Discreet Power Christina Garsten, Adrienne Sörbom
2018, 2018-07-10
eBook, Book
In Discreet Power, Christina Garsten and Adrienne Sörbom undertake an ethnographic study of the World Economic Forum (WEF). Accessing one of the primary agenda-setting organizations of our day, they ...draw on interviews and participant observation to examine how the WEF wields its influence. They situate the WEF within an emerging system of "discretionary governance," in which actors craft ideas and entice formal authorities and top leaders in order to garner significant sway. Yet in spite of its image as a powerful, exclusive brain trust, the WEF has no formal mandate to implement its positions. It must convince others to advance chosen causes and enact suggestions, rendering its position quite fragile. Garsten and Sörbom argue that the WEF must be viewed relationally as a brokering organization that lives between the market and political spheres and that extends its reach through associated individuals and groups.They place the WEF in the context of a broader shift, arguing that while this type of governance opens up novel ways of dealing with urgent global problems, it challenges core democratic values.
The debate on global governance points to shifts in the type and nature of regulation as well as in the set of actors involved. The article introduces a novel way of conceptualizing the changes, ...namely a move towards post-political forms of regulation (see also Garsten and Jacobsson, 2007). Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s notion of ‘the post-political vision’, the article argues that many contemporary forms of regulation are premised on consensual relationships as the basis for regulatory activity. These regulatory practices tend to narrow down the conflictual space, thereby exerting a form of soft power. Moreover, in the post-political forms of regulation, unequal power relations tend to be rendered invisible. The empirical cases discussed are voluntary regulatory arrangements, more specifically the Open Method of Coordination of the EU (OMC) and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) initiatives.
Anticipation is part of organizational attempts to manage their future affairs and shape their surroundings. Still, the ways in which organizations engage in anticipation have not been sufficiently ...conceptualized in the field of organization and management studies. This article conceptualizes organizational ways of shaping and orchestrating futures by engaging insights from Foucauldian scholarship that highlight the intersection between what we can see, know and govern. We highlight the importance of processes of knowledge production in governance efforts, and articulate how anticipatory governance is crafted through intricate combinations of resources such as narratives, numbers and digital traces. The main contribution is a conceptual typology outlining four different templates for anticipatory governance in organizational settings that we term ‘indicative snapshots’, ‘prognostic correlations’, ‘projected transformations’ and ‘phantasmagoric fictions’. We posit anticipatory governance as a knowledge-based, performative phenomenon that addresses potential and desirable futures in and between organizations. Such anticipatory activities gauge and guide organizational processes and modes of thinking and acting along different temporal orientations, and have governance effects that makes anticipation performative by its very nature. This understanding of anticipatory governance, we suggest, offers both conceptual contributions and empirical avenues for research in organization and management studies.
Anthropology now and next Eriksen, Thomas Hylland; Garsten, Christina; Randeria, Shalini
2014., 20141015, 2014, 2014-10-01, 2015
eBook, Book
The scholarship of Ulf Hannerz is characterized by its extraordinary breadth and visionary nature. He has contributed to the understanding of urban life and transnational networks, and the role of ...media, paradoxes of identity and new forms of community, suggesting to see culture in terms of flows rather than as bounded entities. Contributions honor Hannerz' legacy by addressing theoretical, epistemological, ethical and methodological challenges facing anthropological inquiry on topics from cultural diversity policies in Europe to transnational networks in Yemen, and from pottery and literature to multinational corporations.
This paper is based on ethnographic work in organization that form part of what we term the Future Industry - such as think tanks, consultancies and governmental bodies - involved in the charting, ...description and analysis of geopolitical future scenarios. That is to say, an industry explicitly aiming for organizing the future. This type of activity has for centuries generally been left to politics, executed foremost by governments and political parties. In later decades, however, the future industry has taken up on political parties in formulating and advocating options and suggestions for the future. In the paper we analyse the Future Industry, which we see as serving, feeding into, the emotional streams of contemporary politics and economics. We wish to describe the emotion work the industry undertakes in order to get the attention of its significant others. In the interest of selling beliefs of the future, we suggest that it draws on reason, in the format of science, making its customers sense the pros and cons of the particular future it puts forth. In so doing, it at times may attempt in shaping the future, but what it foremost does, is selling ideas of the future as a commodity. The paper argues that the mapping of global futures to a large extent involves the making of a ‘geopolitics of emotion’. In anticipatory activities, involving the voicing of ‘global problems’ and the presentation of ‘desirable futures’, the cultivation, articulation and management of fear, anxiety, and hope, as well as a reliance on rationality, reason, and evidence, are central components.
This paper is based on ethnographic work in organization that form part of what we term the Future Industry - such as think tanks, consultancies and governmental bodies - involved in the charting, ...description and analysis of geopolitical future scenarios. That is to say, an industry explicitly aiming for organizing the future. This type of activity has for centuries generally been left to politics, executed foremost by governments and political parties. In later decades, however, the future industry has taken up on political parties in formulating and advocating options and suggestions for the future. In the paper we analyse the Future Industry, which we see as serving, feeding into, the emotional streams of contemporary politics and economics. We wish to describe the emotion work the industry undertakes in order to get the attention of its significant others. In the interest of selling beliefs of the future, we suggest that it draws on reason, in the format of science, making its customers sense the pros and cons of the particular future it puts forth. In so doing, it at times may attempt in shaping the future, but what it foremost does, is selling ideas of the future as a commodity. The paper argues that the mapping of global futures to a large extent involves the making of a ‘geopolitics of emotion’. In anticipatory activities, involving the voicing of ‘global problems’ and the presentation of ‘desirable futures’, the cultivation, articulation and management of fear, anxiety, and hope, as well as a reliance on rationality, reason, and evidence, are central components.
This introduction to the special issue aims to contextualize and critically comment on the current trajectory of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in both scholarly inquiry and business practice. ...It suggests that we must place it within the milieu of the ongoing economic crisis and the failure of a number of important opportunities to make business ethical (e.g. the 2012 Rio + 20 Earth Summit). It then suggests possible future terrain for tenable CSR research (and practice), especially in the context of widespread cynicism and disbelief regarding the claims of business ethicists in industry and the academy.
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