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What Would it Take to Organize for a Better World? Thinking with Feminist New Materialisms
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In the most prestigious journals of many disciplines, female researchers are underrepresented. To better understand this phenomenon, we compare the proportions of female authors in all leading management and organization studies (MOS) journals, explore underlying gendered publication patterns, and analyze factors explaining differences between journals. We examine the gendered distribution of authorship in these journals using a complete, original time series. The comprehensive data set includes all articles published in fourteen leading journals in the MOS field, comprising 77,472 cases (authors) and 43,673 articles. The findings show that women have been underrepresented in all leading MOS journals until now. However, our findings reveal significant differences between journals, with some journals lagging far behind their peers. We ask why some journals score much higher than others and show that gendered authorship constellations and research topic specialization consistently explain female representation differences between journals. More specifically, we find a dominance of 'men's clubs' when it comes to authorship constellations and thriving 'male islands' when it comes to research topics. In contrast, 'women's clubs' are far less prevalent and no 'female island' exists. Interestingly, female authorship and 'shared islands' play a particularly powerful role in narrowing the gender gap in leading journals. Our results provide a benchmark for female representation across leading journals and allow for the formulation of concrete research policy goals and directions for change.
The chapter illustrates the contribution of practice epistemology to the study of management and organization. It argues that practice theories are particularly suited to answer a simple question. What do managers ‘do’ when they manage? The nature of managerial work is still an open question, and a posthumanist practice theory addresses it blurring the boundaries between epistemology and ontology. In other words, the researcher’s epistemic practices (and ethics) shape the object of knowledge. A practice epistemology focuses on managerial work as a collective knowledgeable doing, framing managing in relation to sociomateriality and agency achieved within the agencement of practice elements. The chapter illustrates the applications of a humanist and posthumanist practice epistemology in order to show the respective implications on methodology. The challenge of a posthumanist epistemology for future research is seen in terms of inventing post-qualitative methods based on the concept of entanglement of human and more than human elements.
The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc globally and still persists even after a year of its initial outbreak. Several reasons can be considered: people are in close contact with each other, i.e., at a short range (1 m), and the healthcare system is not sufficiently developed or does not have enough facilities to manage and fight the pandemic, even in developed countries such as the USA and the U.K. and countries in Europe. There is a great need in healthcare for remote monitoring of COVID-19 symptoms. In the past year, a number of IoT-based devices and wearables have been introduced by researchers, providing good results in terms of high accuracy in diagnosing patients in the prodromal phase and in monitoring the symptoms of patients, i.e., respiratory rate, heart rate, temperature, etc. In this systematic review, we analyzed these wearables and their need in the healthcare system. The research was conducted using three databases: IEEE Xplore®, Web of Science®, and PubMed Central®, between December 2019 and June 2021. This article was based on the PRISMA guidelines. Initially, 1100 articles were identified while searching the scientific literature regarding this topic. After screening, ultimately, 70 articles were fully evaluated and included in this review. These articles were divided into two categories. The first one belongs to the on-body sensors (wearables), their types and positions, and the use of AI technology with ehealth wearables in different scenarios from screening to contact tracing. In the second category, we discuss the problems and solutions with respect to utilizing these wearables globally. This systematic review provides an extensive overview of wearable systems for the remote management and automated assessment of COVID-19, taking into account the reliability and acceptability of the implemented technologies.
Posthuman affirmative ethics relies upon a fluid, nomadic conception of the ethical subject who develops affective, material and immaterial connections to multiple others. Our purpose in this paper is to consider what posthuman affirmative business ethics would look like, and to reflect on the shift in thinking and practice this would involve. The need for a revised understanding of human–animal relations in business ethics is amplified by crises such as climate change and pandemics that are related to ecologically destructive business practices such as factory farming. In this analysis, we use feminist speculative fiction as a resource for reimagination and posthuman ethical thinking. By focusing on three ethical movements experienced by a central character named Toby in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, we show how she is continually becoming through affective, embodied encounters with human and nonhuman others. In the discussion, we consider the vulnerability that arises from openness to affect which engenders heightened response-ability to and with, rather than for, multiple others. This expanded concept of subjectivity enables a more relational understanding of equality that is urgently needed in order to respond affirmatively to posthuman futures.
