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.

Cinematic Intermediality

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
World Cinema ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Probing Questions

As a fundamentally hybrid medium, cinema has always been defined by its interactions with other art forms such as painting, sculpture, photography, performance and dance. Taking the in-between nature of the cinematic medium as its starting point, this collection of essays maps out new directions for understanding the richly diverse ways in which artists and filmmakers draw on and reconfigure the other arts in their creative practice. From pre-cinema to the digital era, from avant-garde to world cinema, and from the projection room to the gallery space, the contributors critically explore what happens when ideas, forms and feelings migrate from one art form to another. Giving voice to both theorists and moving image practitioners, Cinematic Intermediality: Theory and Practice stimulates fresh thinking about how intermediality, as both a creative method and an interpretative paradigm, can be explored alongside probing questions of what cinema is, has been and can be.

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 Business model maturity in management theory and practice – defining from an expert perspective

Management ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-103
Author(s):  
Przemysław Niewiadomski
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Business Model ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Management Theory ◽  
Agricultural Machinery ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The One

SummarySince many researchers and managers think about the essence, creation mechanisms and limits of the manufacturing model maturity, at this point, the author raises the question related to this issue: what dimensions (descriptions and desiderata) should be considered when conceptualizing this idea? The formulated question became a starting point and a point of conducting a creative synthesis, based, on the one hand, on a detailed analysis of the problem theory, and on the other hand – on the author’s own research. The above question and belief related to the existence of economic demand for results of application nature were the main inspiration to undertake research whose main purpose is to recognize: how the maturity of the business model is understood by selected experts operating in the Polish agricultural machinery sector?

Cinematic Vitalism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inga Pollmann
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
French Film ◽  
Movie Theater ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Philosophical Texts ◽  
The One

This book argues that there are constitutive links between early twentieth-century German and French film theory and practice, on the one hand, and vitalist conceptions of life in biology and philosophy, on the other. By considering classical film-theoretical texts and their filmic objects in the light of vitalist ideas percolating in scientific and philosophical texts of the time, Cinematic Vitalism reveals the formation of a modernist, experimental and cinematic strand of vitalism in and around the movie theater. The book focuses on the key concepts including rhythm, environment, mood, and development to show how the cinematic vitalism articulated by film theorists and filmmakers maps out connections among human beings, milieus, and technologies that continue to structure our understanding of film.

Political Obligation(s)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Candice Delmas
Keyword(s):  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Political Obligation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Obligations ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
The Face ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The One

The introduction uses the Freedom Rides to set up the book’s discussion of our responsibilities in the face of injustice. It highlights the following gap between theory and practice: on the one hand, philosophers concerned with the rights and duties of citizens often defend a moral duty to obey the law, and consider civil disobedience in terms of permission or right only. On the other hand, activists from Henry David Thoreau to Black Lives Matter have long appealed to a responsibility to resist injustice. The introduction takes seriously both the traditional notion of political obligation and activists’ appeals by outlining a duty to resist injustice, and insisting it is among our political obligations. This chapter also presents the book’s key concepts: injustice, oppression, ideology, legitimacy, resistance, principled disobedience, and civil and uncivil disobedience.

Dances of leadership: Bridging theory and practice through an aesthetic approach

2008 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 560-572 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arja Ropo ◽  
Erika Sauer
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Organizational Life ◽  
Work Processes ◽  
Practical Action ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Dominant Individual ◽  
Ballroom Dance ◽  
Corporeal Nature

