Fragments and Links: Organizational Actor‐World of the Harry Potter Phenomenon

The article seeks to develop an Actor‐Network Theory perspective on the relationship between organization and literature by focusing on the Harry Potter phenomenon. The latter is seen as an example of how contemporary popular literature does not stop at itself, but rather supersedes itself by spinning its own truly impressive organizational actor‐network. This industrious industrial entanglement challenges what may be called the ‘disembodied’ conceptualization of literature—the conceptualization that is centred on the contents of works of fiction alone. When the contents of the literary texts are decentred in that they are taken as but one (however important) actor of the actor‐world that comes to be known by their name, other actors become more visible that help to conceptualize Harry Potter as an organizational, as much as a literary, phenomenon.     

Depoliticising literature,politicising diversity: ethno-racial boundaries in Dutch literary professionals’ aesthetic repertoires

Although still a neglected area, over the years a growing body of sociological research on the position of ethno-racial minorities in Western artistic fields has emerged. With this article we aim to contribute to this research area by focusing on ethno-racial diversity in the Dutch literary field. Through in-depth interviews, we analyse how gatekeepers mobilise specific cultural repertoires and by doing so draw ethno-racial boundaries when discussing acquisition, assessing quality and positioning themselves in the literary field. We argue that literary publishers and other professionals (selectively) employ an ‘old school’ modernist repertoire that especially values the formal aspects of literary products, by which non-white writers and publishers concerned with diversity are often positioned in an identity politics framework. Their work is said to take in a less prestigious ‘political’/’subjective’ position rather than a ‘literary’/‘universal’ one. As such, this paper informs on how gatekeepers’ practices shape the position of non-white authors in the Dutch literary field.     

Lean production of intensive cities: Using the power of Italo Calvino's imagination to grasp organizational change

This article analyses the introduction of Lean Production to ‘the Procurement Office’ (the Procurement Office is made anonymous due to promises of confidentiality in the research project ‘Lean without stress’), a work place marked by continuous organizational changes, unfavourable image and high turnover. This is analysed in terms of Italo Calvino's Invisible cities. It is argued that Calvino's themes and prose help us understand change as a multiplicity of temporal intensities producing ambivalence and affect. We describe this use of literary abstractions as a ‘hyperbolic social epistemology’. Through the depiction of four intensifications of Lean Production, the metaphors of Calvino's cities show how reality and illusion; hope and poverty; dreams and death and utopia and dystopia are intricately mingled and produce temporary and equally ambivalent affects of alienation, hypocrisy, self-governance, job-satisfaction, antagonisms and empowerment.     

Hidden in full view: the organization of public secrecy in Miéville’s The City and the City

ABSTRACT

In this article, we explore China Mieville’s novel The City and the City as a literary experiment for analyzing the dynamics of public secrecy. We explore public secrets as an intrinsic part of organizational life and as a framework for paying attention to the politics of organizing. First, we focus on the novel’s invention and use of the verb ‘unseeing’ to bring out the embodied and sensuous aspects of public secrecy as part of organizational processes. Second we unfold how, although the content of public secrets may turn out to be less spectacular than expected, it is exactly their mundaneness which is key to their political importance. This is important because in an increasingly disorganized and uncertain world, secrecy proliferates and the visibility of secrecy is often a strategic move to justify certain hidden actions.     

Managing cohesion in transnational organizations: an introduction

Aesthetic approaches seek to enrich knowledge about the ‘sensible’ aspects of experience. The ‘aesthetic dimension’ of shipboard organizational life is evoked and co‐created through multiple aesthetic categories such as the agogic, the sacred, and the sublime rendered through multiple sensory experiences of life aboard. A researcher and sailor‐informant co‐authored aesthetic reading contributes to a growing niche of aesthetic‐based research within organization studies. Our article explores collaboration as an important element of the aesthetic project. Possibilities for future aesthetic inquiries are also considered.     

Organizational Restructuring and the Achievement of an Equal Opportunity Culture

The Opportunity 2000 Campaign has recognized that equal opportunity policy change has to be accompanied by a process of culture change in organizations. However, sustaining commitment to an equal opportunity culture may be a difficult task in times of rapid and varied organizational change. In particular, the volume and scope of ‘restructuring’ that follow mergers, acquisitions, divestment, the introduction of internal markets, and other changes in business strategy often lead to ‘downsizing’, ‘delayering’, and outsourcing of business functions. This can have very variable outcomes for the careers of women managers. For them the experience of organizational restructuring is akin to participation in a lottery in which they are occasionally winners, but usually losers. This is the main finding from in-depth case studies of three large organizations in the public sector, pharmaceuticals, and financial services, which have all experienced some form of ‘restructuring’ over the last five years. The main conclusion of this research is that unless restructuring involves an expansion of managerial positions it is likely to disadvantage women managers. The reasons for this are that it leads to job losses in functions where women are concentrated; highlights the disadvantages of poor line manager support; reinforces exclusion from the valuable informal organizational networks that provide access to career development opportunities; and renders formal equal opportunity policy monitoring ineffective. These findings have considerable implications for organizational and national policy initiatives to achieve an equal opportunity business culture.     

