Mobilising Affect for Public Art: Affective practices in voluntary organising

Voluntary organising frequently relies on affective intensities to direct organisational efforts. However, it is not well understood how these intensities are cultivated across time and different contexts to engage and coordinate heterogeneous actors. By applying a practice approach to affect, this paper proposes the concept of affective practices to theorise how affect is mobilised in materially driven (inter)actions to shape actions and relationalities around organisational goals. The analysis of ethnographic data from a long-term public art project reveals that four affective practices - enticing, envisioning, attending and asserting - are pivotal to sustaining the distributed process of voluntary organising. The sense of fascination, enthusiasm, care and discomfort that these affective practices mobilise instigates participation, support, acceptance and compliance from diverse partners, volunteers and the local public. Contributing to the affective turn in practice theory, the paper theorises how affective processes are cultivated as situative accomplishments in an ongoing and translocal organisational process, highlighting the important role played by the vibrant presence of matter in affective practices. Additionally, the study expands our understanding of how an interplay of affective intensities engages and aligns diverse individuals and groups in voluntary organising by fostering coalitional moments in the organisational process.

Affective diaries of quarantine: Writing as mourning

Challenging the bodily-detached logos qualifying as perfect knowledge in academia, I write here to mourn, driven by a visceral need to speak of vulnerabilities and affects, which continuously become overexposed under the COVID-19 pandemic and the corresponding lockdown periods. My diary notes reflect my affective ambivalences, ambiguities, and contradictions during this time, which I interweave with critical feminist theories on affect and mourning as an emancipating process. In so doing, I propose academic writing as a mourning process with heightened relational, ethical, and esthetic possibilities. Mourning the collateral losses and multi-dimensional vulnerabilities experienced during this pandemic provides, I suggest, a relational language to speak of embodied affects to challenge and resist normative structures oppressing difference and otherness, including the affectively disengaged academic logos. I propose that experiencing academic writing as a mourning process enables us to develop the embodied subjectivities necessary to survive the crises surrounding our lives, which the pandemic has left bare. Doing so motivates a kind optimism necessary for driving desired change, collectively, in academia and in broader society.

Who’s afraid of the senses? Organization, management and the return of the sensorium

Organization and management are the perpetual, and perpetually fraught and resisted, ordering of sense experience. However, banning the senses into the outside of thought, and of organizational analysis, was – and to a large degree still is – the default and mostly implicit and unquestioned mode of thinking and studying organization and management. Introducing the special issue on ‘The Senses in Management Research and Education’, this essay historicizes and contextualizes the neglect of the senses, dwells upon possible reasons for keeping the sensory at bay and discusses recent attempts to remedy this situation. The contributions to the special issue are introduced into this context. In conclusion, we speculate on what might happen next.

Feeling your way as an occupational minority: The gendered sensilisation of women electronic music artists

This article develops a nascent theory of ‘sensilisation’ – a process of learning to be skilled in experiencing and displaying sensory knowledge according to social convention. In particular, I present data from an autoethnography of learning to be a DJ and producer of electronic music (hereafter ‘electronic music artist’), and in-depth interviews with 36 women at various stages of their careers as electronic music artists to present a tentative, sensory-led hypothesis for the enduring male dominance of the electronic music industry. I offer direction on how a ‘sensilisation analysis’ might be carried out, and conclude by suggesting that the lessons learned from this ‘extreme’ case study might illuminate more everyday encounters with gender, the senses and management learning and in particular, the Othering of minority individuals in occupational contexts. In addition, the article stands as an empirical exploration of Ashcraft’s concept of ‘senses of self’ in the construction and operation of occupational identities, and in particular occupational segregation – her metaphor of the ‘glass slipper’.

‘He pours love and you eat it’: A psychoanalytic study of human contact and love in affective labor

This psychoanalytic study of affective labour focuses on its two central elements: human contact and love. It is based on a multi-sited organizational ethnography of the fine-dining sector in Istanbul, Turkey, where new restaurant areas known as ‘show kitchens’ place chefs in face-to-face contact with patrons. To understand the psychosocial processes of affective production, we analyze chefs’ and patrons’ experiences of encounters in and around ‘show kitchens’. We demonstrate that affect is produced through unconscious contact mediated by socio-cultural representations, which are hegemonized by the ethos of love for one’s job. We contribute to the extant literature on affective labour by studying the desirous interplay between producers and consumers of affect. Specifically, we theorize the role of the psyche in affective production, and offer a new, psychoanalytic conceptualization of affective labour. We conclude by discussing our conceptualization’s organizational and political implications.

