Focusing on and Backgrounding Events Simultaneously: The Past–Present–Future Relationship of the Great East Japan Earthquake

This article examines how events from the past, present, and future form into event structures over time. This question is addressed by investigating the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011 until the fifth anniversary in 2016. This allowed to analyze different events over time. The findings reveal that events can be used in two different ways. One process was meant to focus on events, whereas the other one backgrounded events. These different ways to use events revealed four different mechanisms of how event structures can be formed. Moreover, each mechanism has its own idiosyncratic temporal orientation toward either a nostalgic past, imagined future, “better” future or critical past. Second, the article contributes that the paradoxical ways of focusing on an event and backgrounding the very same event need to be embraced simultaneously to enable a greater sense of wholeness. Last, the article reveals multiple temporalities within and across temporal trajectories.

Property and Organization Studies

Property is pervasive, and yet we organization scholars rarely discuss it. When we do, we think of it as a black-boxed concept to explain other phenomena, rather than studying it in its own right. This may be because organization scholars tend to limit their understanding of property to its legal definition, and emphasize control and exclusion as its defining criteria. This essay wishes to crack open the black box of property and explore the many ways in which possessive relations are established. They are achieved through work, take place as we make sense of signs, are invoked into existence in our speech acts, and travel along sociomaterial networks. Through a fictionalized account of a photographic exhibition, we show that property overflows its usual legal-economic definition. Building on the case of the photographic exhibit, we show that recognizing the diversity of property changes our rapport with organization studies as a field, by unifying its approaches to the individual-vs.-collective dilemma. We conclude by noting that if theories can make a difference, then whoever controls the assignment of property – including academics who ascribe properties to their objects of study – decides not only who has or who owns what, but also who or what that person or thing can be.

The gendering power of genres: How female Scandinavian crime fiction writers experience professional authorship

This article introduces the notion of genre as an analytical category for the study of gender inequality in creative work. Research on gender and creative labour typically identifies external, systemic and structural causes for gender inequality in media industries. In contrast, I argue that genres, by virtue of their internal, structural and discursive patterning, play a constitutive role in regulating media producers’ gendered professional identities, shaping their struggle for recognition and structuring their economic sustainability. Rather than being merely outcomes of production processes, genres shape gender inequality: They possess gendering power that influences how media producers work, think and feel. Gendering and gendered genre norms that privilege ‘masculine’ over ‘female’ values are so hard-wired in occupational practice and professional codes of conduct that the genre itself becomes a control and boundary ascription mechanism that implicitly governs, sustains and reproduces gendered identity formation, career aspirations and biographical standing. Drawing on in-depth interviews with female producers of Scandinavian crime fiction, globally branded as Nordic Noir, I examine how female writers in Denmark have coped with and experienced the gendering effect of the genre in which they work and to which they are financially beholden. I also tease out the ways in which crime fiction, a masculine genre, causes anxiety of authorship and affects female producers’ identity and boundary work. This focus on the gendering power of genres may potentially help us understand the gender disparities in media industries – disparities that endure despite efforts at policing fair access and equal opportunity.

Consumer Fetish: Commercial Ethnography and the Sovereign Consumer

What is the sovereign consumer that occupies such a central role in organizational discourse whose satisfaction has become an organizational imperative? Our research draws from extended fieldwork in the world of commercial ethnography. Our analysis shows how ethnography is implicated in the organizational fetishization of consumers, that is, how in the process of understanding and managing markets, a quasi-magical fascination with amalgams of consumer voices, images, and artefacts comes about. We offer several contributions. First, we demonstrate the pertinence of (primarily anthropological) theories of the fetish to organizational sensemaking. Second, we describe a distinctive process of organizational market sensemaking that is sensuous, magical, and analogical. Third, we offer a subtle critique of commercial ethnography, a popular research practice that aims to bring ‘real’ consumers to life inside the firm.