‘In the Company of Men’: A Reflexive Tale of Cultural Organizing in a Small Organization

A tale of fieldwork in a small organization is discussed in this article with a view to highlighting how social processes, cultural understandings and expressions of gender are produced during fieldwork interaction. The tale is told reflexively and retrospectively, recording an ongoing conversation about fieldwork experience. Central to the tale is discussion of how the researcher is drawn into ‘culture–making’ within the organization and the ways in which fieldwork interaction creates a ‘space’ through which organizational members engage with, work through and realize work–place values. In this article there are multiple levels of reflection. At one level it is examined how the organizational–researcher role of ‘emotional nurturer’ was constructed during fieldwork. At the same time some cultural insights drawn from ethnographic inquiry and intensive interviewing within the small organization are presented. The analysis is also shaped by a further layer of post–fieldwork reflection and interpretation which draws in emotional issues and expressions of gender. It is argued that a close scrutiny of fieldwork roles is important to organizational research in that it makes explicit how the researcher–‘native’ interaction is central to the theorizing process and how the researcher can become a participant in organizational culture–making.     

Integrated Organizational Identity: A Definition of Hybrid Organizations and a Research Agenda

In contemporary societies an increasing number of social needs have to be financed by market activities. In this regard, scholars started to discuss whether ‘Social Innovation’, ‘Social Entrepreneurship’, ‘CSR’, ‘Social Enterprise’, ‘Enterprising Nonprofits’, and ‘Social Business’ are able to provide solutions for financially sustainable social services. Just how these so-called Hybrid Organizations balance the tension between social and economic issues still requires conceptualization. This paper introduces the following definition based on the literature on organizational identity, civil society, and marketized nonprofits: Hybrids are characterized by an organizational identity that systematically integrates civil society and markets, exchange communal solidarity for financial and non-financial resources, calculate the market value of communal solidarity, and trade this solidarity for financial and nonfinancial resources. In other words they “Create Functional Solidarity”. Criteria to empirically observe Hybrid Organizations are also introduced and compared to similar concepts. The paper concludes with an outline of a research agenda.     

The Subjectivity of Fairness: Managerial Discretion and Work–Life Balance

We use organizational justice theory to examine how perceptions of fairness affect the decision‐making process of line managers. In‐depth interviews were conducted with 35 Irish managers to explore how managers make organizational allocation decisions in cases where it is impractical to offer work–life balance accommodations to all employees. The findings suggest that firstly, managers construct the ‘life’ aspect of work–life balance within a heteronormative framework, where the emphasis is on caregiving and most usually parenting. Secondly, managers actively use their decision‐making powers around both formal and informal work–life balance supports to minimize injustice within their departments. By bringing together ideas about organizational justice and managerial decision‐making, we indicate how managers determine fairness through a decision‐making process narrowed by embedded gender role beliefs. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.     

New ways of working (NWW): work space and cultural change in virtualizing organizations

ABSTRACT

This study offers a grounded theory of ‘new ways of working’ (NWW), an organizational design concept of Dutch origin with a global relevance. NWW concern business solutions for flexible workspaces enabled by digital network technologies. Theoretically, NWW are analysed with reference to Lefebvre’s theory on the ‘production of space’ and are defined along three dimensions: the spatiotemporal ‘flexibilization’ of work practices, the ‘virtualization’ of the technologically pre-defined organization, and the ‘interfacialization’ of meaning making in the lifeworld of workers. Empirically, NWW are explored in a case study of an insurance company which in 2007 radically implemented NWW. The case study consists of a longitudinal – before and after implementation – research based on ethnographic fieldwork, conducted in 2007 and 2010. The article contributes with a conceptual framework for the analysis and management of NWW, and highlights contradictions and ambiguities in the implementation and appropriation of this innovative organizational design.     

