A dialectical approach to the politics of learning in a major city police organization

In this paper we develop a dialectical approach to the organizational politics of learning, exploring complexity, tensions and asymmetries. Turning this kaleidoscopic lens on our empirical setting, a major city police organization, we mix the blue light of police vehicles into Driver’s (2002) ‘fluorescent’ light of office workplaces, fragmenting the brightness of ‘Utopian sunshine’ and the darkness of ‘Foucauldian gloom’ perspectives on organizational learning, and making visible a wider spectrum of political colours of learning. We identify four interdependent political modalities of learning: empowering, coercive, insurgent and palliative and explore how they interplay in complex and contradictory ways. We note that, whilst mainstream and critical literatures tend to focus on organizational learning as, respectively, empowering and coercive, and to a lesser extent insurgent, much of the politics of learning in our study converges in the palliative modality, where the emphasis is on learning-to-cope (rather than learning-to-thrive, learning-to-comply or learning-to-resist). We show that the palliative modality of learning is in many ways an outcome of the dynamic and complex engagement between the other three modalities. We discuss the implications of our findings for a more nuanced understanding of learning as political, and of the relationship between organizational learning and power.

Life imitates art:Yojimbo, critical management, and contractors

Organization studies have consistently drawn from literature and film as tools to understand, explain, and analyze organizational phenomena. With that goal in mind, this article illustrates how Yojimbo, a movie by Akira Kurosawa, provides a critical representation of work and organizations as a context for how micro emancipation might be undertaken in contemporary organizational settings. The argument revolves around the claim that contractors might become the newest frontier in the study of both micro emancipation and organizational misconduct. Reinforcing this claim, the article draws heavily from the film Yojimbo and later supplements the argument with a case study focusing on Edward Snowden. This article sets the tone for an emergent area of discussion about contemporary micro emancipation across sectors.

Doing Free Jazz and Free Organizations, “A Certain Experience of the Impossible”? Ornette Coleman Encounters Jacques Derrida

Many scholars have attempted to make jazz relevant to an organizational audience. We seek to extend this literature by considering a more radical version of improvisation associated with the jazz musician Ornette Coleman. Inspired by an encounter between Coleman and the philosopher Jacques Derrida, we juxtapose the radical collective responsibility associated with Coleman’s Free jazz improvisation and Derridean deconstruction. We especially emphasize a phrase used by Derrida, “a certain experience of the impossible,” as an expression for a particular experience of doing management. The overall contribution of the article is to explore the possibility of responding to issues within organizations in more participative and improvisational ways, without losing an appreciation of the inherent impossibility (perhaps even absurdity) of the managerial condition.