Transcendental and Material Silence: A Multimodal Study on Silence in Team Meetings

Silence in management and organization studies has been predominantly understood as something negative. However, recent examples have highlighted silence as a positive element in learning and organizing. We contribute to prior literature on positive silence and multimodality by arguing silence can operate as a semiotic mode that mobilizes resources for meaning-making. Ten team meetings in a financial organization in Europe were investigated. Visual ethnography was mobilized to gather data through interviews, observations, and photographs. Our analysis identified two types of silence—transcendental and material—that both function through three mechanisms to resemiotize meaning. A framework is presented to situate silence in relation to verbal and visual modes. Three contributions are made to studies on silence and multimodality: extended conceptualizations of silence, silence as a semiotic mode in itself, and methodological pathways for studying silence. In addition, practical implications for team meetings and silence in the workplace are discussed.

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.

Showing Legitimacy: The Strategic Employment of Visuals in the Legitimation of New Organizations

Entrepreneurs commonly engage in discursive activities to pursue the legitimacy of their new organizations. Previous studies on this pursuit have essentially been focused on verbal language and there is limited understanding of how other communication modes, such as the visual, offer specific potentials for influencing legitimation audiences. With the contemporary pervasiveness of digital documents and online environments that often employ the visual mode, this gap has become more relevant. To address it, this study is guided by the following research question: how do entrepreneurs use the visual mode of communication to legitimize their new ventures? Building on the case of a new organization, this study shows that specific features of the visual mode of communication are especially well suited to sustaining legitimation in particular ways. While previous research has mostly remained on a conceptual level, this study empirically advances the understanding of visual discursive legitimation.

Modes of exhibition: Uses of the past in Tehran art galleries

While emerging literature explores how organizations engage with the past, investigations of how complex relationships to the past influence mobilizing multiple forms of historical representation in practice remain scarce. The current study examines different relationships to the past to shed light on how their complex and at times contradictory connotations relates to the use of multimodal historical cues in organizational practices, based on a qualitative study of art galleries in downtown Tehran, Iran. We describe how fondness for, aversion to and conflicted relationships with the past coexist, and how and why actors use diverse historical cues to express these diverse relationships in practice. We add to current understandings of organizational uses of the past by offering insights into how and why organizations actively evoke and manage positive, negative, and conflicted relationships to the past, and how these relationships draw upon diverse discursive and non-discursive supports to organizational practices aiming at different yet complementary goals.

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.

Algorithmic Surveillance in the Gig Economy: The Organization of Work through Lefebvrian Conceived Space

Workplace surveillance is traditionally conceived of as a dyadic process, with an observer and an observee. In this paper, I discuss the implications of an emerging form of workplace surveillance: surveillance with an algorithmic, as opposed to human, observer. Situated within the on-demand food-delivery context, I draw upon Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad to provide in-depth conceptual examination of how platforms rely on conceived space, namely the virtual reality generated by data capture, while neglecting perceived and lived space in the form of the material embodied reality of workers. This paper offers a two-fold contribution. First, it applies Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad to the techno-centric digital cartography used by platform-mediated organisations, assessing spatial power dynamics and opportunities for resistance. Second, this paper advances organisational research into workplace surveillance in situations where the observer and decision-maker can be a non-human agent.

Tasting the Difference: A Relational-Epistemic Approach to Aesthetic Collaboration in Haute Cuisine

Collaboration during aesthetic production is inherently complex, involving difficult-to-articulate aspects of aesthetic judgement as well as relational questions that are inherently power-laden. Particularly in situations where actors do not share background conditions or judgement criteria, aesthetic collaboration poses conceptual and practical challenges. Through an in-depth case study of a French haute cuisine programme in Shanghai, China, we propose a relational-epistemic approach to aesthetic collaboration, in which aesthetic judgement and relational positioning mutually shape how chef trainees come to understand their creative products. Specifically, aesthetic collaboration was shaped by whether participants understood their mutual relationships as antagonistic or integrative, and whether they considered aesthetics as a matter of objective knowledge, cultural tradition or co-construction. Based on our results, we explore the implications of the relationalepistemic approach in understanding organizational aesthetics, especially in the context of the culture industries and haute cuisine specifically.

The strange case of ‘Ugo Fantozzi robot’: Control and resistance through comics in a bank

In this article, I examine a graphic novel created by the management of a banking company and periodically circulated through the company’s intranet as part of a training initiative directed at several tens of thousands of employees working at the branch level. Theoretically, my study draws on two main streams of literature: that on Human Resource Management systems as meaning-creating devices to govern the employment relationship and that on the ever-tighter relation between popular culture and organizations. In addition, I elaborate on Umberto Eco’s semiotic theory—which to date has been largely overlooked in organization studies—to decipher the ‘mystery’ represented by the organizational comics case, along with the individual and collective reactions that followed it. On the basis of the available empirical material, I theorize ‘Semiological Guerrilla Warfare’ as a collective strategy to subvert organizations’ internal mass communications. In the final part of the article, I discuss the innovative possibilities that Semiological Guerrilla Warfare, comic strips, and Eco’s semiotics offer to organization studies and to all those interested in expanding the repertoire of resistance strategies to managerial control in organizations.

Visible objects of concern: Issues and challenges for workplace ethnographies in complex environments

Over the past few decades, we have witnessed the widespread deployment of technologies that enable real-time interaction between co-located and remote participants. These technologies and their accompanying organisational arrangements have created new forms of cooperation and collaboration. They also present challenges for ethnographers seeking to understand the practices, the ‘lived work’ of the participants. In particular, they demand a concern with the physical, the material and the embodied, in other words with what has been termed multimodality. We argue that it is through detailed analysis of specific instances, the circumstances of their use, that we can begin to discover the competencies, skills, the ‘know-how’ that enable practice. In this article, we consider one particular setting that is both distinctive because of its scale but also characteristic of many technology-saturated contemporary workplaces. We aim to show how in this case, as in others, the interactional and the sequential is an inextricable aspect of practice. To uncover these practices requires particular attention to the multimodal but that this presents challenges for ethnographies, even those that draw on complex arrays of resources such as video-recordings. We suggest that this resonates with recent debates regarding how we conceive of materiality, the roles of technologies and practice.

Performing market categories through visual inscriptions: The case of ethical fashion

Whereas categories are important cogs of market dynamics, their construction process has been largely overlooked to date. Drawing on the Actor–Network Theory, the article tackles this issue by redefining categorisation as a translation process transforming multiplicity into unity through inscriptions. This process sheds light on the very practices of categorising, the devices involved and their agency. Combining multiple data sources, it describes how organisers and exhibitors at a trade fair use visual inscriptions like pictures and movies, logos and maps, catalogues and fashion parades to define ethical fashion, make compromises between ethics and aesthetics, and project a fashionable image of the nascent category. This offers new insights into the construction of markets by breaking down the performative process of categorisation and revealing the visual mediations involved.