Suchergebnisse

This article considers a number of issues hampering the application of arts-based 'playful' methods in organization studies once the close relationships between ethnography and aesthetic research, and the connections between art and everyday experience, are recognized. Drawing particularly from the creative ethnographies of Kathleen Stewart, Dwight Conquergood and H. L. Goodall, Jr. it suggests that the performative nature of artistic cultural texts lies in their intention to move their audience towards new sensitivities, awareness, and even learning. Critique is not oppositional to such development, being essential for fully creative movement. The article therefore suggests that what is needed are critically affective performative texts. For such texts to be socially, politically and epistemologically defensible, and thus a viable form for researchers to consider adopting, it is necessary to understand how they work to generate critical momentum, and what possible lines are available for justifying and evaluating creative approaches that challenge orthodox organizational research in being neither objective, representational nor expressive. The article outlines four 'moments' of critical leverage – aesthetic, poetic, ethical and political – that work in play with each other to create powerful artistic texts, and illustrates them by drawing on work-related literature, music, poetry and art, including workplace ethnographies. This framework enables the location of artistic and 'playful' methods epistemologically and ontologically relative to other modes of research and offers a robust justification for their further use in the field of organization studies.

Kitsch as a descriptive and evaluative term is popularly deployed in the context of art and artifacts, contemporarily denoting that which is perhaps poor in taste, quality or refinement yet which retains some sort of mildly perverse attractiveness. It prettifies the problematic, makes the disturbing reassuring, and establishes an easy (and illusory) unity of the individual and the world. This article draws on historical sources and contemporary theory across a range of critical disciplines to expand our current awareness of the range of the concept and its organizational relevance. It examines how its acceptation has developed to incorporate mass production techniques and development in the reproductive technologies which can allow us to apply it with more precision to the field of organization studies. Kitsch is not so much a metaphor as a multifaceted response to modernity of great complexity in its very simplicity, and its key features are summarized. The article then identifies the presence of kitsch in two examples of thinking about organizing—the work of Abraham Maslow as an example of needs-based organization theory, and Peters and Waterman's In Search of Excellence, the founding example of the `excellence' school which claims the status of theory. It is not the identification of kitsch as an aesthetic style in organizing which is significant, but the recognition of kitsch as an ontology of being which effectively masks the experience of being—interposing itself as a comforting buffer between ourselves and the `real', and often being taken for it. Kitsch, rather than being a mere matter of stylistics, can be seen as one of the key philosophical problems of modernity and should therefore be taken seriously by organization theory.

This paper introduces a symposium of three other papers on the work of Henri Bergson, which develop his idea of creative evolution and argue for the continuing relevance and vitality of Bergson's work for contemporary organization studies. Bergson's corpus is reviewed, along with some suggestions as to his relevance for contemporary organization theory. It is argued that Bergson's work would view organization as part of its object, a process that is changed by that engagement in non-dialectical conversation with it. Organizing, then, is a reply to the object, an act that creates its own possibility. Calculative and formalistic organization theory fails to take into account the importance of intuition as a form of knowing, responsive to the shifting nature of both its object and itself over time, which a casual organization theory, on Bergsonian lines, would do. However, there is no Bergsonian system or programme to be offered here-merely an introduction to some of the rich veins of ideas in his work, and an invitation to engage with them-an invitation, which, like all invitations, invites reply.

This comment takes one term which Fiona Wilson in her excellent and useful review of the research on gender in organization studies makes central to her thesis. Whilst this term may be meaningfully applied to more recent studies of organizational behaviour with a largely technical emphasis, it cannot be applied accurately to the classical and human relations theorists — Taylor, Weber, Mayo and Maslow. Here they are very much aware of gender, and because of the nature of their particular knowledge projects, they actively suppress it. Contemporary reflexivity has again made blindness no longer an option — organization theory has to either embrace gender or suppress it, and acknowledge the motivations behind and the consequences of that suppression.

This paper explores case material to show the extent to which non-organizational experiences of violence can shape subsequent behavior within organizations. These connections are not commonly considered either in the study of organizational behavior or of managerial practice, because behaviors from other arenas, adaptations, and responses, can be reproduced many years away from the source of anxiety. These behaviors are widespread, patterned, cyclical, and carry an inevitability about them that cannot be modified simply by changing behavior alone. The paper concentrates on examples where the extent of pathological behavior is easily seen, but the processes which surface are common mechanisms of "ordinary" human behavior and more attenuated experiences of violence within organizations operate similarly. These processes are discussed through the work of object-relations theorists, Julia Kristeva, and recent theorists of masculinity, arguing that bureaucracies seek to deny the emotional dimension of their behavior and decision-making which creates emotion as an abject phenomenon, denied but present, ever potentially resurgent, never addressed as reality. Men are caught up in this web of societal and organizational denial because of their traditional dominance in formal organizations and the historical association of masculinity and rationality, compounded by the dynamics of male psychology. However traditional symbolic associations between men and physical violence introduce a problematic contradiction, and societal, cultural, and organizational arrangements tend to support and facilitate the psychodynamics of denial which deals with this contradiction by producing narcissistic and addictive responses. This is illustrated by a discussion of film, novel, and biographical data. The paper finally argues that men in organizations need to come to terms with the unacceptable in themselves and their experience in order to break this cycle of reproduction of dysfunctional behavior.

Problems of perspective, proximity and distance, objectivity, and self-interest perpetuate tensions in the social sciences. In positivistic research, still dominant in the organizational sciences, attention has been concentrated on the eradication of bias in the researcher. The effects of this approach have extended into areas where it is implicit and remains unrecognized, particularly in the tradition of "reflexive sociology." The focal problem here is one of self-knowing and declaration. Focusing on distanciation, the problem of stepping outside one's data, is an alternative perspective. Esthetic approaches to this issue demonstrate that the processes of fictionalization are endemic to the interpretation of data and the production of research accounts. Language is the central element in creating accounts which are constitutive of the world rather than revelatory of its essence, and hence are partial and persuasive versions of reality. This is discussed with reference to the work of organizational and occupational ethnographers. It is argued that research accounts are inescapably an order of fiction, representations of a world which is unknowable in any "objective" sense. However, the process and products of social science have a dehumanizing effect on social research in failing to recognize this. This cannot be countered by humanist strategies (e.g. self-declaration, confessional, etc.) which preserve misconceptions of authenticity but by exploration of what Lyotard calls the inhuman, those subliminal aspects of experience which are at or beyond the boundaries of articulation. This needs to be done by a greater incorporation of other forms of investigation of the human condition-literature, poetry, art, music-which habitually work at or on these boundaries into the form and processes of "normal" social science.

The social sciences have recently exhibited renewed interest in ethnography while traditional anthropology has been struggling with the challenges of postmodernism. This paper considers the theoretical implications of the potential convergence of these strands, with particular reference to the ethnography of organizations. Postmodernism is seen to affect ethnography by problematizing the processes of description, reference, and the establishment of authority in ethnographic texts. It offers, rather than a "scientific" model, a "literary" model of such texts in which description is an active construction rather than a neutral recording of the other's world. Ostensive reference becomes displaced by evocation, the single authorial voice by the "heteroglossia" of many contributing voices. Unfortunately, there is a tendency for the processes of interpretation to be abandoned to a free play of unlimited signification in which any and all meanings are possible, which jettisons rigor and with it critical acerbity. This paper argues for the development of deconstructive ethnography grounded in the work of Jacques Derrida. This ethnographic praxis would demystify social and organizational actions by revealing their inevitable and ever-present internal contradictions without resorting to an externally contrived theoretical or moral standard. It would realize its emancipatory potential through "self-deconstruction."