Doing Organizational Etnography - Movement, Relations, Agency - Introduction to The Special Issue Part Two (original) (raw)
Related papers
Doing organizational ethnography: Movement, relations, agency
Tamara: The Journal of Critical Organization Inquiry, 2015
Perhaps the most important reason for doing organizational ethnography is the simple one of giving corporate subjects the possibility of speaking. Agency is thus granted to the people who through their interwoven actions create the social patterns that we call organizations. This also implies that we do not see an organization as the result of some narratives that reside inside persons. Neither is an organization the result of some grand narratives that predestine their worlds from the outside. People create the social (Latour, 2005, p. 7) and they thus create organizations. They do this from the particular historical, cultural, political, geographical, material or natural circumstances that surround them or more precisely run through them. People are thrown into the world, which conditions what they can do, how they perceive themselves and so on. They are as such social beings, who cannot be understood independently of the particular timespaces in which they have grown up and in which they live their lives. People are the embodiment of these time-spaces, which are thus living, vibrant, dynamic and moving. It follows that these time-spaces are neither constant, nor do they provide any constant. The framework of forces that runs through these time-spaces always relies on what Deleuze (1992a, p. 161) calls lines of subjectification. In other words, the living dynamic social field of forces, which Foucault (1980, p. 196) calls a dispositive, and which is tactical in targeting the formation of particular subjects, always has to be made. The formation of the subject is neither given, nor determined. It is always only conditioned. It has to be made in order to be living and in order to be 'real'. Ethnography is thus a celebration of agency. It is true that it is through agency that the power relations that are embedded in organizations become real. But it is also through agency that power relations are renewed, bended, transformed, redirected and resisted. When we say that ethnography is a celebration of agency we acknowledge the possibility of multiple subject formations within the same social field. It is thus agency that grants dynamics to the social. Without agency-if we were in other words only discourse and we had no other choice than to enter into a given space of discourse-language would stiffen and die (Agamben, 1999, pp. 142-144).
Towards an ethics of freedom: the politics of storytelling in organizations
Academy of Management Proceedings, 2018
Based upon the work of Arendt's notion of action as freedom and Butler's rework of this notion into a collective, embodied and material performance, this paper proposes an ethics of freedom, which is discussed as a politics of storytelling in organizations. Freedom, it is argued, is closely related to action and hence storytelling and is experienced in between people in a historical and material space. Ethics is thus conditioned on the political framing of this space in terms how that space conditions how people may appear in storytelling as well as how people together transforms this space for future appearances. This has important consequences for an organizational ethics. First, stories are conditioned on freedom, take place in between people and presume a space for a political subject. As a second point, this notion of freedom forwards attention towards the framing of the organizational space and the possibilities concerning appearance that this entails. This goes beyond the question of freedom as a mere possibility towards a material and embodied reality focused on affording peoples appearances as unique subjects performing on an organizational stage. Finally, ethics is always a matter of politics, which thus collects the ethical questions concerning the formation of the "I" and the relation to the "other". The "I" and the "other" are seen as inevitably intertwined and entangled, which implies that their separation not only violates the "I" and the "other" but also the whole condition of plurality seen as the ultimate condition that people cannot escape.
Towards a Postcolonial-storytelling Theory of Management and Organisation
Philosophy of Management, 2013
The contribution to management philosophy is to develop a postcolonial storytelling theory that foregrounds ontology. We do this by drawing together parallel developments in agential realism, quantum physics, and tribal people"s storytelling. We argue that these developments resituate the hegemonic relationship of narrative representationalism over material storytelling practices.
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2017
Structures supported by narratives can play a dominating role in bureaucratic systems, democratic processes, and in an extensive range of social, legal, and political practices. Narratives, in supporting the formation of institutions, traditions, practices, etc. can be rigid protectors of the status quo, promoters of corporate and nationalist interests, and hinder innovative thinking. For this reason some critical theorists are suspicious of narrative. I argue they shouldn't be.
Towards a postcolonial storytelling theory of management and organization
The contribution to management philosophy is to develop a postcolonial storytelling theory that foregrounds ontology. We do this by drawing together parallel developments in agential realism, quantum physics, and tribal people"s storytelling. We argue that these developments resituate the hegemonic relationship of narrative representationalism over material storytelling practices.