AbstractWe wish to develop the argument in this paper that through aesthetic and artistic work, practices and their metaphorical use, we have a potential to better understand the relationship between academic leadership theory and practical action. By aesthetic approach we mean the experiential way of knowing that emphasizes human senses and the corporeal nature of social interaction in leadership. In this paper, we discuss how leadership could look, sound and feel like when seen via the artistic metaphor of dance. We use the traditional dance, waltz and the postmodern dance experience of raves to illustrate our argument. By doing so, we challenge traditional, intellectually oriented and positivistic leadership approaches that hardly recognize nor conceptualize aesthetic, bodily aspects of social interaction between people in the workplace.The ballroom dance waltz is used as a metaphorical representation of a hierarchical, logical and rational understanding of leadership. The waltz metaphor describes the leader as a dominant individual who knows where to go and the dance partner as a follower or at least as someone with a lesser role in defining the dance. Raves, on the other hand representparadigmatically different kind of a dance and therefore a different understanding of leadership. There are neither dance steps to learn, nor fixed dance partners where one leads and the other follows. Even the purpose or aim of dancing may not be known at the beginning of the dance, but it is negotiated as the raves go on. We think that raves describe the organizational life as it is often seen and felt today: chaotic, full of unexpected changes, ambiguous and changing collaborators in networks. Here leadership becomes a collective, distributed activity where the work processes and the targeted outcome is continually negotiated.Through the dance metaphors of waltz and raves, we suggest aspects such as gaze, rhythm and space to give an aesthetic description both to a more traditional and an emerging aesthetic paradigm of leadership where the corporeality of leadership is emphasized. We wish to make the point that leadership is aesthetically and corporeally co-constructed both between the leader and the followers as well as between the researcher and the subjects. The metaphor of dance illustrates the corporeal nature of leadership both to practitioners and theoreticians.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961)

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendelin Kuepers
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Process Philosophy ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Alfred North Whitehead ◽  
Organizational Practice ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Living Body ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Philosophical Phenomenology

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology highlights the bodily, embodied dimensions and forms of non- or post-representational knowing for understanding organizational phenomena and realties as processes. In addition, it focuses on a re-embodied organization and a corresponding sense-based organizational practice. This chapter first considers Merleau-Ponty’s biography and intellectual life before discussing the significance of his ideas for process philosophy as well as organizational theory and practice. In particular, it examines some key concepts such as the living body and dynamic embodiment beyond empiricism and idealism, reversible flesh as elemental carnality and formative medium and chiasm, as well as wild being and be(com)ing. It also looks at Merleau-Ponty’s connections with two other process thinkers, Alfred North Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze. Finally, it assesses the significance of his process-philosophical phenomenology and ontology for organization studies.

Dances of leadership: Bridging theory and practice through an aesthetic approach

2008 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 560-572 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arja Ropo ◽  
Erika Sauer
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Organizational Life ◽  
Work Processes ◽  
Practical Action ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Dominant Individual ◽  
Ballroom Dance ◽  
Corporeal Nature

AbstractWe wish to develop the argument in this paper that through aesthetic and artistic work, practices and their metaphorical use, we have a potential to better understand the relationship between academic leadership theory and practical action. By aesthetic approach we mean the experiential way of knowing that emphasizes human senses and the corporeal nature of social interaction in leadership. In this paper, we discuss how leadership could look, sound and feel like when seen via the artistic metaphor of dance. We use the traditional dance, waltz and the postmodern dance experience of raves to illustrate our argument. By doing so, we challenge traditional, intellectually oriented and positivistic leadership approaches that hardly recognize nor conceptualize aesthetic, bodily aspects of social interaction between people in the workplace.The ballroom dance waltz is used as a metaphorical representation of a hierarchical, logical and rational understanding of leadership. The waltz metaphor describes the leader as a dominant individual who knows where to go and the dance partner as a follower or at least as someone with a lesser role in defining the dance. Raves, on the other hand representparadigmatically different kind of a dance and therefore a different understanding of leadership. There are neither dance steps to learn, nor fixed dance partners where one leads and the other follows. Even the purpose or aim of dancing may not be known at the beginning of the dance, but it is negotiated as the raves go on. We think that raves describe the organizational life as it is often seen and felt today: chaotic, full of unexpected changes, ambiguous and changing collaborators in networks. Here leadership becomes a collective, distributed activity where the work processes and the targeted outcome is continually negotiated.Through the dance metaphors of waltz and raves, we suggest aspects such as gaze, rhythm and space to give an aesthetic description both to a more traditional and an emerging aesthetic paradigm of leadership where the corporeality of leadership is emphasized. We wish to make the point that leadership is aesthetically and corporeally co-constructed both between the leader and the followers as well as between the researcher and the subjects. The metaphor of dance illustrates the corporeal nature of leadership both to practitioners and theoreticians.