What if we imagine we have been leaving the épistème of the age of 'Man at the center of knowledge', the epoch which has brought us to the brink of ecological disaster through discourses and practices of advanced market capitalism, and move on to imagine that we are entering the age of the Anthropocene, positing the need for radically reconceptualizing the relationship between humanity and nature? What discourses and practices would carry this? What kind of knowledge would be possible? Who would be the subject of such knowledge? Inspired by Braidotti's definition of cartography as a method and Latour's articulation of matters of fact and matters of concern, we bring together a variety of feminist ecological perspectives, materialist and new materialist, to eventually assemble a cartographic lens we label ecologies of sustainable concerns. Such a lens would facilitate reclaiming 'sustainability' in organization studies discourses and practices for living well and living with others in the Anthropocene. It is our expectation that in reclaiming 'sustainability' through the feminist literatures we are using, and their discursive variations, it would become clearer that there are options for an economy and ecology beyond what is permissible to say and do as knowledge in organization studies under advanced market capitalism. © 2017 The Authors. Gender, Work & Organization published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Current approaches to the study of affective relations are over-determined in a way that ignores their radicality, yet abstracted to such an extent that the corporeality and differentially lived experience of power and resistance is neglected. To radicalize the potential of everyday affects, this article calls for an intensification of corporeality in affect research. We do this by exploring the affective trajectory of ‘becoming-woman’ introduced by Deleuze and Guattari. Becoming-woman is a process of gendered deterritorialization and a specific variation on becoming-minoritarian. Rather than a reference to empirical women, becoming-woman is a necessary force of critique against the phallogocentric powers that shape and constrain working lives in gendered organizations. While extant research on gendered organizations tends to focus on the overwhelming power of oppressive gender structures, engaging with becoming-woman releases affective flows and possibilities that contest and transgress the increasingly subtle and confusing ways in which gendered organization affects people at work. Through becoming-woman, an affective and affirmative politics capable of resisting the effects of gendered organization becomes possible. This serves to further challenge gendered oppression in organizations and to affirm a life beyond the harsh limits that gender can impose.
Abstract A proposal to designate a new geological epoch of our own making—
the Anthropocene—is being considered by the International Commission on
Stratigraphy (ICS), part of the International Union of Geological Sciences. Based on
a set of formal criteria, there is growing consensus for a Holocene–Anthropocene
boundary set at some point in the last 200 years. A number of scientists have
questioned the utility of such a designation because it overlooks the millennia-long
history of human impacts on the planet and fails to focus on the causes of human
domination of the Earth in favor of the effects. I review these debates and synthesize
a variety of proposals for an Anthropocene beginning 10,000 years ago to as little as
50. I then review a number of parallel debates focused less on the geosciences and
more on the political, social, and institutional implications of the Anthropocene. I
demonstrate how and why formal ICS criteria for the designation of geological time
units may be inadequate for effectively meeting the underlying rationale for designating
a human-induced geological epoch and the role it is currently and,
potentially, will continue to play in the court of public opinion.
The neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed time frames. Though the neoliberal transformation of the university is well documented, the isolating effects and embodied work conditions of such increasing demands are too rarely discussed. In this article, we develop a feminist ethics of care that challenges these working conditions. Our politics foreground collective action and the contention that good scholarship requires time: to think, write, read, research, analyze, edit, organize, and resist the growing administrative and professional demands that disrupt these crucial processes of intellectual growth and personal freedom. This collectively written article explores alternatives to the fast-paced, metric-oriented neoliberal university through a slow- moving conversation on ways to slow down and claim time for slow scholarship and collective action informed by feminist politics. We examine temporal regimes of the neoliberal university and their embodied effects. We then consider strategies for slowing scholarship with the objective of contributing to the slow scholarship movement. This slowing down represents both a commitment to good scholarship, teaching, and service and a collective feminist ethics of care that challenges the accelerated time and elitism of the neoliberal university. Above all, we argue in favor of the slow scholarship movement and contribute some resistance strategies that foreground collaborative, collective, communal ways forward.
