Regulating Nimbus and Focus: Organizing Copresence for Creative Collaboration

Creative collaboration often takes place in collaborative spaces that increasingly use virtual modes of interaction. To better understand the organizational conditions and organizing practices that facilitate collaboration in such spaces, we compare ethnographies of an online platform for collaborative songwriting and a physical songwriting camp, with each of these spatial settings coming with distinct advantages and disadvantages for creative collaboration. We identify the emergence of copresence—an active mutual orientation toward one another—as a common organizational condition for collaboration. Copresence was fostered by practices of regulating nimbus (i.e., making people more or less visible) and focus (i.e., directing attention to others) that not only stimulated moments of converging copresence marked by collaborative problem-solving, but also enabled diverging copresence marked by undirected attention and more serendipitous interactions. Our comparison reveals the challenges of negotiating between converging and diverging copresence to counteract tendencies towards excessive, or conversely, insufficient visibility and focus of the participants, both of which are barriers to copresence. These insights contribute to ongoing debates about the organization of online and offline collaborative spaces by shifting the focus away from co-location towards copresence, highlighting the oscillation between converging and diverging copresence as important for a collaborative atmosphere and identifying practices by which copresence can be organized in different spatial settings.

University Spaces as Agents of National Belonging: Analysing the Visual Culture of Public Universities’ Campuses in India and Pakistan

This article discusses the role of ‘space’ in Indian and Pakistani public sector universities in fostering national pride. University spaces have been highlighted, in both countries, for being used by the governments as agents fostering the national narrative yet there is limited research on how these spaces contribute to the visual culture of educational institutions and in the inculcation of nationalistic values. This article adds to the conversations regarding the fostering of national belonging and pride in universities by exploring space as a constitutive element of the visual culture of the higher education environment in India and Pakistan. In both countries, the physical spaces of public universities have become platforms for channelling student voices. This research uses two state-funded universities, from Delhi (in India) and Lahore (in Pakistan), and Lefebvre’s conception of space to conduct a discourse analysis of bulletin boards, graffiti, statues, sculptures, and any other imagery found online pertaining to the campuses and analyse how it is a ‘conceived’ and ‘perceived’ aspect of the visual culture of the universities. It adds to current scholarly conversations on national pride and consciousness in India and Pakistan by showing how university spaces can potentially play an active role in promoting the state’s narrative in students’ or educators’ everyday educational experiences.

Unsettling bodies of knowledge: Walking as a pedagogy of affect

In this article, we connect with recent attempts to rethink management learning as an embodied and affective process and we propose walking as a significant learning practice of a pedagogy of affect. Walking enables a postdualist view on learning and education. Based on course work focused on urban ethnography, we discuss walking as affect-pedagogical practice through the intertwined activities of straying, drifting and witnessing, and we reflect upon the implications for a pedagogy of affect. In conclusion, we speculate about the potential of a pedagogy of affect for future understandings and practices of management learning.

Business school space, the hidden curriculum, and the construction of student experience

Recent trends in business school architecture and design have sparked significant interest in exploring the ways space is used to build organisational identity and reputation. In this article, we add to these conversations by exploring the ways in which spatial designs and practices shape student experiences of business school education. Drawing from Lefebvre’s theorisation of spatiality as simultaneously physical, social and imaginary, we conceptually link spatial designs and practices to the business school’s hidden curriculum. The empirical study we conducted at a UK business school predominately focused on student accounts of their experiences with and within the school. The findings point out three aspects of the relationship between spatiality and the student experience: (1) space is deliberately used to symbolically orientate the school, and to reflect organisational values and ideals; (2) the way in which spatiality shapes student experiences relies on the student contextualisation of spatial designs and practices; (3) student reaction to spatiality is framed by their ideal vision of business school experience. We add to the current conversations on business school spaces and the student experience by showing how spatiality plays an active role not only in student on-course experiences, but also in their conceptualisation of business school education.

