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International audience ; Work in contemporary society is hidden. Work's products accumulate and fill the spaces of leisure with traces and memories of past labor. Yet, work, and workers, are both necessary and impossible in this accumulation; the memory of their efforts haunts consumer products like a premonition or a limit. This invisibility of work, like the modern subject itself, seems to exist outside of time, inhabiting another kind of time than the linear progression of objects that constitute its past. Symbolically positioned as the antechamber of subjectivity itself, the body and spirit of the worker are produced and repaired over the weekend.The weekend is a liminal, paradoxical space, an ending and a beginning of production, a place where subjects are free to be themselves, yet are faced with the anxiety of empty time to fill by subjects alienated by the weakening of personal ties. Bereft of thick social relations, consumer goods fill the gaps as atomized tokens of individualized work processes. These objects act as talismans against the social void they obscure, sparing us the trauma of facing directly our lack of solidarity. When the demand to help those near us confronts us in the form of a plea, an accusation, or merely the questioning gaze of a work colleague, we realize we are unprepared to meet this demand.A growing discussion is emerging around the relationality of individuals in work contexts, the relational subject, the people of organization. But what about the time of organization? If the workweek is the space of mundane ethics, the ethics of codes, rules and norms, of responsibilities, then the weekend has its own ethics, the messianic, liminal ethics of the sabbatical, where individuals ritualistically invoke the love behind the law. In the mythical space of work/leisure, if the workweek serves for the production of goods, the weekend serves for the reproduction of society. If the workweek works on standardized, linear time, the weekend comes to symbolize unstructured spontaneity. These two spheres co-constitute each other, the weekend giving meaning to the workweek, which frames and nourishes the weekend. Opposed, the two times exist in a tenuous balance.I reflect on the timing of work and leisure in response to a certain uneasiness I felt when watching the film 2 Days, 1 Night (2 Jours 1 Nuit) by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, one Saturday afternoon, with the goal of relating the film to contemporary understandings of work and organizations. The prima facie relation was obvious – a film about a firing, a burnout, the roller coaster of contingent work, the theater of workplace democracy faced with the brutal reality of self-interest. I combed through the many work-related themes, from the personal to the societal, from anxiety to alienation, searching for the hermeneutic key that would reveal to me the complexities of modern work as portrayed in the film. Yet a lingering question remained with me – where was the work in this film?I was struck, then, by the ironic fact that the film, a tour de force about working life, took place almost entirely on the weekend. It was right there in the title – 2 days, 1 night. The movie began just as the boss was leaving work, drew us inexorably through a Saturday and Sunday that seemed both endless and exhausting and yet all-too-quick, and ended at the beginning of the work week. I was left with the lingering question of why a movie whose focal point is labor relations would so obviously situate the action outside of the temporality of work, even taking the title of those few moments outside of the working week.Despite the volumes that have been written about the intensification of work and the erosion of leisure, a quick search revealed that the weekend was a largely untheorized domain, perhaps an off-limits area where work considered taboo, at best a protected space whose social status had been won through historical struggle and whose subsequent erosion was a source of nostalgic lamentation. Perhaps scholars of work, I mused, had better things to do on a Saturday than write about the weekend. Watching a film, however, seemed to be a legitimate weekend activity, and I felt thus justified in using this film to enter into an exploration of the uses of leisure. Whether the film presented a welcome catharsis from the workweek, or a Trojan Horse bringing workplace issues into the leisure sphere, 2 Days 1 Night seemed to offer an experiment in cinematic representation that was worth exploring.In the present case, it must be said that watching this film is far from leisure; a hard film to sit through, it enacts through its pace the slow but urgent ticking away toward a moment of confrontation – with one's own demons, with one's boss, and most of all with one's colleagues. Each shuffle-step of Marion Cotillard's hesitant moments of encounter presents us the dread of a women who must face the judgment of her peers, as she demands the reinstatement of a social bond that has long been forgotten. Should she be expected to disrupt her colleagues' hobbies, their shopping and drinking, their moments with their families, to stir up the injustice that they all face? Are her demands unfair, or just? As her colleagues ask her over the telephone or as she rings their doorbell – can't this wait until Monday?

The study of collective cognition has taken many forms in recent years, including collective managerial cognition, organizational learning, shared mental models, transactive memory and psychological climate. However, few studies have confronted the foundational ideas underlying group mentality directly, leaving the concept as largely metaphorical. The current work reviews foundational debates around the conceptual components of group minds to serve as a meta-theoretical heuristic to orient future research. To lay out this framework, conceptual distinctions are drawn between phenomenal, vehicle, content and context elements of cognition. Next, existing approaches are reframed as conjunctions of claims across the four levels, leading to a distinction between configurationalist, situated and extended views of collective cognition. Finally, future research is proposed regarding the interfaces between conceptual levels and the possibility of establishing bona fide group mental entities.

