Punk routine and academic discipline

Abstract

This is a personal account of being an anarchist punk rock kid in academia, a meditation on the entanglement of punk rock arts and activism with organisation studies. To illustrate this entanglement, I present some of my experiences with hardcore punk rock and anarchist organisation and trace how I believe this background in a radical counterculture formed and conditioned my work within organisation studies and how my academic training has influenced my activism as a punk musician. The article employs Donna Haraway’s concept of partial perspective to reflect on how I have not only learned to see and understand organisation through my lasting engagement with punk and anarchist culture outside the walls of academia, but also learned to see and use art as a medium for change. The article conceptualises punk’s fidelity to the otherwise, the ever-present conviction that life, society and, indeed, the world could be otherwise. In my experience, this fidelity has translated into an anarchist scientific knowledge interest, and when employed in the service of organisation studies, it has enabled me to see, think and study organisation from an anarchist position. To be true to the spirit and aesthetic sensibilities of punk, the article is written in an impatient, erratic and fragmented style.