The Performative University: ‘Targets’, ‘Terror’ and ‘Taking Back Freedom’ in Academia

This special issue assembles eight papers which provide insights into the working lives of early career to more senior academics, from several different countries. The first common theme which emerges is around the predominance of ‘targets’, enacting aspects of quantification and the ideal of perfect control and fabrication. The second theme is about the ensuing precarious evocation of ‘terror’ impacting on mental well-being, albeit enacted in diverse ways. Furthermore, several papers highlight a particular type of response, beyond complicity to ‘take freedom back’ (the third theme). This freedom is used to assert an emerging parallel form of resistance over time, from overt, planned, institutional collective representation towards more informal, post-recognition forms of collaborative, covert, counter spaces (both virtually and physically). Such resistance is underpinned by a collective care, generosity and embrace of vulnerability, whereby a reflexive collegiality is enacted. We feel that these emergent practices should encourage senior management, including vice-chancellors, to rethink performative practices. Situating the papers in the context of the current coronavirus crisis, they point towards new forms of seeing and organising which open up, rather than close down, academic freedom to unleash collaborative emancipatory power so as to contribute to the public and ecological good.

Learning atmospheres: Re-imagining management education through the dérive

This article responds to the recent calls for rethinking management education, particularly to those that emphasize space, affect and atmosphere, and makes the case for the practice of dérive as a way of infusing management education with experiential, experimental and reflexive learning processes. The authors draw on ideas and practices of the art movement Situationist International who proposed the dérive, informed by the concept of psychogeography as a way of exploring and reimagining the atmospheres of everyday life. The paper is illustrated by the authors’ teaching experiences in this area (or space as one might say). The authors argue that the dérive in management education may foster future managers’ imaginative skills and inspire an imaginative self-reflection of the business school and its spatial organization. The paper concludes that in re-enacting their experience of educational space, participants may learn about, reflect on, and develop their affective capacities for becoming part of organizational processes, both as students of the business school and as future managers.

Organizational presence and place: Sociomaterial place work in the Swedish outdoor industry

The purpose of this article is to explore the relation between organizational presence and the place in which such a presence is enacted. To this end I mobilize Doreen Massey’s processual conceptualization of place as an event consisting of a bundle of trajectories. By following the presentification of a Swedish company, Fjällräven, in the natural environment in the North of Sweden during Fjällräven Classic, I show that the organization is not made present in place, but through place production. I propose the concept of place work to express the work done by representatives of the organization, but also by other humans and nonhumans, to make the throwntogetherness of the place result in a rather coherent and stable construction through which the organization is made present. Place work is therefore work through which organizational presence and place are recursively co-creating. The concept of place work expands what we can learn about the “where” of an organization when building on an ontology of performativity.

Changing academic work places: the introduction of open-plan offices in universities

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relation between the spatial intervention of open-plan offices in a university, the consequential change in work practices of faculty members and how these practices appropriate the designed space.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors executed a two-year longitudinal ethnographic study following the case of the science faculty, which moved from a traditional office setting to open-plan offices. The authors studied the space and interviewed staff before, during and after the introduction of open-plan offices.

Findings

Findings show that the new spatial setting triggered staff members to attribute certain meanings and practices of adaptation which were, partly, unintended by the design of the open-plan offices.

Research limitations/implications

This paper contributes empirically grounded insights into the (un)intended consequences of a spatial intervention in terms of how staff members, far from being passive, attribute meaning and alter their work practices leading to unprecedented organizational changes.

Practical implications

For change consultants, facility managers and university managers the outcomes of this paper are highly relevant.

Social implications

Large budgets are spent on new office concepts at universities but the authors do know little about the relation between spatial (re)design and organizational change.

Originality/value

The introduction of new office concepts, spatial redesign and co-location is for many academics highly emotional.

