Suchergebnisse

This essay forms part of the 30th Special Issue of the journal and reflects on the role of the anniversarifier and reports on way of escaping the end of Organization to which it leads. Playful, ludic and irreverent this paper poses difficulties to the abstract, which should eventually be excised from the final publication.

Airports have recently become a central preoccupation for scholars concerned with a range of issues in the social sciences and the wider academy focused around governance and the modern nation state, philosophy, political economy, economics, geography, society and community. There is, however, little critical scholarly interest in what can be learned about management and organisation from airports, which has meant that our discipline is ceding ground to unitarist and highly functional, prescriptive and practitioner-oriented literature. One of the most significant critical challenges to this managerial orthodoxy is the recent work of Griggs and Howarth who adopt the theoretical resources of Laclau and Mouffe to advance their thesis that a discourse built around 'sustainable aviation' is established within public policy in an attempt to develop 'hegemonic' consensus around airport expansion. Laclau and Mouffe have been a significant influence on organisation studies, but when applied empirically their work is discovered to embody contradictions and tensions that prove ultimately self-defeating for those interested in developing a 'critical' politics of organisation. We consider the possibilities for a more critical and politically engaged form of organisation analysis based upon what we call here an 'interventionary ethnography'.

The appearance of 'Olly the cat' on the doorsteps of a major UK international airport provides occasion to reconsider the role of the animal in organization and offers suggestive insight into how we might have to learn new ways of being within extended multi-species or interspecies ontologies. Olly is found to lead multiple lives that cannot be reduced to the status of object or media of human intentionality. Her increasing political involvement in the management and organization of the airport challenges orthodox understanding of agency and organizational action. As the ethnography becomes progressively more implicated in the entanglements between human and animal, the concept of 'feline politics' is proposed and deployed. This allows research to retain focus on actions and behaviour and modes of thinking that would ordinarily be occluded by conventional modes of organizational representation. In these ways the ethnography moves beyond the interpretative and symbolic treatment of organization analysis and finds resource in the recent 'ontological turn' in the social sciences. Embracing what is the inevitable participation of the social sciences in the reflexive and recursive enactment of its phenomena, the ethnography discovers new potentialities and new capacities for action as emergent properties of 'the human' and 'the animal' were mutually learnt, exchanged and acquired. This article adds to what we know about the limits of management as it confronts a radical undecidability characterized by the co-existence of multiple and interacting ontological becomings.

The article reports on the methods and findings of an urban experiment/intervention that deployed mathematic formulae to design a series of random walks through the city of Manchester. In developing these methods, the letters of the words "order" and "disorder" were inscribed into an A-Z map of the city to provide the outline for these walks. This quest to seek alternative modes of conduct in the everyday life of the city attempts to find access to what Massumi has identified as the transitional qualities of a body-in-motion. In this systematic derangement of the senses, the city gives way to a proliferation of decontexualized objects and fragments that stimulate alternative forms of narrative and possible new political imaginaries. Folding the city in these ways brings into relief a number of important spatial features of Manchester that converge around the concept proposed here as "the interruption of topology." This interruption demands a certain textual innovation that displaces the performative rituals of the academic article while improvising its own "mythologization" of the city.

The paper raises the question of embodiment and disembodiment as modes of theorizing organization and essays that struggle to negotiate what we call `entrance' to Blur, an `anti-architectural' installation designed as a working media pavilion by the New York based architects Diller and Scofidio. In Blur the human body is displaced from its customary mode of being-in-the-world and is given chance to discover `media' in organization as transport and possible metamorphosis in thinking and being organization. It is difficult to escape `Blur'. As the paper proceeds the reader begins to experience the sense that Blur is everywhere in organization—media and outcome of organization and both a symptom and possible site for the treatment of its underlying theoretical and methodological aporias. Blur invites a kind of de-subjectivization that intensifies sensation and affect splitting the subject across different modalities of consciousness and perception that provides essential experience for thinking organization critically. In the absence of this incorporeal `en-trance' the paper argues we will remain victim of the tautologies and infinite regress that afflict current thinking in aesthetics and organization and which restrict its practice to an inherently conservative form of organization analysis.

This paper traces and distils crisis in theory and organization that threatens to generate what we call here a cacophony of voices—a `dada' of incoherence and contradiction; but it is babble with `real world' consequences and effects. To explore this we consider organization studies as a machine that is out of control, an `ambulatory automatism' (Hacking, 1999) that is symptomatic of the end, or perhaps the impossibility, of `the social'. Theory can respond to this crisis, however, if it can recover its capacity for `theorizing', a practice that can help navigate and understand contemporary organization, but only insofar as it is able to embrace its absurdity and surrealism and learn to accept that truth may be error, and fact, fiction. `Pataphysical experiments and the practice of theory as θεωρia , as travel and adventure, provide some suggestive modes of theorizing that welcomes and admits the necessity and inevitability of theory as a `deterritorialising activity' in the struggle to respond to the challenge of organization today.

