Investigating the political economy of the territory: The contradictory responses of organisations to spatial inequality

The spatial imaginations of organisations can be particularly insightful for examining power relations. However, only recently they have gone beyond the limits of the workplace, demonstrating the role of the territory for organised action, particularly in mobilising solidarity for resistance. In this article, I investigate power relations revealed by the political economy of the territory to explain contradictory actions undertaken by organisations. Specifically, I adopt the theoretical framework of the noted Brazilian geographer Milton Santos, who recognises spatial multiplicity and fragmentation while maintaining an appreciation of the structural conditions of the political economy. This perspective is particularly useful for the analysis of civil society organisations (CSOs) in a Brazilian favela (slum), given the context of high inequality perpetuated by the selective flows of urban development. First, I show that the history of favelas and their role in the territorial division of labour explain the profiles of existing organisations. Then, I examine how the political engagement of CSOs with distinct solidarities results in a dialectical tension that leads to both resistance based on local shared interests and the active reproduction of central spaces even if the ends are not shared. The article contributes to the literature of space and organisations by explaining how territorial dynamics mediate power relations within and across organisations, not only as resistance but also as the active reproduction of economic and political regimes.

Gamifying situated learning in organisations

Gamification is an emerging area in research and practice that has sparked considerable interest in management studies. The attention to gamification is amplified by the ubiquitous nature of digital technologies and augmented reality which touches on how people work and learn socially. Consequently, gamified tools’ affordances affect situated learning in working environments through their implications on human relations in practice. However, the dynamics between gamification and situated learning have not been considered in the literature. Thus, drawing on the synthesis of gamification and situated learning literatures, we offer a model of gamifying situated learning in organisations. Thereby, our discussion explains the role of gamified affordances and their socio-material characteristics, which blend with situated learning as people indwell on such tools in their work. Moreover, gamified tools can afford the technological support of community-building and networking in organisations. Such gamified communities and networks, in turn, can be seen to existing within a gamified altered reality as part of which the physical distance and proximity of situated learning activities become inevitably bridged and joined together.

On the move to stay current: Knowledge cycling and scheduled labor mobility

Technical consulting plays an increasingly important role in developing and transferring knowledge in a wide range of industries and sectors. We present a case study of Swift Tech, a leading Scandinavian technical consulting firm, to identify and assess the importance of knowledge cycling—a knowledge process based on scheduled and recurrent rotation of technical consultants among organizational and problem-solving contexts. Our study identifies four main phases of knowledge cycling: entering an assignment, building experience, contributing to the project, and shifting to a new assignment. These phases underpin our model of knowledge cycling, which demonstrates that two aspects of local knowledge processes are critical: project task familiarization and project organization familiarization. We show that knowledge cycling relies on a dynamic interaction between client organization, consulting firm, and individual consultant in the ongoing transfer of knowledge among distinct contexts and communities. Knowledge cycling demonstrates the significance of “mobile knowledge” for the development of situated knowledge; hence, our results have important implications for situated learning theory.

Embodied Organizational Routines: Explicating a Practice Understanding

This article contributes to theory development through advancing an embodied framing of organizational routines. It addresses the absence of bodies in a literature that tends to treat the “people” involved in organizational routines as disembodied actors. One consequence of this is that progress toward a theory of “routines as practices” has tended to ignore how bodies contribute to their unfolding. Theorizing embodied communicative acts brings the body and embodiment into organizational routines research. Existing knowledge is extended by drawing from multiple empirical illustrations to explain how routines are accomplished when power is exercised through gesture and bodily movement, the spaces where routines unfold cohere with human bodies making a difference in how they are constituted and experienced, and, the routineness of routines is made manifest when mutual intelligibility is discerned in the silences that characterize how embodied actors interrelate.

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.

Boundary objects, power, and learning: The matter of developing sustainable practice in organizations

This article develops an understanding of the agential role of boundary objects in generating and politicizing learning in organizations, as it emerges from the entangled actions of humans and non-humans. We offer two empirical vignettes in which middle managers seek to develop more sustainable ways of working. Informed by Foucault’s writing on power, our work highlights how power relations enable and foreclose the affordances, or possibilities for action, associated with boundary objects. Our data demonstrate how this impacts the learning that emerges as boundary objects are configured and unraveled over time. In so doing, we illustrate how boundary objects are not fixed entities, but are mutable, relational, and politicized in nature. Connecting boundary objects to affordances within a Foucauldian perspective on power offers a more nuanced understanding of how ‘the material’ plays an agential role in consolidating and disrupting understandings in the accomplishment of learning.

Emotions in Institutional Work: A Discursive Perspective

This article focuses on the dynamics and interplay of meaning, emotions, and power in institutional work. Based on an empirical study, we explore and elaborate on the rhetorical strategies of emotion work that institutional actors employ to mobilize emotions for discursive institutional work. In an empirical context where a powerful institutional actor is tasked with creating support and acceptance for a new political and economic institution, we identify three rhetorical strategies of emotion work: eclipsing, diverting and evoking emotions. These strategies are employed to arouse, regulate, and organize emotions that underpin legitimacy judgments and drive resistance among field constituents. We find that actors exercise influence and engage in overt forms of emotion work by evoking shame and pride to sanction and reward particular expedient ways of thinking and feeling about the new institutional arrangements. More importantly, however, the study shows that they also engage in strategies of discursive institutional work that seek to exert power—force and influence—in more subtle ways by eclipsing and diverting the collective fears, anxieties, and moral indignation that drive resistance and breed negative legitimacy evaluations. Overall, the study suggests that emotions play an important role in institutional work associated with creating institutions, not only via “pathos appeals” but also as tools of discursive, cultural-cognitive meaning work and in the exercise of power in the field.

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.

‘Oh, was that “experiential learning”?!’ Spaces, synergies and surprises with Kolb’s learning cycle

We share findings from empirical research into Kolb’s experiential learning approach, using our reflections as teachers and data from our undergraduate management students. The experiential learning experience emerges as a space where bodies, feelings and ideas move and develop in intimate relationship with one another. This is a space where teachers exercise authority over, and commitment to, the here-and-now, risking corporeal and intellectual exposure. We probe the concept of experience in experiential learning, suggesting that teachers require a kind of ‘experiential expertise’ to draw both on embodied felt sense and on what one has done in one’s own career to role-model the transformation of experience into knowledge, which is at the heart of Kolb’s theory. We explore a blurring of experiential agency, and the tendency for students to appropriate the teacher’s experience rather than dwell on or develop their own. For us, experiential learning is more usefully seen as ‘relationship-centred’ than ‘student-centred’, and we contrast this relational focus with the way experiential learning seems to have been popularised as anti-interventionist, a kind of educational ‘laissez-faire’. Based on these reflections, we suggest powerful connections between phenomenology and theories of space as a way of conceptualising the complexities and richness of teaching and learning experiences.