This article identifies power, subjectivity, and practices of freedom as neglected but significant elements for understanding the ethics of social entrepreneurship. While the ethics of social entrepreneurship is typically conceptualized in conjunction with innate properties or moral commitments of the individual, we problematize this view based on its presupposition of an essentialist conception of the authentic subject. We offer, based on Foucault’s ethical oeuvre, a practice-based alternative which sees ethics as being exercised through a critical and creative dealing with the limits imposed by power, notably as they pertain to the conditioning of the neoliberal subject. To this end, we first draw on prior research which looks at how practitioners of social enterprises engage with government policies that demand that they should act and think more like prototypical entrepreneurs. Instead of simply endorsing the kind of entrepreneurial subjectivity implied in prevailing policies, our results indicate that practitioners are mostly reluctant to identify themselves with the invocation of governmental power, often rejecting the subjectivity offered to them by discourse. Conceiving these acts of resistance as emblematic of how social entrepreneurs practice ethics by retaining a skeptical attitude toward attempts that seek to determine who they should be and how they should live, we introduce three vignettes that illustrate how practices of freedom relate to critique, the care for others, and reflected choice. We conclude that a practice-based approach of ethics can advance our understanding of how social entrepreneurs actively produce conditions of freedom for themselves as well as for others without supposing a ‘true self’ or a utopian space of liberty beyond power.
If the Global Finance Crisis has taught us anything, it’s that economics as we know it is not working. If global warming means anything, it’s that we have to rethink how we live on this shared planet. Take Back the Economy is about making the economy work for people and the planet. It is intended for academic researchers, activists, students, community members and citizens interested in how they can contribute to a more just, sustainable and equitable world. The book reframes the idea that the economy is a thing, separate from us and best understood by experts. The economy is presented as a human creation and therefore open to ethical intervention and political imagination. This book explores the actions that people are taking to build ethical economies, and it presents these actions in terms of shared ethical concerns. What’s necessary for human survival? What do we do with the extra or surplus that’s produced over and above what we need to survive? What relationships do we have with other people and with the environments that help to satisfy our needs? What do we use up and consume in the process of satisfying our needs? How do we maintain and replenish the gifts of nature and intellect that all humans rely on? How can we invest in a future worth living in? There are no easy answers to these questions, but across the globe people are responding in novel ways that take into account people and planetary wellbeing. Take Back the Economy features these novel responses and it introduces a series of tools that readers can use to explore the ethical thinking that underpins the responses. It shows readers how they can take back the economy from where they are and using what they have at hand.
Across the globe, groups are experimenting with initiatives to create alternatives to the dominant food system. What role might research play in helping to strengthen and multiply these initiatives? In this paper we discuss two research projects in Australia and the Philippines in which we have cultivated hybrid collectives of academic researchers, lay researchers and various non-human others with the intention of enacting community food economies. We feature three critical interactions in the “hybrid collective research method”: gathering, which brings together those who share concerns about community food economies; reassembling, in which material gathered is deliberatively rebundled to amplify particular insights; and translating, by which reassembled ideas are taken up by other collectives so they may continue to “do work”. We argue that in a climate-changing world, the hybrid collective research method fosters opportunities for a range of human and non-human participants to act in concert to build community food economies.
There is widespread agreement that current climate change scenarios mean we have to change how we live on this planet. Yet our current understandings of social and behavioural change seem insufficient for the task at hand. In this paper we explore Bruno Latour's notion of “learning to be affected”, and we argue that this idea of bodily learning seems well-suited to thinking about how people can be moved to act in response to the human and nonhuman world that is all around us. We also argue that research can prompt and sharpen this form of embodied learning when it is conducted in a performative and collective mode that is geared towards crafting rather than capturing realities. We demonstrate how this might occur through the example of a community garden research project based on a collective bus trip-workshop method.
