is to say, it describes what we include in our list of useful possibilities, and what to exclude on the grounds that it doesn't fit with our definition of what counts as sufficiently different from the present. We suggest three principles which we believe that radicals should be guided by – autonomy, solidarity and responsibility – and that we think any reflection on the politics of organizing needs to deal with. We wish to encourage forms of organizing which respect personal autonomy, but within a framework of cooperation , and are attentive to the sorts of futures which they will produce. This is a simple statement to make but it produces some complex outcomes since gaining agreement on any of these ideas is not a simple matter.
In this paper, we explore the dual role of human agency in maintaining the status quo and generating change. Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu offer differing conceptions of change agency in relation to organization and transformation of gender relations. Focusing on how those approaches would work, we analyse an empirical case study on a particular change process: getting women the right to vote in the Swiss cantons of Appenzell. We contribute to the current use of Butler's and Bourdieu's theories in organization studies in three main ways. First, we explore stability and change from the lenses of these two scholars. Second, we illustrate how change agency looks from these two distinct perspectives. Finally, we offer an empirical analysis that identifies the main elements of change agency in the two frameworks and discuss the possibilities and limitations of bringing these two approaches together to better understand change agency.
“All too often,” wrote disabled architect Ronald Mace, “designers don’t take the needs of disabled and elderly people into account.” Building Access investigates twentieth-century strategies for designing the world with disability in mind. Commonly understood in terms of curb cuts, automatic doors, Braille signs, and flexible kitchens, Universal Design purported to create a built environment for everyone, not only the average citizen. But who counts as “everyone,” Aimi Hamraie asks, and how can designers know? Blending technoscience studies and design history with critical disability, race, and feminist theories, Building Access interrogates the historical, cultural, and theoretical contexts for these questions, offering a groundbreaking critical history of Universal Design. Hamraie reveals that the twentieth-century shift from “design for the average” to “design for all” took place through liberal political, economic, and scientific structures concerned with defining the disabled user and designing in its name. Tracing the co-evolution of accessible design for disabled veterans, a radical disability maker movement, disability rights law, and strategies for diversifying the architecture profession, Hamraie shows that Universal Design was not just an approach to creating new products or spaces, but also a sustained, understated activist movement challenging dominant understandings of disability in architecture, medicine, and society. Illustrated with a wealth of rare archival materials, Building Accessbrings together scientific, social, and political histories in what is not only the pioneering critical account of Universal Design but also a deep engagement with the politics of knowing, making, and belonging in twentieth-century United States. © 2017 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved.
This provocation to debate begins with the observation that critical management and organization scholars exhibit powerful capacity for critiquing, weaker capacity for changing, and atrophied capacity for feeling relations of power at work. Following developments in affect theory, I propose that we foster a critical practice of inhabiting, discerning, and cultivating relations of difference in our own work world as we also study power elsewhere. The argument unfolds in three turns, claiming that (1) difference at work is a constitutive sensate activity, (2) our “senses” of difference at home haunt our studies of power in other fields, and (3) we could be better change agents if we tuned in to the relation of home and field (i.e. how we are already doing what we seek to know about). Ultimately, I suggest that efforts in so-called critical performativity must also include critical vulnerability, whereby we begin to grapple with our complicity and integrate it into critical practice.
‘How do we introduce democracy democratically to people who are not sure they want it?’ This question was posed to us at the outset of what became a three-year experiment in seeking to implement more democratic organizational practices within a small education charity, World Education (WE). WE were an organization with a history of anarchist organizing and recent negative experiences of hierarchical managerialism, who wanted to return to a more democratic organizational form. This was an ideal opportunity, we thought, for the type of critical performative intervention called for within Critical Management Studies. Using Participant Action Research, which itself has a democratic ethos, we aimed to democratically bring about workplace democracy, using a range of interventions from interviewing, whole organization visioning workshops through to participating in working groups to bring about democratic change. Yet we failed. WE members democratically rejected democracy.
We reflect on this failure using Jacques Derrida’s idea of a constitutive aporia at the heart of democracy, and suggests the need to more carefully unpack the difficult relationship between power and equality when seeking to facilitate more democratic organizational practices. The article presents an original perspective on the potential for, and limits of, critical performativity inspired interventions in organizations.
