Critical Organization Studies Research Articles

Recognition at the corporate celebration of Christmas: Freezing the postsocialist gender regime

This article critically examines the perpetuation of gender regimes within postsocialist Europe by analyzing how organizational recognition is performed as part of the corporate celebration of Christmas. A critical ethnography was conducted at a male-dominated company in postsocialist Hungary. The article’s findings align with three corporate Christmas scenes: the company owner’s speech, an award ceremony for families, and an award ceremony for the best employee. This study contributes to critical organization studies by advancing an understanding of the postsocialist gender regime and those ideological forms of recognition that invisibly reproduce it through the seemingly innocent practices of Christmas celebrations. Furthermore, by providing a critical reconceptualization of workplace familism as an ideology, it is argued that it is a central and distinctive element of the gendered subtext of this particular postsocialist gender regime. Ultimately, three different and ritualized forms of pathological recognition (misrecognition, overidentification and reification) are identified, claiming to be constitutive of individual gender identity regulation and extending socioideological control beyond the boundaries of the organization.

Towards a biosocial turn in management and organization research? Proposals for a paradigm shift

In this essay, I draw on the concept of biosocial organizing to propose a biosocial turn in organization research. In recent years, Organization has seen an increase in articles and special issues on the organizational dimension of agriculture, food and the environment as major challenges and opportunities for our scientific community and global societies. These contributions participated towards moving the critical thinking of Organization beyond traditional concepts in management such as sustainable development or corporate social and environmental responsibility, in which the environment, living entities and nature are seen, at best, as contexts. However, the number of these works is still limited and the subject deserves further empirical and theoretical research. Much more is needed to promote the contribution of critical organization studies to these challenges, to account for the complexity of phenomena – such as climate change or biodiversity losses – from an organizational point of view, and to learn more about the impacts of studying these topics on new modes of organizing.

The politics of post-human technologies: Human enhancements, artificial intelligence and virtual reality

This essay encourages fellow scholars to consider critical organizational studies of post-human technologies. While these nascent technologies hold many promises, they also risk exacerbating several unacceptable organizational features that have been regularly documented, discussed and combated in Organization over the past 30 years. These features include, among other evils, corporate domination and colonization; further erosion of organic solidarity; entrenchment of inegalitarian imaginaries; and impoverished lifeworlds oriented toward instrumental efficiency alone. In order to steer them democratically, we need reflexive empirical studies of post-human technologies in connection with big societal issues.

Beyond the technology-centric and citizen-centric binary: Ontological politics of organizing in Translation of the Smart City Discourse in India

Smart city (SC) experts in India often center-stage citizens as an alternative to a technology-led transformation. A substantial body of literature on smart cities sustains this resultant binary between techno-centrism and citizen-centrism. Mobilizing ANT sensibilities, we generate an ethnographic narrative on how the smart city discourse has translated into everyday processes of city administration and urban governance in India. Our account unmutes more-and-other-than-human actants—event-stage, glossy publications, ceremonial awards, conference producers, and decision-makers—in the translation of SC discourse, with following effects: the uncertainties in the translation process are foregrounded which potentially destabilize center-staged actor identities; and the work of heterogeneous actants in articulating the citizen as the center of their efforts is revealed, thereby de-naturalizing the binarized reality. Furthermore, when unmuted, more-and-other-than-humans spell out their ongoing collaborations and negotiations and generate a nuanced reading of the clashes and accommodations made in the process of translating SC discourse in everyday settings of city administrations. These effects lead us to emphasize the translation of SC discourse as an uncertain socio-material process proceeding through episodic clashes and tentative accommodations. They also invite a conceptual expansion of translation as constitutive of the ontological politics of organizing, which insists on attending to ongoing collaborations and negotiations among more-and-other-than-humans that compose organizational realities. Thus, we address critical organization and management studies’ concerns regarding ANT’s alignment with its objectives by locating politics in the performance of, and interference into, the multiple realities that are being enacted through practices that assemble experts, decision-makers and non-humans.