Learning everyday entrepreneurial practices through coworking

This article aims to understand learning in coworking. Coworking is an emergent global phenomenon that involves independent workers, often from various occupational backgrounds, working collectively in shared workspaces. I situate coworking in broader debates on entrepreneurialism and socioeconomic change to conceptualise it as a twofold process: of learning everyday coworking practices and learning through coworking practices. While coworking, individuals learn to make sense of their place in the entrepreneurial milieu by developing practices that contest established entrepreneurial norms. Drawing on an ethnographic study, I show how coworkers learn to become collaborative, intentional and to perform contestation through co-created situated learning. That learning enables them to co-construct a sense of community necessary to become entrepreneurially proficient in an increasingly uncertain world of work. By critically understanding why and how learning occurs in coworking, this research contributes to our knowledge of what learning is, and why and where it can occur.

The Materiality of Absence: Organizing and the case of the incomplete cathedral

This study explores the role of absences in making organizing possible. By engaging with Lefebvre’s spatial triad as the interconnections between conceived (planned), perceived (experienced through practice) and lived (felt and imagined) spaces, we challenge the so-called metaphysics of presence in organization studies. We draw on the insights offered by the project of construction of Siena Cathedral during the period 1259–1357 and we examine how it provided a space for the actors involved to explore their different (civic, architectural and religious) intentions. We show that, as the contested conceived spaces of the cathedral were connected to architectural practices, religious powers and civic symbols, they revealed the impossibility for these intentions to be fully represented. It was this impossibility that provoked an ongoing search for solutions and guaranteed a combination of dynamism and persistence of both the material architecture of the cathedral and the project of construction. The case of Siena Cathedral therefore highlights the role of absence in producing organizing effects not because absence eventually takes form but because of the impossibility to fully represent it.

Could Slow Be Beautiful? Academic Counter-Spacing Within and Beyond “The Slow Swimming Club”

This article proposes a specific form of academic counter-spacing, based on an autoethnographic account of an initiative called the “Slow Swimming Club.” The justification for this initiative is to contest what is contextualized as the pervasive fast pace of universities, driven by contemporary marketization, new public management, and neoliberalism. The proposed counter-spacing is analyzed here through a conceptual lens, inspired by recent research from the environmental psychology discipline around Attention Restorative Theory (ART), along with its central four principles. By using such a conceptual frame, it allows a way of exploring the impact beyond the personal day-to-day micro-restorative counter-spacing opportunities, such as the Slow Swimming Club (which take place outside the university space), toward counter-spacing back on campus. It thereby endeavors to explore how such counter-spacing not only reflects and disconnects through a restorative coping mechanism, but also collectively resists and challenges the fast agendas on campus.

Os Circos Contemporâneos como Heterotopias Organizacionais: Uma Etnografia Multissituada no Contexto Brasil-Canadá

Resumo Neste artigo buscamos entender os circos contemporâneos desde a perspectiva das heterotopias organizacionais. Realizamos uma aproximação teórica entre Estudos Baseados em Práticas nos Estudos Organizacionais e o conceito de heterotopias desenvolvido por Michel Foucault. A partir de uma etnografia multissituada focada nos processos organizativos do circo contemporâneo no Brasil e no Canadá, identificamos conjuntos de práticas organizativas que alteraram as relações de forças no campo das artes nos contextos estudados, resultando na produção de outros espaços - ou heterotopias, de acordo com Michel Foucault - na sociedade que possibilitaram os circos se constituírem como organizações. Como contribuição teórica, apresentamos o conceito de heterotopias organizacionais para as análises de organizações que se constituem com base em multiplicidade socioespaciais. A contribuição metodológica do artigo é a apresentação da etnografia multissituada como estratégia de pesquisa de estudos dos processos organizacionais estabelecidos em diferentes contextos culturais e localidades.

The Video Production of Space

This article examines how video recording practices excert an influence on the ways in which an organizational phenomenon—in our case organizational space—becomes available for analysis and understanding. Building on a performative and praxeological approach, we argue that the practical and material ways of conducting video-based research have a performative effect on the object of inquiry and do not simply record it. Focusing in particular on configurations of camera angle and movement—forming what we call the Panoramic View, the American-Objective View, the Roving Point-of-View, and the Infra-Subjective View—we find that these apparatuses privilege different spatial understandings both by orienting our gaze toward different analytical elements and qualifying these elements in different ways. Our findings advance the methodological reflections on video-based research by emphasizing that while video has a number of general affordances, the research practices with which we use it matter and have an impact both on the analytical process and the researcher’s findings.

