Social practices of quantification, or the production and communication of numbers, have been recognized as important foundations of organizational knowledge, as well as sources of power. With the ...advent of increasingly sophisticated digital tools to capture and extract numerical data from social life, however, there is a pressing need to understand the ethical stakes of quantification. The current study examines quantification from an ethical lens, to frame and promote a research agenda around the ethics of quantification. After a brief overview of quantification research and its uses in state and market organization, I discuss quantification in terms of three core subprocesses—capture, specification, and appropriation, illustrating and identifying ethical concerns around each process. Linking these processes to the performative effects of measures, I present a working model of quantification from which the discussion builds ideas for developing a research agenda around quantification.
Arguing that psychology and business ethics are best brought together through a multi-level, broad-based agenda, this essay articulates a vision of psychology and business ethics to frame a future ...research agenda. The essay draws upon work published in JBE, but also identifies gaps where published research is needed, to build upon psychological conceptions of business ethics. Psychological concepts, notably, are not restricted to phenomena "in the head", but are discussed at the intra-psychic, relational, and contextual levels of analysis. On the basis of this presentation, I discuss future directions for development in psychology and business ethics, including but not limited to studies of personality, emotion, decision making, motivation, and the biological bases of psychology and business ethics. An inclusive approach to these and related areas, it is argued, will both bring about depth of understanding on the psychological bases of business ethics, and allow dialogue across disciplinary areas within JBE.
Metrics shape our social worlds in many and more ways. Everyday quantifications of our preferences, our behaviors and our relationships, alter us and the institutions that we constitute. This essay ...takes a brief look at the metrics of business ethics through two analytic devices.
Representation
explains the notion that metrics can capture or demonstrate ethics (the metrics of ethics) and
performativity
explains the notion that metrics can shape or constitute ethics (the ethics of metrics). The analytic distinction between representation and performativity is obscured in practice when metrics become targets, indeed much of the social power of metrics comes from their use as targets. Hence, we should pay attention to the world of practice in which measuring and doing are entangled. However, we should not lose sight of the limitations of measurement and the possibility that there are areas of ethical life best left unmeasured.
The rapid emergence of mindfulness programs within organizational settings reflects an amalgam of humanistic, spiritual, and managerial perspectives. While impact studies have focused on effects of ...mindfulness programs on employees, how such programs are implemented by trainers, managers, and employees and how the mindfulness concept operates within organizations are not well understood. In this study, we draw upon Laclau’s notion of the ‘empty signifier’ to argue that mindfulness programs work to encode oppositional organizational elements, drawing on competing discourses that shape, in practice, how mindfulness evolves within organizations. Through an empirical qualitative study of organizational mindfulness practitioners, we show how practitioners leverage heterogeneous meanings to represent oppositions within organizations, and that in the course of mindfulness programs, these oppositions are framed to align with dominant managerial perspectives. We discuss the ramifications of these findings to understanding the uses of mindfulness for ideological purposes while speculating on the emancipatory possibilities of mindfulness as a solidaristic and collective practice.
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Drawing from a qualitative empirical study of Canadian entrepreneurs, we seek to understand the nature of entrepreneurial thinking. More specifically, we analyse entrepreneurs’ cognitive capacity to ...mitigate the risk inherent in an uncertain future and overcome low community expectations of entrepreneurial success. We introduce the notion of ‘magical thinking’, an emergent construct that refers to a cluster of beliefs that maintain the motivation and focus of entrepreneurs by transmuting agency from a rational-scientific context in which the entrepreneur imposes his or her will on the environment, to a spiritual context in which the entrepreneur perseveres by remaining true to trust in a wider cosmological belief system. We identify three key elements of magical thinking – finding one’s path, obtaining the answers and being at peace.
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Technology invites a reconsideration of organization and organizing by calling attention to mediated forms of value production among loose social collectives outside formal organizational boundaries. ...While the nascent concept of organizationality holds potential for such a re-conceptualization, the processes through which loose social members become invested in co-orientation and collective effort require further empirical and theoretical exploration. In this paper, we link organizationality research with critical media studies on affect and technology to theorize how affect holds provisional collectives together while promoting new modes of value extraction. Empirically, we draw from an ethnographic study of hackathons – transdigital innovation spaces where participants act with and through technology – and suggest three intertwined processes as part of an affective circuit that stokes and directs affect. The paper’s contribution is threefold. First, by analysing how affective circuits bind, integrate and co-orient action among loose members, we contribute to understanding organizationality as affectively constituted. Second, by showing how hackathons leverage desire for community, we offer a critical perspective on affective capture and argue that organizationality involves novel modes of value production. Third, we complement theorizing of hackathons by exploring them as sites of organizationality, focusing on the provisional, relational and affect-rich nature of new forms of organizing in the digital age.
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The current article examines the experience of middle management through the concept of boundary work, characterized as the work of negotiating between multiple roles in the interstices of ...organizational groups. Through an ethnographic study of a Brazilian accounting firm, we explore the ambivalent experience of boundary work as characteristic of professional middle managerial workers. Our managers described themselves as proactive and reflexive agents, on the one hand, yet also as lacking autonomy and a sense of belonging, on the other. We examine this tension as a contrast between forces of emancipation (i.e. sense of mastery, autonomy, empowerment and reflexivity) and alienation (i.e. fatigue, lack of self-determination, and detachment from their profession and coworkers). We discuss these forces and their implications for managerial work in the light that, in our findings, managers routinely shift between being agential and reflexive mediators (boundary subjects) and interfacing and coordination devices (boundary objects).
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Mindfulness programs, and related practices of contemplation and spirituality, are a growing trend in contemporary work organizations. Increasingly adopted into corporations, mindfulness is often ...described as a remedy for workplace challenges such as constant hurry, interruptions, and stress. Despite increasing research on mindfulness, little research examines how mindfulness is adapted in corporate settings, including concerns of co-optation during implementation. This article addresses this gap by qualitatively examining corporate mindfulness practices within an international, knowledge-intensive firm. We identify the processes of scientization, instrumentalization, and commodification of mindfulness programs, exploring the mechanisms by which these three processes interact with each other. We conclude by discussing the importance of scientization, instrumentalization, and commodification for understanding mindfulness in practice, and for building a research agenda around emic and situated understandings of corporate mindfulness.
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Collaboration during aesthetic production is inherently complex, involving difficult-to-articulate aspects of aesthetic judgement as well as relational questions that are inherently power-laden. ...Particularly in situations where actors do not share background conditions or judgement criteria, aesthetic collaboration poses conceptual and practical challenges. Through an in-depth case study of a French haute cuisine programme in Shanghai, China, we propose a relational-epistemic approach to aesthetic collaboration, in which aesthetic judgement and relational positioning mutually shape how chef trainees come to understand their creative products. Specifically, aesthetic collaboration was shaped by whether participants understood their mutual relationships as antagonistic or integrative, and whether they considered aesthetics as a matter of objective knowledge, cultural tradition or co-construction. Based on our results, we explore the implications of the relationalepistemic approach in understanding organizational aesthetics, especially in the context of the culture industries and haute cuisine specifically.
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