Book Review Forum

This forum brings together a diverse group of scholars from political geography, international relations, critical organisation studies, global development, international studies and political sociology to explore the debates and dynamics of celebrity engagement with development and humanitarianism. The contributions here come from a series of roundtables organised in 2021, including one at the 6th World Conference on Humanitarian Studies of the International Humanitarian Studies Association in Paris that discussed the findings and insights of the book Batman Saves the Congo: How Celebrities Disrupt the Politics of Development (University of Minnesota Press, 2021).

COVID-19: Interrogating the capitalist organization of the economy and society through the pandemic.

This editorial introduces eight papers included in this special issue on COVID-19. Together, these papers draw key theoretical and political insights for critical organization studies from the pandemic along three main lines. First, they examine how COVID-19 has denaturalized global capitalism, leading to a broad interrogation of the organization of the economy and our societies. Second, they point to how COVID-19 has unveiled the close relation between capital and the state in producing inequalities old and new, a relation that neoliberalism tends to hide from view. Third, they leverage COVID-19 to give voice to the largely female disposable workforce in the Global South on whose work global commodity flows, consumption and capital accumulation rest. We conclude by pointing to the need to address constitutive interdependencies, such as those between wage work and reproductive work, the global North and the global South, the market and the state, to name only a few. We further call for expanding traditional understandings of struggle to include a broader range of social antagonisms (e.g. for sufficient time to care, education, healthcare, housing, safe public spaces, accessible to all) as part of a theoretically and politically renewed organizational research agenda fostering solidarity.

The Struggles for Organizational Discursive Hegemony on the Sustainability of Fracking in Colombia

ABSTRACT Over more than ten years different organizations in Colombia (South America) have discussed the advantages and disadvantages of implementing hydraulic fracturing processes (fracking) as a way to increase the production and exports of oil and natural gas. Drawing on the fields of critical organizational discourse studies and environmental studies, this manuscript explores how the Colombian discourses on fracking emerge, recontextualize, operationalize, and become hegemonic in order to present fracking as a sustainable or unsustainable practice. After performing a discourse analysis of organizational texts published between 2012 and 2020 by different Colombian organizations, I argue that the intertextual discourse on the sustainability of fracking reflects both interorganizational collaboration and disruption.

How ‘matter matters’ for morality: The case of a stock exchange

While matter clearly matters to organization theory, its absence from the study of organizational ethics is striking. Despite the obdurate materiality of the workplace, critical scholarship on organizations and morality sees ethics as interpersonal, subjective and embodied. Organizations, meanwhile, are characterized by moral anomie and dysfunction. This article advances our understanding of the material entanglements of organizational morality, drawing on the science and technology studies inflected study of markets to show how moral orders arise in dialectic between the social and the material. It argues that moral orders are entangled in the material infrastructures of organizations. Its empirical case is the founding and development of a small-company focused stock exchange, OFEX, launched in London in 1995, accessed through elite interviews and documentary work. The article seeks to develop our understanding of morality in critical organization studies, to further defend the Weberian notion of ‘ethics of office’ by emphasizing the sociomaterial dimension of organizational morality, and to contribute to an ongoing renaissance of the study of morality as a sociological phenomenon. There are implications for managers and engaged scholars alike.

Artificial intelligence and rationalized unaccountability: Ideology of the elites?

In this Connexions essay, we focus on intelligent agent programs that are cutting-edge solutions of contemporary artificial intelligence (AI). We explore how these programs become objects of desire that contain a radical promise to change organizing and organizations. We make sense of this condition and its implications through the idea of ‘rationalized unaccountability’ that is an ideological state in which power and control are exerted algorithmically. While populist uses of new technologies receive growing attention in critical organization and management studies, we argue that rationalized unaccountability is the hidden end of a spectrum of populism affecting societies across the world. Rather than populism of the masses, this is a populism of elites. This essay lays out some premises for critical scholars to expose the workings of intelligent agent programs and to call into question the problematic ideological assumptions that they are grounded in.