In the Western world, social enterprises are increasingly seen by governments and non-government agencies as important for addressing social and economic exclusion, and providing much-needed services to disadvantaged people and places. But in order to fulfil expectations, social enterprises seem to be turning more and more to mainstream business practices thereby putting at risk the very characteristics that distinguish them from conventional businesses. In this paper, I ask whether social enterprises have to follow a business-as-usual approach or whether there are other economic practices that social enterprises can draw on to achieve their social (and environmental) ambitions. To do this, I examine two Australian initiatives that operate in economically novel ways, and I argue that these enterprises demonstrate the variety of largely untapped economic innovations that can be used to build viable social enterprises. Introduction In the Australian context, there is growing interest in the potential of social enterprises to address social and economic exclusion by providing training and jobs, and delivering services for marginalised groups. As a result, governments, non-government organisations, philanthropic trusts and others have developed a range of innovative programs to initiate and support social enterprises. i This strong interest in social enterprise mirrors what has happened in Europe where social enterprises are seen as having a central role to play in reintegrating the economically and socially marginalised back into mainstream economy and society. ii Social enterprises have their roots in community enterprises, initiatives that developed through local community activism and engaged in business activities only as a means of achieving community goals, and addressing community needs and concerns (Pearce 2009; see also Smith 2009). These community enterprises generally developed as alternatives or in opposition to the state and private sector. However, the social enterprises that are currently on the policy and political table are very different. Writing in the UK context, practitioner and researcher John Pearce notes that [w]hereas community enterprises are very much the agent of the people by whom and for whom they have been established, social enterprises can easily become and be seen as the tool of the state as they lobby for more of the procurement cake and are courted by all the major political parties as a means of delivering welfare and other services. (2009: 30) Neil Smith similarly observes in the Australian context that social enterprises are being seen by senior politicians 'as a social welfare intervention to "help" "disadvantaged" people and communities' (2009: 1), and are therefore very different from locally owned and embedded community enterprises.
Incl. bibl., index, statistical annex.
This paper explores vulnerable relational knowing, and in it we open up our own embodied habits and experiences as feminist academics. We discuss how displaying our academic bodies as naked, both symbolically and physically, enhances and appreciates––instead of hiding––vulnerability. We also discuss how our academic bodies entangle with a range of more-than-human creatures and material surroundings to highlight the multispecies and material nature of vulnerable relational knowing. Two detailed stories, ‘Intimate sharing of academic knowledge: A recumbent study circle’ and ‘Keropirtti: A place and space to work differently’ provide unique examples of the enactment of alternative ways of working in academia, and their analysis demonstrates the potential of vulnerability for embodied relational knowing in academia, which has, to date, been commonly analysed in the context of writing.
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Haraway’s discussions of how scientists have perceived the sexual nature of female primates opens a new chapter in feminist theory, raising unsettling questions about models of the family and of heterosexuality in primate research.
In recent years, feelings such as melancholia, paranoia, despair and political depression have been deemed distinctive political moods, also within critical theories. This, the author argues, is the affective landscape for understanding and situating new materialist endeavours. As much as new materialist approaches have been praised and even celebrated lately, they have also provoked highly controversial reactions and evoked questions, such as: Why a new materialism, why at this historical moment? And what is so attractive about this material turn? In this article, the author argues that new materialist approaches seek to oppose the contemporary affective condition of political depression, despair and hopelessness by desiring and mobilizing to achieve a different political future, one that ultimately relates to care and commonality as well as to (new) modes and modalities of political agency. However, while new materialist approaches doubtlessly provide engaged and powerful inventions and interventions within contemporary struggles for agency, the author also demonstrates the risk of depoliticization inherent in this longing for something different, which can ultimately even compromise opening up possibilities for agency. This article, thus, aims to discuss new materialist concerns within the context of contemporary political and theoretical landscapes in order to better decipher the new materialist signals of our times, but also to critically push further the possibilities for political agency within feminist theory, at times even against all odds.
This essay de-centers the human for a more ecological perspective. Drawing on Haraway’s “naturecultures” and Deleuze and Guattari’s “assemblages,” the authors collaborate across the humanities and sciences to rethink Asian/America as a multispecies, naturecultural, and transnational phenomenon. After offering a theoretical foundation, the essay connects Asian/American Studies to issues in the biological sciences, and discusses how Said’s theory of Orientalism resonates in a multispecies paradigm – specifically, the nativism and xenophobia of “invasion biology” that vilifies foreign species with strident calls for their eradication. Case studies reveal that it is not an essential predilection to invasion, but the conditions of globalization that generate so-called invasions. The authors conclude that solutions must move from targeting species to a reconsideration of the larger forces that “invite” invasions and that assembling Asian/America generate interdisciplinary academic and political partnerships that can better solve the problems of the 21st century.
