Violence and Organization Studies

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (10) ◽  
pp. 1573-1586 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jana Costas ◽  
Chris Grey
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Organizational Life ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Norbert Elias ◽  
Absent Presence

In this paper we argue that violence is curiously both absent and present within organization studies. By violence we mean actual or potential physical harm and, building on an insight from Norbert Elias, we suggest that such violence is both ‘totally familiar yet hardly perceived’ in organizations. We examine how in two major traditions of organization studies, one deriving from Weber and the other from Foucault, violence figures as, respectively, an ‘absent-presence’ and a ‘present-absence’. We then propose that a sensibility towards violence enables the recognition of ‘the blood and bruises’ of organizational life: something present close to home as well as faraway; here and now rather than long ago; and featuring in ‘normal’ organizations as well as in abnormal or exceptional circumstances.

scholarly journals What can bodies do? Reading Spinoza for an affective ethics of organizational life

Organization ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Torkild Thanem ◽  
Louise Wallenberg
Keyword(s):  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Rule ◽  
Organizational Life ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Rule System ◽  
Ethics Of Recognition

Recent attempts to develop an embodied understanding of ethics in organizations have tended to mobilize a Levinasian and ‘im/possible’ ethics of recognition, which separates ethics and embodiment from politics and organization. We argue that this separation is unrealistic, unsustainable, and an unhelpful starting point for an embodied ethics of organizations. Instead of rescuing and modifying the ethics of recognition, we propose an embodied ethics of organizational life through Spinoza’s affective ethics. Neither a moral rule system nor an infinite duty to recognize the other, Spinoza offers a theory of the good, powerful and joyful life by asking what bodies can do. Rather than an unrestrained, irresponsible and individualistic quest for power and freedom, this suggests that we enhance our capacities to affect and be affected by relating to a variety of different bodies. We first scrutinize recent attempts to develop an ethics of recognition and embodiment in organization studies. We then explore key concepts and central arguments of Spinozian ethics. Finally, we discuss what a Spinozian ethics means for the theory and practice of embodied ethics in organizational life.

Dualities, Dialectics, and Paradoxes in Organizational Life

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Dynamic Systems ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Organizational Studies ◽  
Organizational Life ◽  
Organizational Processes ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Process Studies ◽  
Convergence And Divergence ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Over Time

Organizational contradictions and process studies offer interwoven and complementary insights. Studies of dialectics, paradox, and dualities depict organizational contradictions that are oppositional as well as interrelated such that they persistently morph and shift over time. Studies of process often examine how contradictions fuel emergent, dynamic systems and stimulate novelty, adaptation, and transformation. Drawing from rich conversations at the Eighth International Symposium on Process Organization Studies, the contributors to this volume unpack these relationships in more depth. The chapters explore three main, connected themes through both conceptual and empirical studies, including (1) offering insight into how process theorizing advances understandings of organizational contradictions; (2) shedding light on how dialectics, paradoxes, and dualities fuel organizational processes that affect persistence and transformation; and (3) exploring the convergence and divergence of dialectics, paradox, and dualities lenses. Taken together, this book offers key insights in order to inform persistent, contradictory dynamics in organizations and organizational studies.

Inclusion and exclusion—We and the Other. Response to Vamik Volkan’s Key-note Lecture

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Mies
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western World ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Specific Group ◽  
Norbert Elias ◽  
German Nation ◽  
History Of

This response is focused on the following question: What may be the specific group analytic point of view on phenomena as the resurgence of nationalism in the western world, the so-called refugee crisis and the confrontation with Islamism and Islamist terror? The guideline of this response will be the idea of the ‘group of individuals’, which Norbert Elias characterized as his main contribution to group analytic theory. The response will emphasize the significance of the Other for the formation of personal and collective identities. It will argue that we face the Other, not only outside our own group, but also inside, and that xenophobia goes hand in hand with the denial of real differences and conflicts inside one’s own group. Finally, the history of the German nation-state is discussed as an exemplary case.