Do we form or deform? Qualitative Investigation in Public Hospitals of Madrid

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
María Jesús Gómez Camuñas ◽  
Purificación González Villanueva
Keyword(s):  
Participant Observation ◽  
Scientific Evidence ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Public Hospitals ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Business Growth ◽  
Small Hospital ◽  
Student Learn ◽  
Depth Interviews

<div><i>Background</i>: the creative capacities and the knowledge of the employees are components of the intellectual capital of the company; hence, their training is a key activity to achieve the objectives and business growth. <i>Objective</i>: To understand the meaning of learning in the hospital from the experiences of its participants through the inquiry of meanings. <i>Method</i>: Qualitative design with an ethnographic approach, which forms part of a wider research, on organizational culture; carried out mainly in 2 public hospitals of the Community of Madrid. The data has been collected for thirteen months. A total of 23 in-depth interviews and 69 field sessions have been conducted through the participant observation technique. <i>Results</i>: the worker and the student learn from what they see and hear. The great hospital offers an unregulated education, dependent on the professional, emphasizing that they learn everything. Some transmit the best and others, even the humiliating ones, use them for dirty jobs, focusing on the task and nullifying the possibility of thinking. They show a reluctant attitude to teach the newcomer, even if they do, they do not have to oppose their practice. In short, a learning in the variability, which produces a rupture between theory and practice; staying with what most convinces them, including negligence, which affects the patient's safety. In the small hospital, it is a teaching based on a practice based on scientific evidence and personalized attention, on knowing the other. Clearly taught from the reception, to treat with caring patience and co-responsibility in the care. The protagonists of both scenarios agree that teaching and helping new people establish lasting and important personal relationships to feel happy and want to be in that service or hospital. <i>Conclusion</i>: There are substantial differences related to the size of the center, as to what and how the student and the novel professional are formed. At the same time that the meaning of value that these health organizations transmit to their workers is inferred through the training, one orienting to the task and the other to the person, either patient, professional or pupil and therefore seeking the common benefit.</div>

Mystical Theology and the Exegesis of Transfiguration in St. Maximus the Confessor

2019 ◽  
pp. 145-176
Author(s):  
Григорий Исаакович Беневич ◽  
Дмитрий Александрович Черноглазов
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Mystical Theology ◽  
The One ◽  
Maximus The Confessor

В статье рассматриваются толкования прп. Максимом Исповедником события Преображения Господня, которые сопоставляются с его учением о мистическом богословии. Доказывается, что Преображение созерцается прп. Максимом как своего рода «эйдос» или парадигма мистического богословия. Проводится сравнение некоторых ключевых понятий мистического богословия прп. Максима, с одной стороны, с «Ареопагитиками», а с другой - с учением свт. Григория Паламы. Сохраняя верность основным моментам учения «Ареопагитик», прп. Максим придаёт ему более отчетливое христологическое и опытно-антропологическое истолкование. Что касается учения свт. Григория Паламы, то, несмотря на некоторые отличия в терминологии (особенно понимания апофатики), экзегеза Преображения прп. Максима и его учение о мистическом богословии в целом могут быть согласованы с основными положениями Паламы. При этом необходимо помнить, что прп. Максим отвечал на иные вопросы, природа и характер восприятия Фаворского света не были в центре его внимания. The article discusses Maximus the Confessor’s interpretations of the Transfiguration of the Lord, which are compared to his doctrine of mystical theology. It proves that Transfiguration was contemplated by Maximus to be a kind of paradigm of mystical theology. A comparison of some key concepts of Maximus’s mystical theology is made, on the one hand, with that of the Corpus Areopagiticum, and on the other - with the teachings of St. Gregory Palamas. Remaining loyal to the main points of the teachings of the Areopagite, Maxim gave them a clearer Christological and experimental anthropological interpretation. As for the teachings of St. Gregory Palamas, despite some differences in terminology, (especially the understanding of apophaticism), Maximus’s exegesis of the Transfiguration and his doctrine of mystical theology as a whole can be reconciled with the main provisions of Palamas. At the same time, it is necessary to remember that Maximus answered other questions, the nature and character of the perception of the light of Thabor was not at the centre of his discussion.

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