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.

What if? Fine-tuning the expectations of business simulation technology through the lens of philosophical counterfactual analysis

Great technological leaps in computational capacity and machine autonomy have increased the business community’s expectations of simulators. In joining the conversation on simulators’ ability to reproduce the reality of actual, possible, past, and future worlds, this paper draws on the literature in analytical philosophy on counterfactuals. It identifies three functions of simulations (training, advising, and forecasting) and further inquires into their ontological and epistemological assumptions to show how they limit the quest for reality of higher-performance simulators in each of these three areas. This argument is not only meant to contribute to adjusting scholars’ and practitioners’ expectations and uses of simulations; it also calls for a more in-depth and critical study of the social implications of relying on them.

How art becomes organization: Reimagining aesthetics, sites and politics of entrepreneurship

Art and entrepreneurship both demonstrate a particular power to experiment with how the social is apprehended, organized and inhabited. How can we then understand and theorize the particular power of art understood as entrepreneurial organizing? In this paper, we develop the concept of artistic entrepreneuring. It is based on contemporary art’s wide-ranging ‘organizational turn’, where art becomes organization by experimenting with forms and processes of emancipatory organizing. Interweaving art theory, examples of art’s organizational turn and a processual understanding of public entrepreneurship, we conceptualize artistic entrepreneuring as fundamentally aesthetic, necessarily sited and invariably political, and we discuss the implications for entrepreneurship studies and research on the aesthetics and politics of organizing.

Tinkering with Space: The Organizational Practices of a Nascent Social Venture

The article seeks to further our understanding of the process of organizing nascent social ventures. It builds upon current research on the political and collaborative nature of the social entrepreneurial process, and takes an ANT-inspired processual approach to follow the organizational practices carried by a nascent social venture in its efforts to mobilize stakeholders, bring about collaboration and ultimately secure resources. It draws upon empirical material generated during the first year of a social venture I founded and continue to chair. Findings highlight the adaptive and fluid nature of the organizational practices involved in nascent organizations and indicate that the capacity to continuously adjust the qualities of the eventual venture to the stakes of potential partners is instrumental to start up the venture. The article suggests the notion of tinkering to underscore the fluidity, the ongoing and piecemeal everyday work of such organizing processes. Further, findings highlight the extent to which social ventures, as well as the engaged scholar, are caught in the networks that contribute to reproduce the social problem they aim to change.