‘Where is she?’ Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Gildersleeve
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Literary Influence ◽  
The One ◽  
Absent Presence

This chapter examines the absent presence of Katherine Mansfield in Elizabeth Bowen’s personal and fictional writing to demonstrate how loss, desire and mourning might constitute a particularly female mode of literary influence. It explores Bowen’s ambivalent perceptions of Mansfield as a literary influence throughout her career, on the one hand protesting against her influence and defending her own originality, and on the other recognising her innovation and mourning her as a ‘lost contemporary’. Gildersleeve argues that the literary relationship between Bowen and Mansfield eludes both the Bloomian model of destroying the predecessor and the model of matrilineal heritage preferred by feminist literary critics. Instead, influence between Mansfield and Bowen registers as a ‘desire for kinship, and resentment that this bond does not exist’.

The Politics of Performance in Organizational Theatre-Based Training and Interventions

2004 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 817-839 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Nissley ◽  
Steven S. Taylor ◽  
Linda Houden
Keyword(s):  
Traditional Approach ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Organizational Studies ◽  
Organizational Life ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Improvisational Theatre ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
A Performance

In this article, we first ‘set the stage’, taking our focus as theatre inorganizations, in contrast to the more traditional approach within the field of organizational studies of the use of ‘theatre’ as a metaphorical means of making sense of organizational life (organizations astheatre). More specifically, we examine the phenomenon of theatrebased training and interventions. However, we move beyond the practitioner-oriented ‘how-to’ understanding of theatre-based training, instead undertaking a more critical examination of the phenomenon. We analytically look ‘behind the curtain’, exposing the ‘politics of performance’ in theatre-based training and interventions by considering who controls the script and who controls the role in a performance. Lastly, we close with an ‘offer’ to the organization studies scholar — similar to the kind of ‘offer’ found in improvisational theatre. We offer a Boalian perspective of organizational theatre. We intentionally mean to be provocative by using Boal’s language (for example, ‘theatre of the oppressor’ to describe more corporate-controlled performances and ‘liberation of the spectator’ to describe more worker-controlled performances); yet, we firmly believe that the Boalian perspective may offer an ‘other’ way of looking at organizational theatre — particularly, the politics of performance in organizational theatre.

On Class, the Logic of Solidarity, and the Civilizing Process: Workers, Priests, and Alcohol in Dutch Shoemaking Communities, 1900–1920

1994 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-152
Author(s):  
Don Kalb
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Relationship ◽  
Civilizing Process ◽  
Norbert Elias ◽  
To Come

There is an economic logic and a moral logic and it is futile to argue as to which we give priority since they are different expressions of the same “kernel” of human relationship.—E. P. Thompson, 1961Class is certainly a key concept of social history just as civilization is for the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias and his followers. Each of these traditions needs to come to terms with the other. Notwithstanding fundamentally divergent assumptions, interests, and styles, both traditions would gain from a closer examination of each other's concepts, subjects, and methods.

scholarly journals Indian Psycho‐Philosophy and Human Response in Organizations

1987 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-42
Author(s):  
L.N. Jhunjhunwala
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Quality Of Work Life ◽  
Human Response ◽  
Organizational Life ◽  
Letters To The Editor ◽  
Managerial Practices ◽  
Quality Of Work ◽  
The Will ◽  
Do So

The ideas S K Chakraborty presented in his article “The Will-to-Yoga: Key to- Better Quality of Work Life,” published in the April-June 1986 issue, have drawn several responses from our readers. Some of them were published in the Letters to the Editor in the October-December 1986 issue along with a reply from the author. In this issue we publish three more responses. In the first instance, L N Jhunjhunwala narrates his experiences of putting some of Chakraborty's ideas into practice in his company. In the second response, R Jayaraman Iyer wonders whether a majority of the executives who need to practise the yoga concepts can do so. On the other hand, a minority of executives who can, do not specifically need the concepts, he states. Even so, he feels that the dissemination of concepts themselves and attempts at praGtising them would help. The final piece by P K Srivastava provjdes additional insights into some of the concepts of yoga and their impact on organizational life when they are put into practice. Vikalpa hopes that this exchange of ideas and experiences clarifies the issues and improves managerial practices.

