The humanities are not our patient

When inviting contributions to a special issue of this journal titled ‘Management Learning and the Unsettled Humanities’ the guest editors did not simply encourage contributors to explore possibilities ‘for reciprocal integration’ between the two realms. Stressing that ‘the humanities . . . [are] facing a complex crisis on their own’, they stated that ‘the humanities . . . need to be enriched, nuanced, and critiqued through . . . the ideas and perspectives of organisational research’. While we may agree that all is not well in the humanities and share their scepticism towards ‘just prescribing the value of the humanities to ameliorate the ills of management education’, we are less confident that the humanities need management learning as much as we need them. As long as learning and scholarship in management and organisation studies continues to suffer from too much management, we doubt that ‘management education [may help] . . . unsettl[e] . . . the human within the . . . humanistic . . . disciplines’. Rather, students of management and organisation still have plenty to learn from the humanities, not least from its rich portrayal of human lives. It is on this basis we draw the conclusion that the humanities are not our patient.

What can bodies do? Reading Spinoza for an affective ethics of organizational life

Recent attempts to develop an embodied understanding of ethics in organizations have tended to mobilize a Levinasian and ‘im/possible’ ethics of recognition, which separates ethics and embodiment from politics and organization. We argue that this separation is unrealistic, unsustainable, and an unhelpful starting point for an embodied ethics of organizations. Instead of rescuing and modifying the ethics of recognition, we propose an embodied ethics of organizational life through Spinoza’s affective ethics. Neither a moral rule system nor an infinite duty to recognize the other, Spinoza offers a theory of the good, powerful and joyful life by asking what bodies can do. Rather than an unrestrained, irresponsible and individualistic quest for power and freedom, this suggests that we enhance our capacities to affect and be affected by relating to a variety of different bodies. We first scrutinize recent attempts to develop an ethics of recognition and embodiment in organization studies. We then explore key concepts and central arguments of Spinozian ethics. Finally, we discuss what a Spinozian ethics means for the theory and practice of embodied ethics in organizational life.

Just doing gender? Transvestism and the power of underdoing gender in everyday life and work

While previous research in organization studies has utilized transgender to show how gender is done, overdone and undone, this literature lacks empirical grounding, and the theoretical arguments dominating it tend to idealize the transgressive power of transgender while reducing transgender to hyperbolic drag and stereotypical passing. To further advance the understanding of transgender within and around organizations, this article presents a qualitative study from a Northern European country to investigate how male-to-female transvestites do and undo gender in everyday life and work. In contrast to extant research, we found that participants did transgender and undid gender by underdoing gender, that is, by combining feminine, masculine and ungendered practices and attributes in ways that made passing and drag insignificant. As transvestites simultaneously expressed masculine and feminine forms of embodiment, we argue that they may more obviously challenge, though not dismantle, dominant forms of gender and identity than suggested by previous accounts. We conclude by discussing broader implications for the understanding of gender, identity, power and resistance in organizations.

Effect of early mobilisation after skin grafting to lower limbs

We undertook a prospective, randomised study of 50 consecutive patients admitted for split-thickness skin grafting to the lower extremities below the inguinal ligament. All types of wounds and skin defects were included. Postoperatively, 25 patients were randomised to early mobilisation and 25 were confined to bed for four days postoperatively. Otherwise the two groups were treated in exactly the same way. Fourteen days postoperatively the healing of the grafts was assessed by two nurses who did not know whether the patients had been mobilised early or late. The overall primary healing rate of the grafts in patients who had been mobilised early was 20/25 (80%), which did not differ from that among patients who were mobilised late (22/25) (88%). We therefore recommend early mobilisation for both economic and humanitarian reasons.