Critical scholars in the business school are becoming increasingly concerned about the impact of their research beyond the confines of academia. This has been articulated most prominently around the concept of ‘critical performativity’. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with critical leadership scholars, this article explores how academics engage with practitioners at the same time as they seek to maintain a critical ethos in relation to their external activities. While proponents of critical performativity tend to paint a frictionless picture of practitioner engagement—which can take the form of consulting, coaching, and leadership development—we show how critical scholars may end up compromising their academic values in corporate settings due to practitioner demands and other institutional pressures. Taken together, these pressures mean that critical scholars often need to negotiate a series of (sometimes insoluble) dilemmas in practitioner contexts. We argue that the concept of critical performativity is unable to contend meaningfully with these tensions because it replicates the myth of the ‘heroic-transformational academic’ who is single-handedly able to stimulate critical reflection among practitioners and provoke radical change in organizations. We conclude with a call for further reflection on the range of ethical dilemmas that can arise during academic–practitioner engagement.
It has been proposed that engagement with activism might make critical organizational scholarship more relevant to practitioners. However, there is a lack of systematic inquiry into how such engagement might be undertaken, which this article redresses. We propose activist ethnography as a suitable methodological framework for critical organizational scholarship, drawing on organizational ethnography, militant ethnography, and participatory action research, to construct a theoretical framework which we use to analyze four ethnographic vignettes of our own experiences of research with activists. Our contribution is to (a), assess the methodological challenges and opportunities of engagement with activism, (b) give an account of our own experiences as activist ethnographers for others to learn from, and (c) propose strategies whereby the challenges of academic activism might be negotiated and the opportunities maximized.
Despite abundant scholarship addressed to gender equity in leadership, much leadership literature remains invested in gender binaries. Metaphors of leadership are especially dependent on gender oppositions, and this article treats the scholarly practice of coding leadership through gendered metaphor as a consequential practice of leadership unto itself. Drawing on queer theory, the article develops a mode of analysis, called ‘promiscuous coding’, conducive to disrupting the gender divisions that currently anchor most leadership metaphors. Promiscuous coding can assist leadership scholars by translating the vague promise of queering leadership into a tangible method distinguished by specific habits. The article formulates this analytical practice out of empirical provocations encountered by the authors: namely, a striking mismatch between their experiences in military fields and the dominant metaphor of leading as military command. Ultimately, the article seeks to move scholarly practices of leadership toward queer performativity, in the hopes of loosening other leadership practices from a binary grip and pointing toward new relational possibilities.
In an unusually direct style of address, the article moves toward a novel critical practice stimulated by affect theory: inhabited criticism. This more-than-representational approach enacts vigilant attunement to the lively scenes, bodies, and trajectories of ordinary affects. I cultivate the practice by staging successive encounters with the contemporary labor of scholarship and, specifically, with an assemblage condensed as The Rule of Excellence. The first half of the article addresses The Rule through reigning critical practices in organization studies, which are recast as vacated criticism (disembodied analysis), humanized criticism (confessional tale), and reciprocated criticism (dialogue across dualisms) in order to sift their affective postures and implications for resistance. The second half then calls on affect theory to address The Rule anew, as an agentic, transpersonal current that animates academic landscapes and figures in troubling yet indeterminate ways. By performing, not only theorizing, inhabited criticism, I demonstrate how it can transcend stubborn dualisms and nourish relational enactments difficult to accomplish within the current critical practices of organization and management studies. Ultimately, I argue that inhabited criticism can (a) help us come to terms with the affective demands and limitations of all modes of criticism and (b) enact an alternative posture of resistance rooted in ‘sense-abilities’ of home, field, and their relation.
Affect holds the promise of destabilizing and unsettling us, as organizational subjects, into new states of being. It can shed light on many aspects of work and organization, with implications both within and beyond organization studies. Affect theory holds the potential to generate exciting new insights for the study of organizations, theoretically, methodologically and politically. This Special Issue seeks to explore these potential trajectories. We are pleased to present five contributions that develop such ideas, drawing on a wide variety of approaches, and invoking new perspectives on the organizations we study and inhabit. As this Special Issue demonstrates, the world of work offers an exciting landscape for studying the ‘pulsing refrains of affect’ that accompany our lived experiences.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it brings forth a methodology of “traces” for organizational ethnography of the shadow, also understood as the realm of the repressed. Second, it highlights the emotional disconnect that organizational ethnographers encounter in traumatized communities and provides suggestions to bridge them.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper – drawing on autoethnography – incorporates the author’s fieldwork experiences conducted with market women in postconflict Monrovia, Liberia. In the tradition of “confessional tales,” it includes vignettes from fieldnotes and in-depth qualitative interviews.