Learning subversion in the business school: An ‘improbable’ encounter

Entrepreneurs develop activities that aim to challenge the status quo, break rules and subvert systems. How can such a thing be taught/learnt in a business school? This article contributes to current debates within entrepreneurship studies that seek to address the subversive nature of entrepreneurial activity. It presents an ethnographic case study of an entrepreneurship course that attempts to re-define the teaching and learning boundaries of subversive activities in a leading European business school. Drawing on the theory of Bakhtin, which has thus far been overlooked in entrepreneurship studies, we unpick the potentiality of art practices in the learning and experiencing of the subversive dimension of entrepreneurship. We employ the concept of ‘dialogical pedagogy’ in order to address calls for more ‘relationally experienced’ approaches to management learning that foreground the conflicts, emotional strains and uncertainties that are embedded in the fabric of entrepreneurial practice. We show how ‘subversive dialogues’ are enacted between students and teachers as they engage in the learning process, and we discuss implications for critical entrepreneurship teaching in an increasingly commoditized education environment.

Conceptualising curricular space in busyness education: An aesthetic approximation

This article outlines a conceptual framework for conceptualising students' experiences of curricular space from an aesthetic perspective. The curriculum is conceived as a three-dimensional, aesthetic artefact that elicits sensory responses and judgements about meaning that can impact learning. Space is conceived in terms of three dimensions that may either be produced or foreclosed by curricular structures and content: autonomy space, reflective space and cognitive space. Together, these spaces enable imaginative space, which is important for innovative and creative thinking. The Japanese concept of ma is proposed as a fruitful way of thinking about space in curricula not as a wasteful, inefficient or mere void to be filled but as the element that enables learning to result from exposing students to structures and content.

University, Ltd: Changing a business school

This article recounts two years in the change management of a European business school. Using evidence gained whilst I was an employee, I describe the conditions and institutional mechanisms which allowed an ‘earth shattering’ change programme to take place. This involved discounting the past and claiming that anyone who is against change is either self-interested or doesn’t understand the ‘real world’. The lack of collective and successful resistance is of particular concern here, since it suggests that (in certain contexts) academics are incapable of preventing their own institutions changing around them. Exit appears to be the only choice, when loyalty is questioned and voice impossible. I conclude with some observations on the relationship between the managerial business school and the idea of the university.

Breaching or disturbing the peace? Organizational aesthetic encounters for informed and enlivened management learning experiences

The recent burgeoning of “organizational aesthetics” scholarship represents unrealized potential for transforming management learning practices. In response to calls for more embodied “holistic” ways of knowing, the present case study is a “wayfinding” journey into organizational aesthetic encounters with undergraduate management students. Initial encounters reveal how narratives of organizational quotidian evoke aesthetic attunement. Closer encounters engage students with their own aesthetic inquiries and artifacts to re-present aesthetic knowledge and sensibilities. As aesthetically attuned and active producers of “organizational aesthetics,” what is sensible and thus knowable in the context of management learning is disturbed—informing and enlivening our learning experiences. From a practical standpoint, these types of aesthetic encounters may breach the “management learning” peace, one disturbance at a time.

The Finnish Team Academy model: Implications for management education

This article explores an innovative model of management education, the Team Academy based in Finland, in which teams of learners create and operate real enterprises, supported by coaches. The contributions of the article are to provide insights into how the Team Academy works, and to review its implications for theories of management learning and educational design. Based on a case study of the Team Academy model, we argue that management education programmes need to be construed as artificially created learning environments, and specifically as ‘micro-cultures’ – local contexts in which pedagogical and cultural practices coalesce. The concept of a micro-culture can bring together four main attributes of learning environments, namely, social embeddedness, real-worldness, identity formation, and normative. Construing learning environments in this way has likely important implications for the theory and practice of management learning and education, since a micro-culture is a complex, emergent phenomenon that is not necessarily controllable or transferable.