There is no doubt that “economy” is a keyword in contemporary life, yet what constitutes economy is increasingly contested terrain. Interested in building “other worlds,” J. K. Gibson-Graham have argued that the economy is not only diverse but also open to experimentations that foreground the well-being of humans and nonhumans alike. Making Other Worlds Possible brings together in one volume a compelling range of projects inspired by the diverse economies research agenda pioneered by Gibson-Graham. This collection offers perspectives from a wide variety of prominent scholars that put diverse economies into conversation with other contemporary projects that reconfigure the economy as performative. Here, Robert Snyder and Kevin St. Martin explore the emergence of community-supported fisheries; Elizabeth S. Barron documents how active engagements between people, plants, and fungi in the United States and Scotland are examples of highly productive diverse economic practices; and Michel Callon investigates how alternative forms of market organization and practices can be designed and implemented. Firmly establishing diverse economies as a field of research, Making Other Worlds Possible outlines an array of ways scholars are enacting economies differently that privilege ethical negotiation and a politics of possibility. Ultimately, this book contributes to the making of economies that put people and the environment at the forefront of economic decision making. Contributors: Elizabeth S. Barron, U of Wisconsin–Oshkosh; Amanda Cahill; Michel Callon, École des mines de Paris; Jenny Cameron, U of Newcastle, Australia; Stephen Healy, Worcester State U; Yahya M. Madra, Bogazici U; Deirdre McKay, Keele U; Sarah A. Moore, U of Wisconsin–Madison; Ceren Ozselçuk, Bogazici U; Marianna Pavlovskaya, Hunter College, CUNY; Paul Robbins, U of Wisconsin–Madison; Maliha Safri, Drew U; Robert Snyder, Island Institute; Karen Werner, Goddard College. © 2015 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved.
Research often characterized as “new materialist” has staged a return/turn to nature in social and critical theory by bringing “matter” into the purview of our research. While this growing impetus to take nature seriously fosters new types of interdisciplinarity and thus new resources for knowing our nature-cultural worlds, its capacity to deal with power’s imbrication in how we understand “nature” is curtailed by its failures to engage substantively with the epistemological interventions of postcolonial feminist science studies. The citational practices of many new materialist thinkers eschew the existence of what Sandra Harding has called “a world of sciences.” I argue that the “science” privileged and often conflated with matter in new materialist storytelling is the same science destabilized by postcolonial feminist science studies. This does not mean that new materialist feminisms and postcolonial feminist science studies are necessarily at odds, as new materialist storytelling and prevailing conceptualizations of the postcolonial seem to suggest. On the contrary, I suggest that thinking creatively, capaciously, pluralistically, and thus irreverently with respect to the rules of science––about the boundaries and meanings of matter, “life,” and “humanness”––could be understood as a central project for a postcolonial feminist science studies.
This article argues that feminist theorists should conceive of the life sciences not only as a factual resource but also as a figural resource. It proposes that in shifting our conceptual orientation to biological science from fact to figure, feminists will be able to give theoretical life to scientific findings about the ways in which social environments and material habitats are processes integral to our development, growth, and social and political well-being. The figuration of ourselves as specifically biocultural creatures will enable feminists to gain a stronger theoretical and analytic purchase on the ongoing mutual shaping of the biological and social dimensions of existence. This, in turn, will enable feminists to creatively re-imagine the fields and fora of feminist politics.
We engage in a critical theoretical exercise to extend the boundaries of entrepreneur-ship theory and research by reframing "entrepreneurship as positive economic activity" to "entrepreneurship as social change." Reframing entrepreneurship through feminist analytical lenses, we argue that more theoretical frameworks are needed for exploring the varieties of social change that entrepreneurship may bring about. We also discuss what difference this would make in extant entrepreneurship perspectives. Theoretically, methodologically, and analytically, such reframing is the main contribution of this paper.
