scholarly journals Thinking critically about affect in organization studies: Why it matters

Organization ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marianna Fotaki ◽  
Kate Kenny ◽  
Sheena J. Vachhani

Affect holds the promise of destabilizing and unsettling us, as organizational subjects, into new states of being. It can shed light on many aspects of work and organization, with implications both within and beyond organization studies. Affect theory holds the potential to generate exciting new insights for the study of organizations, theoretically, methodologically and politically. This Special Issue seeks to explore these potential trajectories. We are pleased to present five contributions that develop such ideas, drawing on a wide variety of approaches, and invoking new perspectives on the organizations we study and inhabit. As this Special Issue demonstrates, the world of work offers an exciting landscape for studying the ‘pulsing refrains of affect’ that accompany our lived experiences.

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Curtis LeBaron ◽  
Paula Jarzabkowski ◽  
Michael G. Pratt ◽  
Greg Fetzer

Video has become a methodological tool of choice for many researchers in social science, but video methods are relatively new to the field of organization studies. This article is an introduction to video methods. First, we situate video methods relative to other kinds of research, suggesting that video recordings and analyses can be used to replace or supplement other approaches, not only observational studies but also retrospective methods such as interviews and surveys. Second, we describe and discuss various features of video data in relation to ontological assumptions that researchers may bring to their research design. Video involves both opportunities and pitfalls for researchers, who ought to use video methods in ways that are consistent with their assumptions about the world and human activity. Third, we take a critical look at video methods by reporting progress that has been made while acknowledging gaps and work that remains to be done. Our critical considerations point repeatedly at articles in this special issue, which represent recent and important advances in video methods.


2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mila Gasco-Hernandez ◽  
Carlos E. Jimenez-Gomez

The topic of open justice has only been little explored perhaps due to its traditionally having been considered a “closed” field. There is still a need to know what open justice really means, to explore the use of information and technology in enabling open justice, and to understand what openness in the judiciary can do to improve government, society, and democracy. This special issue aims to shed light on the concept of openness in the judiciary by identifying and analyzing initiatives across the world.


2021 ◽  
pp. 017084062110317
Author(s):  
Piera Morlacchi

This article seeks to open up new possibilities for process organization studies to reimagine power and performativity by exploring the potential of Mary Parker Follett’s pragmatism as process philosophy. I revisit her body of work to show how she translated her process ontology into theoretical resources and practical insights that allow for new ways of understanding power and performativity together and explore them as mutually constituting processes of organizing. In particular, I mobilize Follett’s view of conflicts as emerging differences in the world and frictions as constructive conflicts with the potential to generate something new in order to introduce and conceptualize ‘performative power’, that is, the power emerging from relating and integrating differences in organizational situations that are experienced as frictions by people involved. Drawing on my ethnographic study of an entrepreneurship accelerator – a training programme for innovators and start-up projects – I discuss and illustrate empirically how performative power is generated from frictions that arise in ordinary lived experiences. This conceptualization of performative power is an attempt to develop a processual and performative understanding of power, and a useful lens to conduct process research. Making a connection between performative power and the experience of frictions provides a new way to see, talk and study processually power in contemporary organizations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 3756-3766
Author(s):  
Shuang Lv ◽  
Xiayuan Gao ◽  
Shuai Liu ◽  
Lei Li ◽  
Kuang Wu

China, as demonstrated by its macroeconomic data and good cooperation with the IMF, is the second biggest global economy. The breakdown of the pandemic was a big shock that brought China’s forecast GDP growth back to 2020. The impending recession resulted in economic losses, reduced growth, and a further decline in the labor economy. The present study aims to analyze the covetous effects of COVID-19 via Chinese enterprises on the labor and industrial economy. The study focuses on the consequences for the industry and workforce of COVID-19. The research helps shed light on the issues and progress in China’s economy and encompasses its uniqueness. The paper adds to the special issue on Chinese economic issues and progress. The Chinese population is utilized for study, which shows that industries, whose labor is more sensitive to covetousness, are more likely to display less efficiency and profitability. There was a negative link between the research variables, which is less than 5 percent. The greater the industries and workforce exposed to COVID-19, the lower their relative economy, the greater the populations the lower their relative economy. The research is the first of its sort in the world to be published and is regarded as innovative research of its sort.