Strangely Familiar: The Uncanny and Unsiting Organizational Analysis

This paper focuses on the aesthetics of the uncanny to inquire into and perform affective sites of organizing that are imbued with feelings of uncertainty and uneasiness. We argue that the uncanny forms an ‘unconcept’ that allows us to think and apprehend ‘white spaces’ of organization not as new or other spaces but through a process of relating intensively with the conventional places, streets and squares that form the backdrop to everyday life. We also make use of the notion of ‘unsiting’ to show how organizational research is able to enhance our appreciation of the aesthetic dimension of organization in ways that expose and undermine that which has become familiar and taken-for-granted. Based on an artistic intervention by the theatre collective Rimini Protokoll, we encounter and analyse such processes of unsiting through the affective and spatial doublings at work in the organization of urban space. Theorizing the organizational uncanny opens up new sites/sights in organization by forging an interconnection of the recent affective, spatial and aesthetic ‘turns’ in organizational theory. To do this demands what we call scholarly performances that involve the witnessing and enacting of everyday sites of organizing.

Exploring a spatial–temporal understanding of organizational learning

This article responds to calls for research into the production of time-space in organizations – in particular, it does so as a way of synthesizing the diverse ways of thinking in the existing organizational learning literature. This is achieved by drawing upon Lefebvrian-informed research into spatial–temporal rhythms, enabling the investigation of the rhythmic production and reproduction of time-spaces from a 12-month ethnography of a UK Management Team. This rhythmic approach also augments extant spatial and temporal organizational research. It reveals how learning involves contrary spatial–temporal experiences – highlighting the interplay of rhythms, which raises reflexive implications for both managers and researchers.

The power of spatial and temporal orderings in organizational learning

This article attends to the call for research on the often neglected spatial and temporal dynamics of organizational life. In particular, we examine the ways in which aspects of space and time facilitate or hinder learning and knowledge sharing in organizations. We draw on conceptual tools derived from work influenced largely by Henri Lefebvre to illustrate how a spatial–temporal lens throws new light on the problem of learning and knowledge sharing across organizational communities. We examine these dynamics in a qualitative study with four high-technology engineering companies in the energy conversion and automation and aerospace sectors. Building on a situated learning perspective, we argue that a spatial and temporal perspective contributes to our understanding of processes of identity construction and the power relations that influence access to forms of participation and learning across organizational communities.

Taking an aesthetic risk in management education: Reflections on an artistic-aesthetic approach

This article responds to calls from the field of organizational aesthetics to study and represent sensible-aesthetic knowledge with artistic-aesthetic approaches. An artistic-aesthetic touchstone artifact engages the sensibilities of 54 MBA Organizational Behavior students as they take an aesthetic risk to enjoy exploring and re-presenting the aesthetic dimension of group organizational life. In the context of dominant business school pedagogic practices that tend to neglect aesthetics, student reflections reveal that the creative process itself is imbued with its own aesthetic value. This study contributes to artistic-aesthetic knowing at the group level of understanding. This paper also makes a contribution to the field of organizational aesthetics by extending its reach into management education practices. It is further suggested that an aesthetic inquiry into the aesthetics of management education is well worth the effort. In accordance with aesthetic criteria, this paper seeks to represent a plausible account of this management education journey.

Spacing organization: non-representational theory and performing organizational space

This article connects to and extends the attempts to bring space back into critical organizational theory, which, we argue, has mainly been based on the socio-spatial perspective as pioneered by Henri Lefebvre. Taking issue with the various ways in which Lefebvre’s work can be interpreted, we develop an alternative route. Adopting a mode of non-representational theorizing as outlined in human geography, we propose the concept of ‘spacing’, which orients the understanding of organizational space towards its material, embodied, affective and minor configurations. In discussing the consequences of such a performative approach to space for the practice and craft of organizational scholarship, we argue that our conceptual opening entails a move from representational strategies of extracting representations of the (organizational) world from the world to embodied apprehensions of the everyday performing of organizational space. What can be termed the enactment of organizational geographies in slow motion is inspired and illustrated by the video ‘The Raft’ conceived by the artist Bill Viola.