This article elicits two overlapping frameworks in which emancipation has been understood and applied to women. The first distinguishes between a) an original definition grounded in Roman Law and defined as release from slavery and b) an Enlightenment sense in which an emancipatory process is associated with a critical ethos. I derive this latter meaning from an analysis of Kant's and Foucault's respective essays on enlightenment. Although they agree that emancipation is an ongoing critical task, I emphasize two aspects of Foucault's version: his attention to practices of liberty that entail bodily as well as subjective reconstruction and his inclusion, among topics for critique, of modernity's ontology of the human subject. In the case of women's emancipation, I argue that both aspects of emancipation must proceed simultaneously because of the distinctive nature of their oppression. For second-wave feminism, I note a continued, although reoriented, equation between women and slaves. But now I identify a further framework whereby emancipation emerges as a threefold although systemic undertaking in which legal, subjectivist, and economic dimensions are at stake. I argue in conclusion that each entails unfinished emancipatory projects that represent timely ways to revive emancipation in the twenty-first century.
In this new book, Bruno Latour offers answers to questions raised in We Have Never Been Modern, a work that interrogated the connections between nature and culture. If not modern, he asked, what have we been, and what values should we inherit? Over the last twenty-five years, Latour has developed a research protocol different from the actor-network theory with which his name is now associated—a research protocol that follows the different types of connectors that provide specific truth conditions. These are the connectors that prompt a climate scientist challenged by a captain of industry to appeal to the institution of science, with its army of researchers and mountains of data, rather than to “capital-S Science” as a higher authority. Such modes of extension—or modes of existence, Latour argues here—account for the many differences between law, science, politics, and other domains of knowledge.Though scientific knowledge corresponds to only one of the many possible modes of existence Latour describes, an unrealistic vision of science has become the arbiter of reality and truth, seducing us into judging all values by a single standard. Latour implores us to recover other modes of existence in order to do justice to the plurality of truth conditions that Moderns have discovered throughout their history. This systematic effort of building a new philosophical anthropology presents a completely different view of what Moderns have been, and provides a new basis for opening diplomatic encounters with other societies at a time when all societies are coping with ecological crisis. (Publisher's abstract)
The aim of this article is to provide analytical tools for understanding why and how economic markets are becoming a growing source of political issues. We show, first, that the mechanisms of framing and overflowing, which characterize the functioning of markets, contribute towards the emergence of matters of concern and of concerned groups. We then explain why this proliferation of the social is accelerating, with particular emphasis on the establishment of a new innovation regime and the growing role of certain scientific disciplines and technologies. The multiplication of emergent concerned groups raises the question of what forms of market organization and political procedures could be designed and implemented to take their demands and expectations into account.
In this paper we want to affirm the desiring-social-change that we find in practices presently represented by theorists and policy-makers as examples of ‘social entrepreneurship’ (SE). We do this as an attempt to intensify the presence of the social and sociality in today's discourse on the entrepreneurship–society relationship. SE, as all entrepreneurship practices, operates by social and economic forces (limiting ourselves to those here), and generates social and economic outcomes (amongst others). Its second half, however, dominates the concept of SE, and our analysis seek to remedy this imbalance by focusing on the social productivity of entrepreneurship, on entrepreneurship desiring social change. We suggest ‘public entrepreneurship’ might grasp this as a more balanced concept that will also support a more precise analysis of the entrepreneurship–society relationship.
In this article, I note that the idea of a new materialist turn has recently been gathering steam. The first part considers some of the signature elements of the new materialisms. The most distinctive aspect identified here is the invocation of a generative or vital ontology of immanence. Following discussion of some of its principal claims, the article draws out its implications for reconceptualising agency, in particular regarding the way agentic capacities are recognised to be distributed across animate, and perhaps also inanimate, entities. The significance of this development for the political sciences is then explored. In a second part, I suggest that the new materialism entails a normative project. Here, ethical overtures towards a new sensitivity predicated on vital materialist insights are contrasted with a renewed critical theory. The latter is commended as a material reckoning of the 21st century: a project provisionally labelled a capacious historical materialism.
Science studies has often been against the normative dimension of epistemology, which made a naturalistic study of science impossible. But this is not to say that a new type of normativity cannot be detected at work inscience studies. This is especially true in the second wave of studies dealing with the body, which has aimed at criticizing the physicalization of the body without falling into the various traps of a phenomenology simply added to a physical substrate. This article explores the work of Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret in that respect, and shows how it can be used to rethink the articulation between the various levels that make up a body.