Findings
The paper highlights three types of traces for research on the shadow: memorial, interactional, and material.
Research limitations/implications
The paper is important because it provides a methodology to recover information pertaining to the organizational shadow, where silence, absence, and suppression dominate. It extends existing literature focused on visuality to consider alternative and holistic epistemologies in line with African worldviews.
Practical implications
This paper will help practitioners working with traumatized communities as it suggests the use of memory as a more indirect route to recover information rather than direct questioning.
Originality/value
The paper juxtaposes poignant stories with academic prose and is valuable in terms of content and form. First, it addresses the topics of emotion and discomfort, seldom incorporated in organization studies. Second, it is valuable to scholars wishing to experiment with more intuitive forms of writing.
This article explores the methodological possibilities that Butler’s theory of performativity opens up, attempting to ‘translate’ her theoretical ideas into research practice. Specifically, it considers how research on organizational subjectivity premised upon a performative ontology might be undertaken. It asks: What form might a Butler-inspired methodology take? What methodological opportunities might it afford for developing self-reflexive research? What political and ethical problems might it pose for organizational researchers, particularly in relation to the challenges associated with power asymmetries, and the risks attached to ‘fixing’ subjects within the research process? The article outlines and evaluates a method described as anti-narrative interviewing, arguing that it constitutes a potentially valuable methodological resource for researchers interested in understanding how and why idealized organizational subjectivities are formed and sustained. It further advances the in-roads that Butler’s writing has made into organization studies, thinking through the methodological and ethical implications of her work for understanding the performative constitution of organizational subjectivities. The aim of the article is to advocate a research practice premised upon a reflexive undoing of organizational subjectivities and the normative conditions upon which they depend. It concludes by emphasizing the potential benefits and wider implications of a methodologically reflexive undoing of organizational performativity.
In this article we extend the debate about critical performativity. We begin by outlining the basic tenets of critical performativity and how this has been applied in the study of management and organization. We then address recent critiques of critical performance. We note these arguments suffer from an undue focus on intra-academic debates; engage in author-itarian theoretical policing; feign relevance through symbolic radicalism; and repackage common sense. We take these critiques as an opportunity to offer an extended model of critical performativity that involves focusing on issues of public importance; engaging with non-academic groups using dialectical reasoning; scaling up insights through movement building; and propagating deliberation.
Purpose
– Contemporary outdoor rock and popular music festivals offer liminoidal spaces in which event participants can experience characteristics associated with the carnivalesque. Festival goers celebrate with abandonment, excess and enjoy a break from the mundane routine of everyday life. The purpose of this paper is to explore the way gender is negotiated in the festival space.
Design/methodology/approach
– The rock and popular music tribute festival, known as “Glastonbudget” provides the focus for this conceptual paper. A pilot ethnographic exploration of the event utilising photographic imagery was used to understand the way in which gender is displayed.
Findings
– It is suggested that liminal zones offer space to invert social norms and behave with abandonment and freedom away from the constraints of the everyday but neither women nor men actually take up this opportunity. The carnivalesque during Glastonbudget represents a festival space which consolidates normative notions of gender hierarchy via a complicated process of othering.
Research limitations/implications
– This is a conceptual paper which presents the need to advance social science-based studies connecting gender to the social construction of event space. The ideas explored in this paper need to be extended and developed to build upon the research design established here.
Originality/value
– There is currently a paucity of literature surrounding the concept of gender within these festival spaces especially in relation to liminality within events research.
This article examines the reparative turn in current queer feminist scholarship by tracking its twin interest in the study of affect and time. By foregrounding Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's influential critique of what she called paranoid reading, I am interested in the ways that various critics - Ann Cvetkovich, Heather Love, and Elizabeth Freeman in particular - take up the call for reparative reading by using the temporal frameworks of the everyday, backward feeling, and queer time to reparative ends. In the process, I consider the reparative work being done to reclaim Sedgwick as a major thinker for queer feminist concerns, and speculate on the attraction, in a time of declining economic and cultural support for the interpretative humanities, of a critical practice that seeks to love and nurture its objects of study.