Corporate Scramble for Africa? Towards a postcolonial framework for transglocal development governance

Building on postcolonial critical organization and development studies, this paper explores the neo-colonial drive of a global development initiative. The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (NA) was launched in 2012 and provides a governance framework for partnerships between donors, governments, and companies that applies principles and practices of market-led growth as means to the end of inclusive development. Through an in-depth, multilevel analysis that juxtaposes the NA’s stipulated framework with the lived experiences of smallholder farmers in Malawi, one of ten African countries to participate in NA, the paper shows how local consequences are decoupled from global goals through governance gaps in both the horizontal and vertical dynamics of implementation. This decoupling of intention and consequence, we argue, happens at the national level of translating global principles into local practices. On the basis of this analysis, we suggest that vertical and horizontal governance must be integrated in one framework. Thus, we contribute to ongoing efforts to improve the theory and practice of the organization of development by introducing a framework of transglocal governance.

Feminism and men: Ambivalent space for acting up

Feminism, historically and today, provides challenges and opportunities to men. In this essay, we present a dialogue that highlights different positions on men’s activism and thought in relation to feminism. We argue that it is essential for men to engage with feminism as activists and in theory, although this may present risks subjectively, professionally and interpersonally. To illustrate our argument, we provide examples of engagement and distance from our working lives in different socio-cultural contexts. We explore questions of vulnerability and uncertainty in learning from feminism, and discuss how our privileges as (White, middle-aged, permanently employed) men condition our ambivalent experiences. The essay is oriented towards encouraging ourselves/men to articulate what feminism in action means, through research, teaching and professional identity work. We consider throughout the conditions of possibility for men in acting up with feminism in critical organization and management studies, in the hope that practical action can create better conditions of work for all of us.

We Are Pilots, not Horses

Drawing upon contributions of scholarship on power and resistance in critical organizational communication studies, this essay explores resistance as a form to shape and reinforce professionalism from Taiwanese commercial airline pilots' performed discursive practice. Interviews were conducted with Taiwanese commercial airline pilots to excavate their personal narratives, which are then presented in poetic transcription. Through the poetic transcription, this essay demonstrates Taiwanese commercial airline pilots' resistance as embodied performance of work-practices in everyday organizing; thus calling for a performative turn to study organizational power, resistance, and professionalism.

Género e teoria organizacional

A preocupação dominante da teoria organizacional tem estado centrada, ao longo dos anos, na melhoria do desempenho, incluindo factores de eficácia e eficiência. Este foco, enraizado no paradigma funcionalista e justificado pelo carácter fundamentalmente aplicado desta área científica, tem sido posto em causa pelas teorias críticas da organização. Uma das principais variantes da teoria crítica das organizações é a teoria feminista das organizações, a qual pretende promover o encontro entre a teria organizacional e o pensamento feminista. O resultado, defendem os proponentes desta aproximação, poderia ser o fim da teoria organizacional tal como hoje a conhecemos. Este trabalho pretende apresentar os fundamentos genéricos da teoria feminista das organizações, e ilustrar a importância potencial do género enquanto variável relevante para a análise e compreensão das organizações.
 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17575/rpsicol.v15i1.489

Rethinking Value, Labour and Class in critical OS through the New Reading of Marx and Open Marxism

This article addresses the growing interest in value as a topic of inquiry in critically oriented organisation studies by generating new key resources for its understanding, analysis and investigation derived from the New Reading of Marx and Open Marxism’s reinterpretations of Marx’s critique of political economy. After reviewing the three most influential Marxist traditions in critical organisation studies – Labour Process Theory, postoperaismo and paleo-Marxism – with particular attention to the relation between value and labour, we advance the New Reading of Marx and Open Marxism as offering an alternative conceptualization of such relation that overcomes key critiques to these three traditions. This conceptualization is distinguished by its focus on how the classed relations of production specific to capitalist society assume market-mediated social forms in the sphere of circulation. We conclude by suggesting a number of areas across which this strand of Marxist theorising can help grant new analytical and political resources to existing and future research on contemporary work and economic life as well as its alternatives.