Organizational Analysis of Small Software Organizations

2011 ◽  
pp. 1-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesús Zavala-Ruiz
Keyword(s):  
Software Engineering ◽  
Quantitative Approach ◽  
The Other ◽  
Organizational Analysis ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Promising Alternative ◽  
Paradigmatic Change ◽  
The One ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Software Organization

The intention of this chapter is twofold. On the one hand, I illustrate the complexity of the small software organization, because it is not a reduced version of a large company. Rather, it has very important advantages and challenges. Then, I use organization studies as a multi-disciplinary and multi-paradigmatic link between disciplines, able to reconcile those distinct visions. On the other hand, I open the discussion on the state of crisis affecting software engineering as a discipline. For that, I try to sensitize the reader to the facts surrounding this crisis, but also to the most promising alternative, which is the redefinition of software engineering as a discipline. One of the possible options for that paradigmatic change requires a multi-disciplinary orientation because their positivist roots and the adoption of a constructivist ontology and epistemology facilitating the inclusion of visions non-qualified for a systematic, disciplined and quantitative approach. My position is that only by opening up this discussion is it possible to begin transforming and consolidating software engineering as a strengthened and more terrain-attached discipline because of its powerful theoretical and practical explanatory capacity.

Crimes Against Humanity

2019 ◽  
pp. 167-188
Author(s):  
Vasuki Nesiah
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The Other ◽  
International Criminal Law ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Global Dynamics ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
The One ◽  
Absent Presence

Race and racism have a schizophrenic life in international criminal law (ICL) histories, both ever-present, and ever-elusive. This chapter excavates this double-life by tracing, not race, but its repression, in ICL historians’ projection of ICL’s origins to the mid-nineteenth century regime instituted to implement the prohibition of the Atlantic slave trade in the name of ‘humanity’. This regime included treaty born transnational tribunals (‘Mixed Commissions’) with jurisdictional authority that extended beyond national borders. Racialized structures and imaginaries hide in plain sight in histories of these tribunals as an embryonic ICL—present everywhere yet not acknowledged anywhere. This chapter argues that this absent presence is constituted, on the one hand, by juridification, and on the other, by moralization. Troubling legacies of juridification and moralization entails unpacking continuities and discontinuities with contemporary ICL and the work of race-invisibility in putting wind in the sails of humanity’s racially mal-distributive global dynamics.

UKRAINIAN LITERARY EMIGRATION: MODELS OF „ABSENT PRESENCE” IN MATERNAL WRITING

2019 ◽  
pp. 358-368
Author(s):  
Lyudmyla Tarnashinska
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Environment ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
Artistic Style ◽  
The World ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The One ◽  
Absent Presence ◽  
Emigre Writers ◽  
Harsh Conditions

The article focuses on various aspects and peculiarities of Ukrainian literary emigration – from the need to surround other people’s space with the whole complex of psychological, socio-cultural, creative problems – to the re-accentu- ation of the notions of motherland / stranger, center / periphery, etc. In this context, various individual views on the notion of a homeland as a territory and a homeland as a spiritual, metaphysical substance are considered. It is noted that under the conditions of a closed system of totalitarianism, this was perhaps the only opportunity to perceive the intellectual, philosophical, artistic-style impulses of the world not only through the mediation of Russian and Polish translation, but also directly within other cultures. Writers outside Ukraine produced other models of world perception – hence the explanation of a broad map of scattering of Ukrainian emigrants. The emigre writers integrated into a strange world, the world of the Other is not as Alien, where, accordingly, there is a dominant, “central” or dominant culture and culture marginal, peripheral, brought from other ethnic territories and communities. On the one hand, they got the freedom of creativity, and on the other hand, they were limited by harsh conditions of survival (most of them had to work for a long time on different jobs). Open to change, they were guided by the guideline to maintain a certain balance between their / stranger to balance the images of their homeland / stranger. The received “gift of freedom” tried to convey creativity, “liberating” itself from traditional aesthetics, instead seeking the new, “unburied aesthetics”. Different models of “absent presence” of diasporic writers in mainland Ukrainian literature (B. Boychuk, B. Rubchak, I. Koshelevets, Emma Andievskaya, Vera Vovk, Anna-Galya Gorbach, Martha and Ostap Tarnavsky, etc.) are analyzed in the article. Some of them tried to legalize their presence in the Ukrainian socio-cultural space still far from gaining independence from Ukraine; others have proven active in the Ukrainian cultural environment since the 1990’s. The author stresses the need to study the holistic image of Ukrainian literature, including the study of mentality, psychological peculiarities of emigration writers.

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