The atmospherics of creativity: affective and spatial materiality in a designer’s studio

Encounters between materials and bodies matter throughout the creative process. This paper contends that creative work depends on these encounters generating and filling the atmosphere with affect. Based on an in-depth ethnography within a fashion design studio, the article empirically traces such affective encounters and corresponding atmospheres. In the studio, designing is performed through artefacts as well as experimental and collaborative gestures that inspire affective reactions and spark creative work. The creative body is part of a complex and atmospheric space where materials, bodies, and external influences circulate via affective encounters and prompts. The analysis reveals the spatial and affective materiality of creativity and contributes to the recent interest in atmospheric organizational inquiry.

Organizing tekhnē: configuring processes and politics through craft

In this paper we investigate how craft as tekhnē configures organizations and their politics by exploring the relations of technology and organization. Through a two-year ethnographic study of remote craft villages in Vietnam, we consider how political concerns are mobilized, distributed and materialized through craft. Defining craft as a process of organizing that often involves mundane objects, but also sits at the centre of political concerns, we are interested in understanding how craft as tekhnē is realized in organizations and suggest two key features: craft as a location for politics and as a basis for mobilizing politics of scale. We provide three main contributions. First, we show that tekhnē can hold steady a focus on organizing through mundane objects. Second, we demonstrate that attending to the mundane reveals distinct relationships between technology and forms of organizing, that mobilize political concerns. Third, we explore the ways mundane objects of tekhnē are not only involved in representing and preserving cultural heritage, but also in challenging the marginalized status of these communities.

Becoming Visible: Uncovering hidden entanglements of power, performativity and becoming subjectivities in a global bank

This paper explores entanglements and flows of power, performativity and related becoming subjectivities, in a rich thicket of lived experience in a global bank. The inquiry focuses on an affective auto/ethnographic field text of a mundane, cross-continent, telephone meeting between a senior executive colleague and myself. Experimenting with post-qualitative, transversal, feminist inquiry ‘I’ deliberately plug into multiple, criss-crossing, philosophical concepts of gendered power, performativity and subjectivity. ‘I’ playfully–vulnerably assay with new ways of doing processual organizational research and making knowing–as–action, including with potential readers. ‘I’ write differently, aiming to enact and exemplify the post-qualitative organization studies terrain as unsettled, unsettling and unpredictable. In a processual, abductive interpretation of my field text ‘I’ uncover agential subjectivities emerging from unconscious affective entanglements travelling across continents and disjunctive temporalities and between human and non-human entities. ‘I’ depart by reflecting on the contributions of my paper and implications of this inquiry for my practice as an organization studies practitioner–researcher.

Heart, Mind and Body: #NoMorePage3 and the Replenishment of Emotional Energy

Emotional energy is key to disruptive institutional work, but we still know little about what it is, and importantly, how it is refuelled. This empirical paper presents an in-depth case study of ‘No More Page 3’ (#NMP3), an Internet-based feminist organization which fought for the removal of sexualized images of women from a UK newspaper. Facing online misogyny, actors engage in ‘emotional energy replenishment’ to sustain this disruptive institutional work amid emotional highs and lows. We introduce ‘affective embodiment’ – the corporeal and emotional experiences of the institution – as providing emotional energy in relation to disruptive institutional work. Affective embodiment is surfaced through alignment or misalignment with others’ embodied experiences, and this mediates how actors replenish emotional energy. Alignment with others’ embodied experiences, often connected to online abuse, means emotional energy is replenished through ‘affective solidarity’ (movement towards the collective). Misalignment, surfaced through tensions within the movement, means actors seek replenishment through ‘sensory retreat’ (movement away from the collective). This study contributes to theorization on institutional work and emotional energy by recentring the importance of the body alongside emotions, as well as offering important lessons for online organizing.

Making a Difference Through Atmospheres: The Orange Alternative, laughter and the possibilities of affective resistance

The paper focuses on affective resistance with an emphasis on the context in which resistant action emerges, and on the liberating power of laughter. It adopts the approach of ‘affective ethnographic history’ to examine the activities of the Polish oppositional artistic collective, the Orange Alternative (OA), between 1986 and 1989. The OA organized interventions in the streets of Polish cities which engaged the general public as participants. The focus of the interventions was on the creation of affective atmospheres leading to affective transitions in the participants from fear to the lack of fear. The paper contributes to scholarly debates on resistance in three ways: (1) it proposes that resistance and its efficacy should be assessed not in terms of the form of resistance, but through consideration of resistant action in relation to the context of its emergence; (2) it demonstrates how affective resistance operates through affective atmospheres that result in affective transitions to the state of lack of fear; and (3) it reconsiders the significance of laughter as an affective force that has liberating consequences both within a particular resistance assemblage and beyond it.