A Lama da Samarco e o Crime Corporativo: uma reflexão necessária

O presente estudo objetiva-se a lançar luzes sobre o tema de crime corporativo tal como defendido por Medeiros e Alcadipani (2013a). Os estudos organizacionais tendem a se debruçarem sobre o aspecto positivo das organizações, tratando o seu lado sombrio como algo excepcional. Diante disso, Medeiros e Alcadipani (2013a) buscaram explorar esse lado sombrio, especificamente os crimes corporativos. Destarte, busca-se lançar reflexões acerca do evento da “Lama da Samarco” que ocasionou na morte de dezenove pessoas, em famílias desabrigadas, prejuízos econômicos, consequências ambientais e cálculo de atingidos inestimáveis. As conclusões no que se referem à classificação do evento da “Lama” como crime corporativo ainda é prematura, porém, defende-se a necessidade de tais reflexões como forma de desvelar práticas sombrias das organizações e, diante da atualidade desse acontecimento evidenciar como adoção de tais práticas é presente na sociedade ao passo que pesquisas que abordem os aspectos negativos do management recebem pouco espaço.

Caught between norm and difference: narratives on refugees’ inclusion in organizations

PurposeIn this study the authors show how discursive spaces both enable and constrain the inclusion of first-generation refugees. For this purpose the authors analyzed a triptych of narratives from first-generation refugees, employers, and mediators (mediating between organizations and job-seeking refugees). The authors adopted a critical studies approach, paying particular attention to the ways in which meanings are embedded within the normalizing discursive processes. The purpose of this paper is to show the maneuvering capacities of three different groups concerning the inclusion of first-generation refugees.Design/methodology/approachThe data consist of a selected number of narratives from three groups of actors (refugees, mediators and employers) with the ambition of contrasting their discursive positionings. By including multiple positionings in the process, the authors aimed to reveal “the power effects of particular discursive formations,” which Alvesson et al. (2008) refer to as “positioning practices.” To investigate these patterns, the authors used in-depth interviews and employed an interpretive approach with the focus on the narrations of inclusion and exclusion.FindingsThe major constraint the authors discovered was that, in spite of the “good will” of all parties involved, the normalizing impact of the dominant discourses on migrants and refugees (discourse of lack) often works against other approaches (added value). This creates contradictory expectations toward refugees, limiting the possibilities of inclusion within organizations. The findings of this research show that diversity and inclusion can only be successful in conjunction with critical reflection that questions the taken-for-granted position of privileged groups as a norm reproduced by dominant societal discourses.Research limitations/implicationsIn the light of growing urgency for the inclusion of refugees in the European context, it is crucial to rethink the notions of inclusion and exclusion from a critical perspective. The authors believe that the findings of the study could have implications which goes beyond the particular experiences presented in this study.Originality/valueThe authors conclude that diversity talk and practice which does not include reflection on the normalizing power of discourses of otherness does not have a chance of making a long-term impact on inclusion. Although there is a growing body of literature on this topic within critical organization studies, there has been no attention so far for the position of refugees in organizations which makes this paper both unique and urgent.

Affective atmospheres of hope: management model training in public reforms

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to argue that we need to take seriously what affective atmosphere means in public reform. Particular emphasis is put on understanding the mechanisms of hope (Brunsson, 2006) through affective atmosphere (Anderson, 2009) in regards to a management model training course.Design/methodology/approachEthnographically, the paper is placed in a Lean coach training course, led by two consultants, in the public care services in a municipality in Sweden. The participants were set to learn the language and techniques of the Lean management model during the course of three training days.FindingsUsing affective atmosphere as a theoretical window for how to understand how participants become enthusiastic about public reform, the author puts forward that the enthusiastic, affective atmosphere created in the training room demanded the ingredients of consultants and the mechanism of hope at play. The consultants’ fashioning of the course contributed to the affective atmosphere. But what also triggered the affective atmosphere in the room was the participants’ way of responding, which was much more accidental and founded in the Lean model itself, promising smooth flows and rational organization, and the participants’ ability to keep mechanisms of hope active.Originality/valueFotaki et al. (2017) point out that affect has only recently started to be integrated and explored in critical organization studies. Michels and Steyaert (2017) emphasise that affective atmosphere has rarely been used by organization theorists. This is an attempt to contribute to this literature by arguing for the fruitfulness of understanding the mechanisms of hope through affective atmosphere in regards to public management reform. The author also calls attention to the need for ethnographic fieldwork when examining affective atmospheres.