Towards ‘New Emotional Movements’? A Comparative Exploration into a Specific Movement Type

In this article we broaden the scope of earlier research that established a theoretical specificity for the Belgian ‘White March’ and ‘White Movement’, by comparing them to three similar movements and mobilizations that were also triggered by random violence. The comparisons suggest that we are dealing with a new type of social movement and mobilization, preliminarily referred to as ‘new emotional movements’. The three other cases under study are the ‘Snowdrop Campaign’ in the UK, the ‘Million Mom March’ in the US and the ‘Movement against Senseless Violence’ in the Netherlands. Four important features seem to characterize all cases: the central role of emotions and victimization in the mobilization and development of the movement; broad elite support; organizational weakness; and extensive media support. We distinguish two sub-types of new emotional movements: (1) an instrumental variant with clear-cut aims and demands; and (2) an identity variant with displays of solidarity and compassion as the main constitutive elements. In both cases the initiators lack prior organizational experience and the absence of mobilizing organizations is compensated for by mass media support. In the instrumental sub-type neither the victims nor their relatives take the initiative but lend support and give approval to amateur entrepreneurs. The main mobilizing emotion appears to be fear about the possibility of personal suffering, and this emotion is reflected in the formulation of clear-cut demands for the future prevention of similar events. This instrumentality results in elite support being considerably broad, yet partisan. In contrast, the victims themselves take the initiative in the identity variant, causing the movement to remain more or less without specific demands but ensuring a broad support that is not bounded by party lines.     

MADE IN THE USA: LATINAS/OS?, GARMENT WORK AND ETHNIC CONFLICT IN LOS ANGELES' SWEAT SHOPS

In the 1990s Latino identity is increasingly constructed as a ‘universal’, ‘classless’ and genderless pan-ethnicity. In this article I problematize this construct through an ethnographic study of Latina workers in the Los Angeles garment industry whose jobs are not only gender and ethnic specific but also immigrant specific. These women are located at the bottom of a complex organizational structure of an industry that promotes Third World conditions in the US in addition to promoting inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic conflict among workers. The voiced testimonies of these Latina garment workers provide a vivid record of contractor abuse, the unrelenting demands and difficulties of garment work, and the exploitative conditions and ethnic rivalries that make it difficult for Latinas to forge an effective culture of resistance. I argue that the survival of Latina garment workers rests on their ability to negotiate collaborative relations based on their unique struggles and experiences within the garment industry as women, immigrants, racialized workers and specific types of Latina Americanas. Finally, I highlight the importance of recording the insights of those women who not only experience the contemporary conditions of global capitalism, but also endeavour to speak rather than silence these conditions.     

Paying the toll: a feminist post‐structural critique of the discourse bridging work and family

On the surface, the modern workplace and home life appear to stand in sharp contrast to one another. The workplace seems to epitomize the modern concern with bounded time and the necessity of effective ‘use time’ (e.g., efficiency, effort, organizational commitment, speed‐up). Home life, on the other hand, is characterized by idealized images of emotionality and relief from the pressures of work. Yet numerous reported experiences of working people seem to belie this supposed duality. For many, home life is experienced as an appendage of the workplace, with its demands on time‐effort balance. Nonetheless, we continue to act as if there are two separate spheres of life that can ultimately be balanced and reconciled. This has been reinforced over the years by a growing discourse of work‐family conflict. Deconstruction of the discourse suggests that far from unraveling the ‘problem’ its characterization as a ‘work‐family’ conflict serves to privilege the dominant themes of use‐time and speed.     

Zora Neale Hurston’s visual and textual portrait of middle passage survivor Oluale Kossola/Cudjo Lewis

This article examines African American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston’s book-length biography and film of the last known Middle Passage survivor, Oluale Kossola/Cudjo Lewis, to explore her cinematic and literary engagement with slavery and to recover Lewis as a co-author of both documents. Hurston’s literary project, ‘Barracoon’, in which she situated herself merely as Kossola’s amanuensis and foregrounded the ‘inexpressible violence’ and ‘horror’ of his experience, represented an unusually frank twentieth-century record of enslavement and post-slavery life. Such work pre-dated and lacked the patronising tone of much of the WPA Slave Narrative Collection (1936–1938), whose investigators were mainly white and whose subjects’ accounts were often reconstructed loosely from field notes. Moreover, Hurston’s footage of Lewis circumvented literary mediation altogether to provide an Atlantic slavery survivor with an unprecedented visual outlet for self-expression.     

Curative fictions: The ‘narrative cure’ in Judith Herman's trauma and recovery and Chantal Chawaf's Le Manteau noir

Abstract

The possibility of a so‐called ‘narrative cure’, whereby a survivor of traumatic experience can begin to deal with her past through integrating it into narrative, has become central both to psychotherapy and to literary criticism on writings of trauma as a means of ethical, ‘truthful’ testimony and of healing. This article seeks to question the correlation between testimony and ‘cure’ through analysing the function of the ‘narrative cure’ in a psychotherapeutic text and in a literary text. This highlights how any notion of ‘truthful’ testimony is always underwritten by fiction, which raises crucial ethical questions about the relation between fiction and ‘truth’, testimony and ‘cure’ and psychotherapy and literature. I argue that the ‘narrative cure’ is not a privileged space of curative ‘truth’, but a point of tension between memory and amnesia and between ‘truth’ and fiction; it is precisely this tension, I suggest, which should characterize and structure interdisciplinary responses to trauma.     