International audience ; This paper discusses the concept of organizational anthropophagy, a metaphor describing a unique relationship between identity and otherness. To show how this perspective contributes to understandings of diversity and difference, I read anthropophagy against psychoanalytic discussions of abjection, a process where individuals are simultaneously fascinated by, drawn towards, and horrified by their relationships to outside "others". Stemming from the global periphery, anthropophagy provides a way to combine psychoanalytic with sociological views of otherness. I stress the implications of the anthropophagic approach for organizational theorizing of the "monstrous", placing monstrousness against the political economic context of post-coloniality and discussing its relations with diversity and difference.

International audience ; This paper discusses the concept of organizational anthropophagy, a metaphor describing a unique relationship between identity and otherness. To show how this perspective contributes to understandings of diversity and difference, I read anthropophagy against psychoanalytic discussions of abjection, a process where individuals are simultaneously fascinated by, drawn towards, and horrified by their relationships to outside "others". Stemming from the global periphery, anthropophagy provides a way to combine psychoanalytic with sociological views of otherness. I stress the implications of the anthropophagic approach for organizational theorizing of the "monstrous", placing monstrousness against the political economic context of post-coloniality and discussing its relations with diversity and difference.

I propose the concept of anthropophagy as a metaphor for understanding Brazilian organizational knowledge, contributing to post-colonial thought, and better understanding issues of cultural mix and hybridity essential to contemporary social theory. After describing the diverse meanings of anthropophagy, I outline three important moments in Brazilian history where the concept has been central to understanding intercultural mixture. First, anthropophagy was an important component of indigenous reactions to intercultural contact, providing a ritual mechanism by which to negotiate identity. This identity crafting mechanism became revived in the 20th century modernist and tropicalist periods, where it took on symbolic functions in positioning modern Brazilian identity with respect to both European and indigenous roots. More recently, anthropophagy has entered the organizational literature, providing novel ways to make sense of key concepts in the discipline. I discuss three central issues around which anthropophagy contributes to contemporary theory, those of otherness, authenticity, and corporality.

While emerging literature explores how organizations engage with the past, investigations of how complex relationships to the past influence mobilizing multiple forms of historical representation in practice remain scarce. The current study examines different relationships to the past to shed light on how their complex and at times contradictory connotations relates to the use of multimodal historical cues in organizational practices, based on a qualitative study of art galleries in downtown Tehran, Iran. We describe how fondness for, aversion to and conflicted relationships with the past coexist, and how and why actors use diverse historical cues to express these diverse relationships in practice. We add to current understandings of organizational uses of the past by offering insights into how and why organizations actively evoke and manage positive, negative, and conflicted relationships to the past, and how these relationships draw upon diverse discursive and non-discursive supports to organizational practices aiming at different yet complementary goals.

International audience ; The current paper examines the experience of middle management through the concept of boundary work, characterized as the work of negotiating between multiple roles at the interstices of organizational groups. Through an ethnographic study of a Brazilian accounting firm, we explore the ambivalent experience of boundary work as characteristic of professional middle managerial workers. Our managers described themselves as proactive and reflexive agents, on the one hand, yet also as lacking autonomy and a sense of belonging, on the other. We examine this tension as a contrast between forces of emancipation (i.e. sense of mastery, autonomy, empowerment and reflexivity) and alienation (i.e. fatigue, lack of self-determination, and detachment from their profession and coworkers). We discuss these forces and their implications for managerial work in the light that, in our findings, managers routinely shift between being agential and reflexive mediators-boundary subjects-and interfacing and coordination devices-boundary objects.

International audience ; The current paper examines the experience of middle management through the concept of boundary work, characterized as the work of negotiating between multiple roles at the interstices of organizational groups. Through an ethnographic study of a Brazilian accounting firm, we explore the ambivalent experience of boundary work as characteristic of professional middle managerial workers. Our managers described themselves as proactive and reflexive agents, on the one hand, yet also as lacking autonomy and a sense of belonging, on the other. We examine this tension as a contrast between forces of emancipation (i.e. sense of mastery, autonomy, empowerment and reflexivity) and alienation (i.e. fatigue, lack of self-determination, and detachment from their profession and coworkers). We discuss these forces and their implications for managerial work in the light that, in our findings, managers routinely shift between being agential and reflexive mediators-boundary subjects-and interfacing and coordination devices-boundary objects.