Counting sleep: Ambiguity, aspirational control and the politics of digital self-tracking at work

Existing perspectives on normative and aspirational control have undertheorised how digital technologies such as digital self-tracking might alter what kinds of control is possible in the workplace. This article remedies this lack by studying the affordances of digital self-tracking in the workplace. Empirically, we draw on a case study of digital sleeptracking in relation to a well-being initiative in a private energy company, Encorp. Our analysis reveals how digital self-tracking affords body visibility and remote management but also creates affordance opacity and an ambiguous space of autonomy and control. We theorise how digital self-tracking in the workplace both enables new forms of aspirational control, and creates ambiguity and new limits to control. We conclude by discussing challenges and opportunities for future research on digital self-tracking in the workplace.

The mark of the researcher’s hand: the imperfections of craft in the process of becoming a qualitative researcher

This article draws on insights from the author’s doctoral training and fieldwork in pottery making to extend conversations about the ‘craft’ of qualitative research. Specifically, the imagery of potter and clay is introduced to explore the unfolding of craft – or the development of well-thought-out research – in the process of becoming a qualitative researcher. A longitudinal account of making research and making pottery zooms in on the deeply personal relationship between the craftsperson and their materials to explore the affective relations that emerge in craftwork. By tilting the emphasis towards the processes that bring things into being, rather than the objects that are produced, craft-in-research is conceptualised as a reciprocal shaping of bodies that unfolds in and through the simultaneous becoming of researcher and research.

(Re)moving blinders: Communication-as-constitutive theorizing as provocation to practice-based organization scholarship

Practice-based organization scholarship has made significant contributions, but its vision is narrow. It aims to show organizational scholars that what are taken to be entities are better understood as the accomplishments of ongoing practices; in doing so, it seeks to re-imagine the organization studies field. Yet, practice-based organization scholarship suffers from some encumbering blind spots, particularly with respect to its conceptions of agency and its ability to theorize “the” organization. I offer communication as constitutive of organization theorizing—itself a variant of practice thinking—as providing some helpful remedies to those problems. Both approaches, however, have trouble seeing domination in organizing, so a further provocation builds on their shared interest in new materialist theorizing to articulate a novel approach to exposing the conditions and conduct of organizing.

Future and Organization Studies: On the rediscovery of a problematic temporal category in organizations

Even though organizational activities have always been future-oriented, actors’ fascination with the future is not a universal phenomenon of organizational life. Human experience of the future is a rather young product of modernity, in which actors discovered the indeterminacy of the future, as well as their abilities to ‘make’ and, in part, even control and de-problematize it through ever-more sophisticated planning practices. In this essay, we argue that actors have recently ‘rediscovered’ the future as a problematic, open-ended category in organizational life, one that they cannot delineate through planning practices alone. This, we suggest, has been produced through a pluralization of what we refer to as ‘future-making practices’, a set of practices through which actors produce and enact the future. Based on illustrations of the experienced problematic open-endedness of the future in prevalent discourses such as climate change, digital transformation and post-truth politics, we invite scholars to explore future-making practices as an important but under-appreciated organizational phenomenon.

Affective atmospheres of sensemaking and learning: Workplace meetings as aesthetic and anaesthetic

The aim of this article is to explore sensemaking and learning processes with and through affective atmospheres. We engage with recent research within the ‘affective turn’ across the social sciences and humanities to conceptualize the significance of quasi-autonomous affective atmospheres that emanate from, and also condition, collectives of humans and non-humans. Drawing on this atmospheric scholarship, we propose and elaborate an atmospheric analysis of sensemaking and learning processes to examine how such atmospheres aesthetically transform, and anaesthetically constrain, the potential of bodies, including our own as researchers, to affect and be affected to sense and learn. Through empirical engagement with workplace meetings in a UK housebuilding firm, our analysis contributes by explaining how such atmospheres condition sensemaking that both registers the disorganizing novelty of events and reduces such ambiguity and equivocality to enable purposeful action. While extant research has suggested how the interplay of these two dimensions of sensemaking enables learning, our analysis contributes by drawing attention to how the production, maintenance and transformation of specific atmospheres in workplace meetings imbues affects that condition these two dimensions of sensemaking. Such atmospheres thus constitute vital, yet seldom discussed, phenomena in conditioning learning within organizational life.