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.

A sense of spacing: Toward a diffractive reading of organizational space

This article explores how a diffractive methodology can enrich research on organizational space and the senses. Through the creation of interferences, a diffractive methodology directs attention to how differences in sensing are created in the ongoing production of space and what the effects of these are. By using examples from an ethnographic study of the Hub, a university-based entrepreneurship space designed to invoke positive “buzz”, the article illustrates how a diffractive methodology allows for the exploration of the sensory design of space and how it governs the possibilities of sensing among participants. The article contributes to organizational research by demonstrating how a diffractive methodology can be utilized to explore sensing as a spatial, unstable achievement and by highlighting how differences in the possibilities of sensing can be an important analytical starting point.

Human-Animal Relations in Business and Society: Advancing the Feminist Interpretation of Stakeholder Theory

Stakeholder theory has largely been anthropocentric in its focus on human actors and interests, failing to recognise the impact of nonhumans in business and organisations. This leads to an incomplete understanding of organisational contexts that include key relationships with nonhuman animals. In addition, the limited scholarly attention paid to nonhumans as stakeholders has mostly been conceptual to date. Therefore, we develop a stakeholder theory with animals illustrated through two ethnographic case studies: an animal shelter and Nordic husky businesses. We focus our feminist reading of Driscoll and Starik's (J Bus Ethics 49:55-73, 2004) stakeholder attributes for nonhumans and extend this to include affective salience built on embodied affectivity and knowledge, memories, action and care. Findings reveal that nonhuman animals are important actors in practice, affecting organisational operations through human-animal care relationships. In addition to confirming animals are stakeholders, we further contribute to stakeholder theory by offering ways to better listen to nontraditional actors.