Architecture, symbolic capital and elite mobilisations: The case of the Royal Bank of Scotland corporate campus

In this article, we apply the conceptual framework of Pierre Bourdieu, in particular forms of capital, social fields, field of power and modes of domination, to demonstrate how the study of a symbolically powerful building can provide insights into what are often opaque elite interactions. In order to do this, we focus on the corporate campus headquarters of a powerful financial institution, the Royal Bank of Scotland in the context of Scotland in the period 2000–2009. We pose the following questions: What is the relationship between corporate space and the field of power? What role does a corporate building play in circuits of capital conversion? What does this case tell us about the role of architecture in elite mobilisations? In addressing these questions, we contribute to critical organisation studies by identifying and theorising the role of corporate space in inter-elite dynamics and circuits of capital conversion. This approach, we argue, provides a methodological lever which could be applied to other symbolically important buildings in order to understand the nature and role of inter-field interactions in the conception and realisation of such buildings.

Experimentalizing the organization of objects: Re-enacting mines and landfills

In this article, we draw upon ‘After-ANT’ scholarship to generate openings for a shift from purely deconstructive studies of object organization to a more straightforward generation of concrete and specific alternative trajectories towards the future by way of ontological experimentation. Through careful empirical investigation of a mine and a landfill, and how these are enacted in practice in different topological registers, we show how mines and landfills are intertwined; enacted sometimes as similar and in other cases as different types of objects, thus shaping the paths of becoming for those bundles of relations that become enacted as either a ‘mine object’ or a ‘landfill object’. Mapping these practices generates openings for interventions suggesting how things could be made different in some specificity; in this case, for example, the appreciation of what constitutes ‘natural resources’. The overarching purpose of this article is to intervene in current debates regarding the potential merits of drawing upon Object-Oriented Philosophy as an inspiration in critical organizational studies. While we are highly sympathetic to calls for more experimental object studies, we are hesitant towards Object-Oriented Philosophy as a source of inspiration due to its specific metaphysical underpinnings. To clarify what we find to be at stake here, we conclude the article by situating After-ANT in a wider landscape of thought, discussing the contrast between broadly pragmatist research approaches, such as After-ANT, and Object-Oriented Philosophy. Finally, we try to spell out how we believe this contrast reverberates upon how we understand the purpose and potential of critical social science.

Organizing beyond organization: Branding, discourse, and communicative capitalism

This essay presents an argument for critical organization studies scholars to more seriously address the phenomenon of corporate branding as a central, constitutive feature of organizing in contemporary capitalism. While brands and branding have historically been the domain of marketing and consumer studies researchers, I argue that a focus on the intersection of branding and organizing enables critical researchers to more effectively address the ways in which neoliberal capitalism and post-Fordist organizational forms mediate processes of meaning construction and human identity formation. Taking up Böhm and Land’s claim that neoliberal capitalism is characterized by a ‘new hidden abode of production’, I adopt Dean’s conception of ‘communicative capitalism’ to explore how branding processes are ‘hidden in plain sight’ as a key, constitutive element of this ‘new hidden abode’. As such, branding can be explored as a particular case of ‘organizing beyond organization’. The essay develops three elements of the branding and organizing relationship as medium and outcome of communicative capitalism: (1) floating signifiers and nodal points, (2) communicative labor, and (3) communication and affect.