2020 ◽  
pp. 019791832092113
Author(s):  
Francesca Esposito ◽  
José Ornelas ◽  
Silvia Scirocchi ◽  
Manuela Tomai ◽  
Immacolata Di Napoli ◽  
...  

Although migration-related detention has proliferated around the world, little is known about life inside these sites of confinement for illegalized non-citizens. Building on 34 months of fieldwork, this article examines the lived experiences of center staff and external civil-society actors engaged within Rome’s detention center. We discuss the emotional, ethical, and political challenges faced by these professional actors in their everyday work and their relationship with detainees. Our aim is to shed light on psychosocial life in detention and the intersections between humanitarian and security logics in this setting. In doing so, we problematize the idea that “humanizing detention” can be a solution for change.


According to a long historical tradition, understanding comes in different varieties. In particular, it is said that understanding people has a different epistemic profile than understanding the natural world—it calls on different cognitive resources, for instance, and brings to bear distinctive normative considerations. Thus in order to understand people we might need to appreciate, or in some way sympathetically reconstruct, the reasons that led a person to act in a certain way. By comparison, when it comes to understanding natural events, like earthquakes or eclipses, no appreciation of reasons or acts of sympathetic reconstruction is arguably needed—mainly because there are no reasons on the scene to even be appreciated, and no perspectives to be sympathetically pieced together. In this volume some of the world’s leading philosophers, psychologists, and theologians shed light on the various ways in which we understand the world, pushing debates on this issue to new levels of sophistication and insight.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 1771
Author(s):  
Massimo Fabris ◽  
Nicola Cenni ◽  
Simone Fiaschi

Land subsidence is a geological hazard that affects several different communities around the world [...]


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 160940692199891
Author(s):  
Ellie Haberl

As education researchers increase our focus on affect as a crucial dimension of school practice and pedagogy, we also have the responsibility of taking up the paradoxical nature of seeking to represent and analyze moments of feeling that, by their very nature, evade our understanding. This article explores the question of attending to affect in education research by drawing on research conducted in a seventh grade classroom in a mid-sized city in the western United States, where students were explicitly invited to ground argumentative writing in lived experiences that were significant to them, including those experiences often deemed difficult and thus saturated with affective intensities. Invited to use visual arts-based methods of representing the felt dimension of the project, participants used both color and abstract design as a method for representing the complexity of these affective intensities. The author makes an argument for this visual method of representation that invites students to illustrate their affective experience in ways that maintain its complex, contrasting and often non-linguistic nature.


Laws ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 46
Author(s):  
Esther Salmerón-Manzano

New technologies and so-called communication and information technologies are transforming our society, the way in which we relate to each other, and the way we understand the world. By a wider extension, they are also influencing the world of law. That is why technologies will have a huge impact on society in the coming years and will bring new challenges and legal challenges to the legal sector worldwide. On the other hand, the new communications era also brings many new legal issues such as those derived from e-commerce and payment services, intellectual property, or the problems derived from the use of new technologies by young people. This will undoubtedly affect the development, evolution, and understanding of law. This Special Issue has become this window into the new challenges of law in relation to new technologies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 263178772095444
Author(s):  
François Cooren

Although we have to welcome the renewed interest in socio-materiality in organization studies, I claim that we are yet to understand what taking matter seriously really means. The mistake we especially need to stop making consists of automatically associating matter to something that can be touched or seen, that is, something tangible or visible, an association that irremediably leads us to recreate a dissociation between the world of human affairs and the so-called material world. To address this issue, I mobilize a communication-centered perspective to elaborate that (1) materiality is a property of all (organizational) phenomena and that (2) studying these phenomena implies a focus on processes of materialization, that is, ways by which various beings come to appear and make themselves present throughout space and time. In the paper I conceptualize the contours of these materialization processes and discuss the implications of this perspective on materiality for organizational theory and research.


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