Suchergebnisse

In this article, we seek to open up the study of affect and organization to colour. Often simply taken for granted in organizational life and usually neglected in organizational thought, colour is an affective force by default. Deploying and interweaving the languages of affect theory, critical theory and organization studies, we discuss colour as a primary phenomenon for the study of 'critical affect'. We then trace colour's affect in conditioning the unfolding of organization in two particular 'colour/spaces' – Adorno's grey and Taussig's blue of our title – and discuss both its ambiguity and critical potential. Finally, we ponder what colour might do to the style of an organizational scholarship attuned to affect, where sentences blur with things and forces more than they seek to represent them.

In this article, we examine the theoretically constructed case of private equity in the UK anno 2007. The theory at play is the theoretical edifice Luc Boltanski has been developing for more than two decades and which concerns the underlying architectonics of how social reality is constituted, challenged and stabilized. We thus interweave the story of private equity with the evolution of Boltanski's work: from the six-world model to the widening of the critical notion of 'test' and the outline of a new 'connexionist' capitalist logic, and finally to his most recent attempts at reconnecting his sociology of critical practices with a more traditional critical sociology. Now that Boltanski's work from the 1990s is being increasingly used and critiqued in our field, we believe it is important to engage with his more recent writings which, while less easy to 'apply', have acquired more depth, complexity and a change in focus in response to some of the more pertinent critique. The case of private equity is of particular interest in that for a brief moment it became the 'face' of 21st century capitalism, something which is significant in the broadening of our discussion into the possibilities and the limits of critique under a financialized capitalism.

Building on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Maurice Merleau-Ponty we seek to open up traditional categories of thought surrounding the relation `body-organization' and elicit a thought experiment: What happens if we move the body from the periphery to the centre? We pass the interlocking theoretical concepts of object-body/subject-body and habitus through the theoretically constructed empirical case of `carnival dance' in order to re-evaluate such key organizational concepts as knowledge and learning. In doing so, we connect with an emerging body of literature on `sensible knowledge'; knowledge that is produced and preserved within bodily practices. The investigation of habitual appropriation in carnival dance also allows us to make links between repetition and experimentation, and reflect on the mechanism through which the principles of social organization, whilst internalized and experienced as natural, are embodied so that humans are capable of spontaneously generating an infinite array of appropriate actions. This perspective on social and organizational life, where change and permanence are intricately interwoven, contrasts sharply with the dominant view in organization studies which juxtaposes change/ creativity and stability.

In this paper we engage with the liberalist project in organization and management studies. The first `face' of organizational liberalism is expressed through post-bureaucratic discourses which very much define the mainstream of management thought today, highlighting the need for organizational openness which can only come through a liberation of management from the closed structures of the bureaucracy. The second face of organizational liberalism defends the bureaucratic ethos of liberal-democratic institutions and points to the Popperian concept of the `open society' that requires rational, procedural laws to reconcile conflicting values in societies and organizations, thus ensuring the existence of a plurality of ways of life. We point to the limitations of both `faces' of organizational liberalism by discussing key aspects of Slavoj Žižek's work. Žižek displaces the liberal conception of institutionally sanctioned `openness' by claiming this actually constitutes a closure and puts a challenge to us. How can we create real openness? How is a real difference possible?