This essay explores the sociality of moods as a sociality that does not simply bring us together. Reflecting specifically on how attunement creates strangers (as those who are only dimly perceived) the essay explores how some have to work to become attuned to others. The essay concludes
by reflecting on how national moods are measured and made, taking up the political potential of affect aliens, those who are alienated from the nation by virtue of how they are affected.
A central debate in critical management studies (CMS) revolves around the concern that critical research has rather little influence on what managers do in practice. We argue that this is partly because CMS research often focuses on criticizing antagonistically, rather than engaging with managers. In light of this, we seek to re-interpret the anti-performative stance of CMS by focusing on how researchers understand, conceptualize and make use of the performative effects of language. Drawing on the works of JL Austin and Judith Butler, we put forward the concept of progressive performativity, which requires critical researchers to stimulate the performative effects of language in order to induce incremental, rather than radical, changes in managerial behaviour. The research framework we propose comprises two interrelated processes: (i) the strategy of micro-engagement, which allows critical researchers to identify and ‘ally’ with internal activists among managers, and to support their role as internal agents of change; and (ii) ‘reflexive conscientization’ − that is, a dialogic process between researchers and researched that aims to gradually raise the critical consciousness of actors in order to provide spaces in which new practices can be ‘talked into existence’ through the performative effects of language.
The article imagines a materially informed post-qualitative research. Focusing upon issues of language and representation, under the influence of Deleuze’s Logic of Sense, it argues for research practices capable of engaging the materiality of language itself. It proposes the development of non- or post-representational research practices, drawing on contemporary materialist work that rejects the static, hierarchical logic of representation, and practices such as interpretation and analysis as conventionally understood. The article explores the ontological and the practical implications of this state of affairs, via a re-reading of a fragment of what would have been called data. Offering relief from the ressentiment and piety that have characterised qualitative methodologists’ engagements with scientific method, the ‘post’ could therefore be read as signalling the demise of qualitative research. Or at least, as inaugurating a qualitative research that would be unrepresentable to itself.
The article considers the productive capacity for wonder that resides and radiates in data, or rather in the entangled relation of data-and-researcher. Wonder is not necessarily a safe, comforting, or uncomplicatedly positive affect. It shades into curiosity, horror, fascination, disgust, and monstrosity. But the price paid for the ruin caused—to epistemic certainty or the comforts of a well-wrought coding scheme—is, after Massumi (2002, p. 19), the privilege of a headache. Not the answer to a question, but the astute crafting of a problem and a challenge: what next?
Canada's fringe festivals are important interventions in the discourses and institutions framing Canadian theatre, leading some to recognize them as sites of a radical cultural politics. Most commentators have placed their attention on performance at these events, but in this paper, the focus is on the manner in which these events reorganize urban spaces into festival spaces, constructing informal discursive arenas within which the interaction of patrons, artists, and organizers is encouraged, and which situates performance, display, and the negotiation of social identities within an intersubjective field less influenced by certain constraints in traditional theatre. What is often overlooked, however, is that these discursive arenas are constructed within, at the same time as they engage, the social and spatial organization of the city, and are therefore marked by certain exclusions and inclusions. By refusing to abstract these festivals as 'artistic events', attention can be paid to their 'topography', to explore the relations between cultural practice, social identity, and the organization of the city.
We analyze organizational regeneration using case materials from a study of a children's summer camp. Each year members of various types of seasonal organizations, such as summer camps and ski areas, come together to bring these organizations “back to life” after many months of dormancy. Because many staff members are new and other conditions vary, the result of this regeneration process is necessarily different from the previous year's organization, but it is nonetheless recognizable to repeat clientele as a familiar instance of “the same” organization. We use this rarely examined process of regeneration to explore the question of how we can regard an organization as being the same entity over time. We suggest that this sameness stems from a coherence and similarity of actions at the organizational level that is analogous to the psychological notion of individual character. Just as individual habits cohere in the character of an individual and allow us to recognize and predict future behavior, we argue that organizations are systems of interacting dispositions to act in a particular way. It is the mutually adapted content of this ensemble of action dispositions that constitutes what we present here as organizational character. We argue that such an ensemble of dispositions is coherent, persistent, and necessary for seasonal regeneration. This work contributes to an ongoing discussion of organizational action and similarity over time. Our focus on regenerative processes in a seasonal organization provides a distinct and informative perspective on these issues.