We have no interest whatever in minimizing the continuing history of racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise abusive biologisms, or the urgency of their exposure, that has made the gravamen of so many contemporary projects of critique. At the same time, we fear — with installation of an automatic antibiologism as the unshifting tenet of `theory' — the loss of conceptual access to an entire thought-realm. (Sedgwick and Frank, 1995: 15)
I was left wondering what danger had been averted by the exclusion of biology. What does the nominative `biological or anatomical body' actually refer to? And what secures the separation of its inadmissible matter from the proper purview of Irigaray's textual interventions? When I asked a question to this effect it was met with a certain nervous comprehension. Deciding, perhaps, that I must still be immersed in a precritical understanding of the body, the speaker dismissed me with a revealing theatrical gesture. As if to emphasize the sheer absurdity of my question she pinched herself and commented `Well I don't mean this body'. And so it seemed with a gesture so matter of fact that it required no further comment, the fact of (the) matter was both decided and dispatched. (Kirby, 1997: 70)
Feminism has been as deeply implicated in routinized antiessentialism as any of our critical procedures. Even though questions of `the body' have become increasingly fashionable in all manner of feminist projects (surely `the body' has become, in a very short space of time, one of our most routinized theoretical gestures), the schedule of feminism's antibiologism has been little altered. In most of these projects on `the body', the body in question is pursued in its socially, experientially, or psychically constituted forms, but rarely in its physiologically, biochemically, or microbiologically constituted form, the idea of biological construction having been rendered either unintelligible or naive. Despite an avowed interest in the body, there is a persistent distaste for biological detail. (Wilson, 1998: 14—15)
These feminist theories have usually been reluctant to engage with biological data: they retain, and encourage, the fierce antibiologism that marked the emergence of second wave feminism. (Wilson, 2004: 13)
That feminist scholars are particularly prone to a `knee jerk constructivism' helps explain the reluctance of those in the humanities to engage seriously with the claims of science. (Squier, 2004: 46)
This book functions primarily as a reminder to social, political, and cultural theorists, particularly those interested in feminism, antiracism and questions of the politics of globalisation, that they have forgotten a crucial dimension of research, if not necessary to, then certainly useful for more incisively formulating the concepts on which they so heavily, if implicitly rely. It is written as a remembrance of what we have forgotten — not just the body, but that which makes it possible and which limits its actions: the precarious, accidental, contingent, expedient, striving, dynamic status of life in a messy, complicated, resistant, brute world of materiality, a world regulated by the exigencies, the forces, of space and time. We have forgotten the nature, the ontology, of the body, the conditions under which bodies are encultured, psychologized, given identity, historical location, and agency. We have forgotten where we come from. (Grosz, 2004a: 2)
In parallel with the empirical work pursued for almost 30 years on the socio-technical networks of science, the author has systematically pursued a philosophical inquiry to compare different ways of producing truth (science and technology being only two ways among several). The principle is to add to the analysis of networks the 'key' in which each type of network is able to spread, this key defining for each type of mediation the felicity and infelicity conditions necessary to grasp it. This project aims at providing a positive philosophical anthropology of the moderns instead of the only negative one offered in 'We Have Never Been Modern'.
Entrepreneuring has never achieved a breakthrough as the key concept that could elucidate the inherently process-oriented character of entrepreneurship, but it may be able to serve as the conceptual attractor to accommodate the increasing interest in process theories within a creative process view. This paper considers whether this is possible. In addition to equilibrium-based understandings of the entrepreneurial process, this paper tentatively reconstructs the creative process view by distinguishing between a range of relevant perspectives: from those on complexity and chaos theory, to the interpretive and phenomenological, social constructionist, pragmatic and practice-based, to the relational materialist. Taking entrepreneuring as an open-ended concept to use in theoretical experimentation, the review documents the potential for the concept to develop new meanings and to attach itself to a series of concepts such as recursivity, enactment, disclosure, narration, discourse, dramatization, dialogicality, effectuation, social practice, translation and assemblage. It is argued that the very act of theorizing about the concept of ‘entrepreneuring’ indicates a move from methodological individualism to a relational turn in entrepreneurship studies, one that inscribes entrepreneurship into a social ontology of becoming.
