Multimodality and the messy object: exploring how rhetoric and materiality engage

We respond to the call for more research into the entanglement between multiple (including non-visual and non-verbal) modes of communication within organizations by exploring the relationships between rhetoric and materiality. We draw on archival sources concerning the Founder’s Building at Royal Holloway College (1874–1897). We discuss the building as a multimodal material object, inherently multiple, fluid, and messy: the Founder’s Building is open to multiple encounters with sociality through multiple modes of communication. We find that such ‘messiness’ explains how the spatial, aural, sensual and visual modes embedded in a material object engage with each other, as well as with other visual, verbal and numerical modes, in the crafting of rhetoric: different modes sustain and oppose each other and evolve through absences and presences. We find that the messiness of material objects explains the engagement between rhetoric and materiality: materiality can limit or augment rhetoric, and materiality and rhetoric can co-evolve as the ‘rhetors’ (such as the founder and the governors of the College) and their audiences (such as students, visitors, and tax authorities) attempt to transform the object (the Founder’s Building) into always something else, even an absent object.

Turning to Mystery in Institutional Theory: The Jesuit Spiritual Exercises

Previous researchers have argued that material objects reproduce institutional logics on the basis of their durability, immutability and mobility. In this paper we analyze material objects that secure logics not because they reveal meanings and significations, but because they allow individuals and groups to confront the mystery of institutional values. Drawing on extensive historical sources, we analyze a small material object, a book entitled The Spiritual Exercises, and investigate the institutionalization of a practice for discovering what cannot be rendered material, the ineffable mystery of God’s will. We argue that religious logics require objects that present, rather than resolve, the mystery of institutional values. We extend the literature on institutional logics by considering how mystery enables institutions and their logics to embrace difference, adapt and endure for centuries.

How the malleability of material artefacts contributes to institutional maintenance: The Guimard metropolitan railway entrances, 1914–2000

Our paper investigates how an institution can be maintained over a long period of time through adaptations to the material artefact which instantiates it. To illustrate our argument, we conduct a historical case study of the Guimard Metropolitan railway entrances, a material artefact which instantiates the Belle Epoque institution from 1914 to 2000. Based on our findings, we develop a process model of institutional maintenance based on the malleability of a material artefact. Supported by three types of interrelated institutional work – damage, preservation and transferability work – we illustrate how adaptations to the material form, meaning and location of an artefact allow an institution to address the evolving environment and its associated challenges and thus to be maintained over time. Our study expands our understanding of long-term institutional maintenance by capturing the importance of the malleability of an artefact and in offering a more positive view on damage work. It also has some implications for studies on materiality in highlighting the multidimensionality of artefacts and the role of transferability and relocation.

Space and Sensemaking in High-Reliability Task Contexts: Insights from a maritime mass rescue exercise

The spatial environment shapes sensemaking in complex situations. While we know that actors in high-reliability task contexts often have a certain degree of control over their spatial environment, it remains unclear how they enact it and which effect this has on their sensemaking. In this paper, we use micro-ethnographic video data from two maritime mass rescue exercises to fill this gap. We find that actors that are under a high cognitive load enact space incidentally and fail to re-enact their spatial environment when problems arise. Instead, actors engage in micro-activities that temporarily mitigate the problems created by their space enactment. We develop a model on space and sensemaking in high-reliability task contexts that distinguishes between unenacted, enacted and lived space. Our findings point towards nested sensemaking, where the enacted spatial environment becomes part of the overall ‘story’ of an operation. Our findings have implications for our understanding of space and sensemaking in high-reliability task contexts, provide opportunities to improve high-reliability organizations’ performance and add to research on space and organising.

Topologies of Organization: Space in Continuous Deformation

This paper offers to extend existing discussions about the socio-material production of organizational space through the concept of topology. It does so by: (1) connecting the concept of topology to existing approaches to spatial organization that emphasize its socio-material and open-ended emergence; (2) theorizing organizational space as being in constant deformation across different topological shapes; and (3) exploring this in an empirical example that juxtaposes a management meeting with its interruption. The empirical material is collected through the method of shadowing managers at a Danish school. Theoretically, the paper argues that the shaping of space is contingent upon dis/continuities between (non)human agencies. The topological deformation of space testifies to the continuous but under-acknowledged work provided by (non)human agencies to both achieve and challenge the stability of organizational space. It further situates the boundary between inside and outside as a transient condition. This renders spatial matters such as scale and size situational achievements. Topology thus implies that we cannot in advance scale organization into micro and macro spatialities, and further, foregrounds the inherent dis/organization of space.

History as Organizing: Uses of the Past in Organization Studies

Research on the “uses of the past” in organizations and organizing is flourishing. This introduction reviews this approach to integrating history into organization studies and explores its paths forward. We begin by examining the intellectual origins of the approach and by defining why and how it matters to the study of management and organizations. Specifically, we emphasize the performative role of history in making and unmaking organizational orders. Next, we elaborate on how the articles in the special issue demonstrate the uses of the past in shaping organizational identity, strategy, and power. We also highlight how this work contributes to our understanding of the socially embedded character of history in organizations by accounting for the role of materiality, intertextuality, competing narratives, practices, and audiences in how the past is used. We conclude by considering four research frontiers particularly worthy of further exploration—the influence of temporal form, the role of non-rational knowledge, the range of methods, and the integration of ethics—in studies of the uses of the past in organizations.