This paper begins with a story told by a corporation president to illustrate what his organization was doing to "help" women employees balance the demands of work and home. The paper deconstructs and reconstructs this story text from a feminist perspective, examining what it says, what it does not say, and what it might have said. This analysis reveals how organizational efforts to "help women" have suppressed gender conflict and reified false dichotomies between public and private realms of endeavor, suggesting why it has proven so difficult to eradicate gender discrimination in organization. Implications of a feminist perspective for organizational theory are discussed.
Challenging the heteronormative bias in the current literature on men’s workplace friendships, this article uses qualitative interview data to explore how gay men understand and experience workplace friendships involving other gay and heterosexual men. Developing a Foucauldian approach, this study suggests that gay men’s experiences and perspectives on workplace friendships can supplant negative stereotypes of men’s friendships, by understanding them as relational sites for developing empowering organizational gay sexualities and genders. From a Foucauldian theoretical orientation, we can examine how gay men can(not) avoid falling into the trap of treating gender and sexuality in dichotomous and heterosexist terms, allowing them and their male work friends to explore new possibilities for workplace friendships that are more gender and sexually complex than is currently assumed. This article advocates future research on this matter as it could potentially enrich extant critical scholarship that has often bathed organizational masculinities in a negative light.
This article is a study of professional identity work, using in-depth interview material from research conducted into the work lives of 10 gay men employed in a UK National Health Service Trust. Using the men's portraits of professional life, we examine the different ways they understand what it means to be a `professional'. The article suggests that while gay men appear to be empowered by forms of agency to self-identify as professionals in `gay-friendly' work contexts, they are by no means unaffected by dominant professional norms and discourses of heteronormativity that treat sexuality and professionalism as polar opposites. Thus how straightforward it might be for the interviewees to self-identify as `professional' and openly gay within an organization that is perceived to be `gay-friendly' is scrutinized in terms of the professional identity dilemmas experienced by the study participants. We conclude that, even within `gayfriendly' organizational settings, fashioning a professional identity is a process marked by negotiation and struggle.
We have recently witnessed a growing, if still arguably marginal, interest in `Critical Management Studies' (CMS). Our aim in this paper is to reflect upon the popularization of CMS; more specifically, we propose to examine the various factors that have contributed to its emergence, and to review the significance of its project. We start by exploring the conditions of possibility for CMS and point to a combination of political, institutional and epistemological trends. In the second part of the paper, we consider what constitutes `CMS' and suggest that whilst it draws upon a plurality of intellectual traditions, CMS is unified by an anti performative stance, and a commitment to (some form of) denaturalization and reflexivity. Finally, we articulate the polemics around which CMS politics have been contested, in particular we review the debates between neo-Marxism and post-structuralism, and discuss the issue of engagement with management practice.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to take account of organizational ethnography in its historical and methodological context, on the occasion of the inauguration of the Journal of Organizational Ethnography .
Design/methodology/approach
This essay brings together some current issues and concerns in one form of “marked” ethnography.
Findings
This essay touches on the questions: what is organizational ethnography and why is it re‐emerging now?; and on related questions, on its way to engaging some of the key methodological issues in organizational ethnography that today merit attention.
Originality/value
The paper may be of value to readers who are interested in the method and in one researcher's conceptual‐methodological take on it.
This article aims to make a contribution to the literature by addressing an undertheorized aspect of sensemaking: its embodied narrative nature. We do so by integrating a hermeneutic phenomenological perspective of narrative and storytelling with a documentary case taken from a filmed tour of a sports team to illustrate the process of sensemaking around a specific event. We argue that we make our lives, ourselves and our experience ‘sensible’ in embodied interpretations and interactions with others. We suggest this occurs within contested, embedded, narrative performances in which we try to construct sensible and plausible accounts that are responsive to the moment and to retrospective and anticipatory narratives.