This article analyzes how race has been studied in organization scholarship and demonstrates how our approaches to the study of race reflect and reify particular historical and social meanings of race. It is argued that the production of knowledge about race must be understood within a racial ideology embedded in a Eurocentric view of the world. Finally, a "re-vision" of the very concept of race and its historical and political meaning is suggested for rewriting "race" as a necessary and productive analytical category for theorizing about organizations.
At the core of J.K. Gibson-Graham's feminist political imaginary is the vision of a decentralized movement that connects globally dispersed subjects and places through webs of signification. We view these subjects and places both as sites of becoming and as opportunities for belonging. But no longer can we see subjects as simply human and places as human-centered. The ‘arrival’ of the Anthropocene has thrown us onto new terrain. Feminist critiques of hyper-separation are pushing us to move beyond the divisive binaries of human/nonhuman, subject/object, economy/ecology and thinking/acting. The reframing of our living worlds as vast uncontrolled experiments is inspiring us to reposition ourselves as learners, increasingly open to our interconnections with earth others and more willing to intervene in adventurous ways. In this article we begin to think about more-than-human regional development and regional research collectives that have the potential to perform resilient worlds. For us the project of belonging involves both participating in the vast experiment that is the Anthropocene and connecting deeply to specific places and concerns.
Over Antipode's 40 years our role as academics has dramatically changed. We have been pushed to adopt the stance of experimental researchers open to what can be learned from current events and to recognize our role in bringing new realities into being. Faced with the daunting prospect of global warming and the apparent stalemate in the formal political sphere, this essay explores how human beings are transformed by, and transformative of, the world in which we find ourselves. We place the hybrid research collective at the center of transformative change. Drawing on the sociology of science we frame research as a process of learning involving a collective of human and more-than-human actants—a process of co-transformation that re/constitutes the world. From this vision of how things change, the essay begins to develop an “economic ethics for the Anthropocene”, documenting ethical practices of economy that involve the being-in-common of humans and the more-than-human world. We hope to stimulate academic interest in expanding and multiplying hybrid research collectives that participate in changing worlds.
In this article, I look into Bengt Johannisson's experiments with enactive research in the so-called Anamorphosis Project. This methodological experiment was based on the assumption that to understand entrepreneurship, researchers themselves must enact an entrepreneurial process and reflect upon it by engaging in auto-ethnography. By connecting aesthetics and politics, this experiment guides us in seeing methodologies as more than just tools - actually as in(ter)ventions or inventive forms of intervening vis-a-vis societal or community issues. By conceptualizing the performance of scholarship as involving practices of enacting and engaging, I suggest entrepreneurship scholars to take into account the ontological politics of method and to anticipate what can be called methodological experimentation. Drawing upon non-representational theory and actor-network theory, I flesh out the notion of in(ter)vention by emphasizing both its performative and participative dimension
Obra teórica de una sociología de las asociaciones, el autor se cuestiona sobre lo que supone la palabra social que ha sido interpretada con diferentes presupuestos y se ha hecho del mismo vocablo un nombre impreciso e inadecuado, además se ha materializado el término como quien nombra algo concreto, de manera que lo social se convierte en un proceso de ensamblado y un tipo particular de material. Propone retomar el concepto original para hacer las debidas conexiones y descubrir el contenido estricto de las cuestiones que están conectadas bajo la sociedad.
Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti
- Rosi Braidotti
Braidotti, Rosi (2011), Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti, New York:
Columbia University Press.
The Anthropocene epoch: Scientists declare dawn of humaninfluenced age, The Guardian
- D Carrington
Carrington, D. (2016), The Anthropocene epoch: Scientists declare dawn of humaninfluenced age, The Guardian, 29 August, available at https://www.theguardian.
com/environment/2016/aug/29/ declare-anthropocene-epoch-experts-urge-geolog
ical-congress-human-impact-earth.
Tracing and theorizing ethics in entrepreneurship: Toward a critical hermeneutic of imagination
- Pascal Dey
- Chris Steyaert
Dey, Pascal and Chris Steyaert (2015), 'Tracing and theorizing ethics in entrepreneurship: Toward a critical hermeneutic of imagination', in Alison Pullen
and Carl Rhodes (eds), The Routledge Companion to Ethics, Politics and
Organizations, London: Routledge, pp. 231-48.