In this introduction to the Special Issue, we review the rich tradition of ethnographic studies in organisation studies and critically examine the place of ethnography in organisation studies as practised in schools of business and management. Drawing on the findings of the articles published here, we reflect on the need for a significant extension of the content and syllabus of our discipline to include what we call objects of concern and objects of ignorance. The articles we publish show that decision makers in organizations are not always humans, and nor can we assume the human and its groups monopolise the capacity for agency in organisation. Where we still labour in organisation theory with dualisms such as structure or agent, or subject and object, these articles trace objects and their relations which point to new forms of non-human co-ordination and agency. The organisational realities to which these objects give rise demand careful methodological enquiry, and we show that recent experiments in a genre we call 'post-reflexive ethnography' are likely to prove helpful for developing ethnographic enquiry in contemporary organisation.

Labour process analysis (LPA) is a well-established approach to the sociological study of work which attends to the instabilities of capitalism and, more specifically, to the volatile and contested nature of social relations at work. However, an unreflexive 'neo-orthodoxy' has emerged in recent years that is constrained by a series of dualistic and (critical) realist assumptions which inhibit the development of this distinctive sociology of work. This article contends that the potential of LPA can best be fulfilled through a renewal of critical reflection upon the foundational assumptions of LPA that can open up an acknowledgement and appreciation of the embroilment of subjectivity in the reproduction and transformation of production relations. This development is consistent with the central analytical importance ascribed to the 'indeterminacy of labour' in LPA but invites the adoption of a negative ontology in order to advance a less narrow conception of its meaning and significance. Studies of the new media and creative industries are engaged to indicate how a revitalized labour process analysis might embrace this ontology as a way of exploring and explaining the radical contingency of organization in contemporary social relations.

This paper locates labour process theory in broader sociological debates concerned with the action-structure dualism before examining three broad programmes for research that have emerged in response to the question of subjectivity and agency. Whereas the `orthodox' school tends to re-assert the structuralist and economistic features of Marx, the `anti-realist' or deconstructionist position invites the abandonment of analysis that has traditionally been orientated by the polarities of `structure' and `agency'. We identify and develop a third, `hybrid position', one that is informed by poststructuralist insights but does not neglect or reject established traditions of `modern' sociology and labour process research. Critical examinations of two recent studies of `subjectivity and the labour process' - Mike Sosteric's (1996) case study of a night club and Douglas Ezzy's (1997) paper on `good work' - are undertaken to show how poststructuralist insights may offer an instructive way of understanding how subjectivity is co-implicated in the accomplishment and reproduction of capitalist employment relations.

This Perspectives article delves into the archives of Organization Studies covering the period 1986–2010 to advance and develop our thinking of politics and political thinking in organization studies. In our Benjamin-inflected reading, we look for the revolutionary energies that reside in what may at first appear as perhaps 'outmoded' articles in an intellectual environment where the obsolescence of ideas and concepts seems to increase at pace. The purpose of the excavation of our six chosen texts is to build a constellation of what we call 'interstitial positions' that reside within and outside the analytical contours of these texts. In this way we bring these texts into a critical condition in the hope that their constellation can act as a real force in the present and help illuminate our contemporary situation. We might then renew our sense of possibility and choice about the organizational worlds we inhabit and open future avenues for thinking politics informed by the distinctive disciplinary traditions of organization studies.

In the era of an increasingly `light' and `liquid' modernity (Bauman, 2000) airports appear to be privileged and distinctive sites of organization, constitutive of what Castells calls a `space of flows' that is helping to extend and integrate the so-called `network age' of global economy and `glocal' culture. This paper draws on original empirical research at Fulchester International Airport and studies the movement of various subjects and objects (including passengers, bags and aeroplanes) as they are assembled and disassembled by `modes of ordering' to facilitate the flows of exchange and interaction that for Castells binds the physically disjointed positions of social actors in contemporary global organization. Our study explores the ways in which digital information and communications technology creates `spectral' and uncanny phenomena that feeds back into the here-and-now of mundane, organizational reality. We find that an emergent hybridity between the dimensions of the virtual and the real opens up an intensive space that seems to extend the becoming of a `post-human' ontology; but in so doing it also provokes the return of a recalcitrant and unpredictable mass.