Routine deaths: fatal accidents in the oil industry

This paper is a study in the relatively neglected field of the Sociology of Accidents and is concerned with fatalities in the UK Offshore Oil Industry. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate the social and organizational causes of these accidents. Common sense and expert opinion both present industrial accidents as products of extra organizational abnormality but evidence from this research locates the causes of accidents in work organization and dependence on bureaucratic rationality. In particular it is shown that the hazardous situations in which the accidents occurred were themselves largely the products of two aspects of the formal organization of work, the 'speed-up’and the practice of ‘sub-contracting’. It is demonstrated that the common sense equation of the‘normal’and the‘routine’inhibited recognition of the organization causes of these accidents. Finally it is argued that, since there is little support for the view that the accident were produced by unique working conditions in the offshore industry, it is therefore likely that the causes of accidents in this industry will be found to exist in other industries.     

Disability in British poetry of the First World War

In 2005, K.D. Laird published an abrasive critique of the poem ‘Disabled’ by Wilfred Owen. This iconic trench poet of the First World War was accused of portraying his impaired veteran as a tragic victim of loss. However, 50?years before the modern disability movement, Owen lacked the language to interpret impairment as oppression. What ‘Disabled’ requires is a contextual analysis that integrates its literary qualities with the historical conditions. This article applies such an approach. Firstly, the technical devices used to tell the story are examined: for example, rhyming, verse structure and allusions. Secondly, the experience of impairment represented in the poem is related to early-twentieth-century British society: in particular to the initial patriotic enthusiasm for the War, to the influence of gender roles and to the limitations of state provision. In this way, we see how Owen’s literary image is situated within a historical time frame.     

On the tacit side of organizational identity: Narrative unconscious and figured practice

It is a paradox of research on organizational identity formation that it cannot take place without reliance upon the expressive acts people use, yet the experience of identity cannot be reduced to such expressions. People are more than they can tell. Drawing from a study of a communication agency and building on notions of self in pragmatism, anthropology, and narrative philosophy, I identify two chief dimensions of tacit organizational identity: (1) the narrative unconscious in the stories that people live by and (2) the related figuring of formative organizational practice, in particular regarding choice of and framing of projects. In the case of organization, an episode revolving around the presentation of the ‘New Bohemian Laws’ provides a window to explore both these dimensions. Implications include a refined methodological approach to identity research. It involves acknowledging ‘feelings of identity’, attending to poetics, tuning-in to refrains and styles, and pursuing a relational subjectivity.     

The body without organs: nonorganizational desire in organizational life

In an attempt to challenge the status of the organizational, this paper proposes a ‘nonorganizational’ turn towards embodiment and desire. Introducing and critically discussing Deleuze and Guattari's () notion of the ‘body without organs’ (BwO), it argues that this may improve organization theory's opportunities to think about the forces of embodied desire that disrupt, undermine and escape organization, upset the homogeneity of organizational life, and overpower organizations to such an extent that they cease to be organizations. Rather than adding more ‘organization’ to ‘organizational life’, this may be a way to put more ‘life’ into it. And rather than deeming organization more powerful, this may be a way to recognize its limitations and fragility.     

Gendered,Invisible Work in Non‐profit Social Service Organizations: Implications for Worker Health and Safety

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) play an important role in the provision of health and social services. In Canada the nonprofit sector includes 7.5 million volunteers and employs over 1.6 million paid workers. The sector is overwhelmingly female‐dominated — women make up over 80 per cent of workers in these nonprofit services. Work performed by women has traditionally been undervalued and invisible. It has often been considered safe by researchers, employers, policymakers and sometimes even workers themselves. Although there is some indication that jobs in the restructuring social services sector can be characterized by constant demand, high stress and violence, research into the working conditions and health hazards of these types of jobs has not been a priority. Using data from a qualitative study examining work in NPOs, we trace the ways that work performed in these workplaces is both gendered and invisible. We identify three types of invisible labour. ‘Background work’ facilitates and supports more visible and recognized organizational activities. Certain organizational language obscures the full spectrum of work that takes place in the organizations and the risks it may involve. ‘Empathy work’ includes the relationship building, counselling and crisis intervention that comprise key components of social service delivery. ‘Emotional labour’ involves the management of client emotions and workers' own emotions in the process of working with clients and delivering care under conditions of scarcity and contraction. The invisibility of these activities means that much of the day‐to‐day work done in the organizations, while particularly important in the context of social service restructuring, is taken‐for‐granted and undervalued by organizational outsiders. As a result, many of the hazards present in the jobs are hidden from view and workers' health may be compromised. We argue that the invisibility and taken‐for‐grantedness of certain types of work in NPOs is reflected in, and constitutive of, particular exclusions and shortcomings of current occupational health and safety systems designed to protect the health of workers.