scholarly journals Monologue and Organization Studies

2021 ◽  
pp. 017084062110694
Author(s):  
Michal Izak ◽  
Peter Case ◽  
Sierk Ybema
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Mikhail Bakhtin ◽  
Macro Level ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Organizational Life ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Michel Serres ◽  
Social Landscape ◽  
Human Sense ◽  
Point Of Reference

In this essay, we propose that recent work in management and organization studies is typically inclined to understand organization and organizing as dialogic in form. Dialogicity is characterized by dynamic interlocution on the part of active human sense-makers and, in our critical reading, evokes a romanticized social landscape that fails to reflect the more prosaic features of organizational life. To address what we see as certain limitations of the dialogic view, we introduce a complementary point of reference: that of monologic organization. This perspective provokes reflection on those situations in which meanings are predetermined at the outset and communication consists of the strictly controlled, routine reproduction of formal scripts. We draw on the works of Mikhail Bakhtin and Michel Serres to reclaim monologic as a pertinent view of organization and its processes. Finally, we provide micro, meso and macro level examples to illustrate and discuss the heuristic potential of a monologic view.

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.

Michel Serres (1930b)

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Steyaert
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
The Third ◽  
Michel Serres ◽  
Time Translation ◽  
The Senses

Michel Serres, a French philosopher and mathematician, is known for his enquiry into the interrelationships between various systems ranging from science and philosophy to mythology and poetry/literature. Such systems can be compared with one another to determine what each tries to exclude (for example, noise, disorder, or turbulence). This chapter examines Serres’ philosophy and its relevance to processual organization studies. It considers his conceptions of time, translation and mediation, the third-excluded and the third-instructed, multiplicity and complexity, the body and the senses, and interdisciplinarity. In order to understand how Serres can be regarded as an important processual theorist, the chapter analyses his book Genèse or Genesis, which offers an account of creation through a performative poetics. It argues that Serres’ work has the potential to support and deepen processual thinking. It also links the ideas of listening and invention from a Serresean perspective.

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.

Introduction: Polyphony and Organization Studies: Mikhail Bakhtin and Beyond

2008 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 493-500 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Belova ◽  
Ian King ◽  
Martyna Sliwa
Keyword(s):  
Mikhail Bakhtin ◽  
Organization Studies

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.

scholarly journals "WEAVING IS REASON": A Critical Reading of Amitav Ghosh

1991 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Saloni Mathur
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Amitav Ghosh ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Anthropological Theory ◽  
Post Modernism ◽  
Clifford Geertz ◽  
The Subject

In anthropology today there exists a considerable anxiety over the problem of representation. How can we understand when 'knowledge is power' without upsetting, or appropriating the selflother balance? In an effort to deal with this anthropological dilemma, writing 'about writing' has become a focal point of attention for authors like James Clifford, George Marcus, Vincent Crapanzano, Nancy Schmidt and Clifford Geertz, to name only a few. Bruce Kapferer has identified the concern over this issue as a "rapidly developing dominant anthropological genre" (1989:77). Elsewhere, the issue has been described as the "new anthropology" (see Clifford and Marcus 1986), or "the spirit of post-modernism" in a post-colonial ethos (Said 1989:222). In the context of this largely Euro-American current of discourse appears Amitav Ghosh: a little known Indian anthropologist and novelist in Delhi. The subject of this paper is an examination of Ghosh and his recent work, The Circle of Reason (1986), in relation to a backdrop of contemporary anthropological theory.

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.

Dogs in organizations

2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 778-800 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Pina e Cunha ◽  
Arménio Rego ◽  
Iain Munro
Keyword(s):  
Organization Theory ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Organizational Life ◽  
Organizational Diversity ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Formal Organizations ◽  
Human Animal

What roles do dogs play in organizational life and formal organizations? Dogs are mostly ignored by organization theory despite the existence of a rich literature on human–animal studies that helps theoretical extension in the direction of organization studies. We discuss why and to what extent dogs are important actors in the lives of organizations and discuss reasons that explain such relevance in functional and symbolic terms. Overall, we suggest that dogs can constitute another indicator of organizational diversity and explain why their presence in organizations is more than just a fad.

scholarly journals Un/doing Chrononormativity: Negotiating Ageing, Gender and Sexuality in Organizational Life

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (11) ◽  
pp. 1677-1698 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Riach ◽  
Nicholas Rumens ◽  
Melissa Tyler
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Narrative Approach ◽  
Organizational Life ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Organizational Research ◽  
Organizational Settings ◽  
Lgbt People ◽  
The Impact

This paper is based on a series of ‘anti-narrative’ interviews designed to explore the ways in which lived experiences of age, gender and sexuality are negotiated and narrated within organizations in later life. It draws on Judith Butler’s performative ontology of gender, particularly her account of the ways in which the desire for recognition is shaped by heteronormativity, considering its implications for how we study ageing and organizations. In doing so, the paper develops a critique of the impact of heteronormative life course expectations on the negotiation of viable subjectivity within organizational settings. Focusing on the ways in which ‘chrononormativity’ shapes the lived experiences of ageing within organizations, at the same time as constituting an organizing process in itself, the paper draws on Butler’s concept of ‘un/doing’ in its analysis of the simultaneously affirming and negating organizational experiences of older self-identifying LGBT people. The paper concludes by emphasizing the theoretical potential of a performative ontology of ageing, gender and sexuality for organization studies, as well as the methodological insights to be derived from an ‘anti-narrative’ approach to organizational research, arguing for the need to develop a more inclusive politics of ageing within both organizational practice and research.

Theocritean Criticism and the Interpretation of the Fourth Idyll

Ramus ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Segal
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Pastoral Poetry

If the critical re-evaluation of classical authors in recent years has brought nothing else, it has given us a humbling awareness of how difficult it is to arrive at a fully satisfactory reading of ancient pastoral poetry. The poet of the Eclogues, seen less and less as merely a painter of dreamy landscapes or a contriver of political allegories, has emerged increasingly as a self-conscious artist whose conventional, but highly symbolic and allusive language embraces questions of man's relation to art and imagination, to passion and work, to the potential for order and violence in his own being. Is it valid to look at Theocritus in similar terms? Is there more in the Idylls than keenly etched portraits of shepherds among verdant hills singing of love in dulcet hexameters and in an atmosphere of easeful sensuousness? Or should we merely enjoy the surface felicities and depart sated and content, like Horace's well-fed guest? The rhythms and resonances of Theocritus will continue to give pleasure as long as Greek is read. Yet recent work in both ancient and later pastoral suggests that the Idylls will sustain and reward a critical reading which looks beneath this charming surface.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document