An ever-increasing range of work activities occur in open spaces that require collective discipline, with silence emerging as a key feature of such workplace configurations. Drawing from an ...ethnographic examination of a makerspace in Paris, we explore the ways in which silence is incorporated into new work practices in the context of their actualization, embodiment and apprenticeship. Through its engagement with the conceptual work of Merleau-Ponty, this article does not posit silence as the opposite of sounds or as a passive achievement. Silence is inscribed in a learning process and requires numerous efforts to be maintained (e.g. body postures to avoid staring into the eyes of someone entering into an open space, wearing headphones, etc.). It is also the envelope of numerous noisy acts that take place in the phenomenological body and in the embodied practices of workers. We argue that ‘silencing’ is an event ordering that gives direction to what ‘happens’ in collective work activities and is central to the process of embodied learning in collaborative spaces.
In this introduction, we thank those who supported and contributed to our special issue of Classical Sociology, on the work and life of André Gorz. We then provide a sketch of Gorz’s place in ...intellectual history. Along the way, we explain some of our motivations for editing the special issue, then move on to a discussion of our contributors’ papers. We end with a reiteration of our goals for the issue, and with thanks once more to those who helped make it happen.
Across Western democracies, the public sector has undergone significant changes following successive waves of marketisation. Such changes find material expression in an organisation’s logic and ...associated vocabulary. While marketisation may be adopted, a growing body of research explains how it is often resisted as public sector professionals reject its logic and vocabulary. We contribute to this debate by detailing additional, theoretically important responses. Rather than simply rejecting or adopting both the logic and vocabulary of marketisation, this article shows how UK museum professionals decouple these. Our analysis shows how museum professionals either fashion generic market vocabulary (e.g. customer, value) to pursue local projects or sustain terms such as public and culture to cling to longer-standing ideals of publicness. Partly because of the nature of cultural goods, we propose the museum sector as a paradigm case to illustrate this phenomenon, but our argument has broader implications for the public sphere.
Performance and Becoming Aroles, Jeremy
Games and culture,
07/2018, Letnik:
13, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article seeks to examine how the notions of belonging and nativeness are enacted in virtual communities. It draws from an ethnographically inspired study of the players of a Massively ...Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) that is explored through three key dimensions: space, time, and language. Drawing on concepts developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I argue that the notion of nativeness, in the case of virtual communities, is best approached as a performance embedded in the process of becoming. In that sense, one is not but rather becomes a member of a virtual community. This process of becoming entails an exploration of smooth forms of space and the appropriation of a vernacular form of language.
This paper aims to explore the insight that can be brought by Deleuze and Guattari's concept of minor literature with regard to questions of field access within the context of organizational ...ethnography. This paper draws from an ethnographic account of scientists negotiating access during a field expedition to Fiji. While the scientists could secure access prior to their departure by abiding by the legal dimension of plant collecting in the field, they had to renegotiate access in the field by engaging with different epistemologies, codes and forms of relationality. Positioned as an ethnography of field access, this paper highlights the enmeshment of codes, practices and trajectories in the negotiation of field access and seeks to set the lines of a 'minor politics of access' within the context of organizational ethnography.
Abstract Though it is widely understood that the past can be an important resource for organizations, less is known about the micro‐level skills and choices that help to materialize different ...representations of the past. We understand these micro‐level skills and choices as a practice: ‘memory work’ – a banner term gathering various activities that provide the scaffolding for a shared past. Seeking to learn from a context where memory work is central, we share insights from a quasi‐longitudinal study of UK museum employees. We theorize three ideal‐typic regimes of memory work, namely representing, re‐presenting and producing the past, and detail the micro‐practices through which these regimes are enacted. Through explaining the key features of memory work in this context, our paper offers novel, broader insights into the relationship between occupations and memory work, showing how occupations differ in their understanding of memory and how this shapes their memory work.
As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, governments across the globe are enforcing various Information Systems (IS)-based systems of control that, we contend, augur a new organisation of our freedoms, ...raising concerns related to issues of surveillance and control. Presented as ways to curb the immediate progression of the pandemic, these systems have progressively appertained our lives, thus becoming the new "normal". Drawing from the concept of "control societies" developed by Deleuze, we explore how, through a logic of "the end justifies the means", these new systems are being normalised. Beyond Deleuzian studies that describe modern society as a control society, we contend that Deleuze provides useful insights to critically analyse the progressive "normalization" of new forms of digitally enabled control, as well as the implications of this normalisation process. The analysis of this normalisation process highlights the ways in which the current pandemic and its response (i.e., new forms of technological control) are "sociomaterially constructed" through a historic, discursive, and material process. Contributing to MIS research on privacy and surveillance, this reflection on the sociomaterial construction of the control society and of its digitally enabled control systems during the current COVID-19 crisis paves the way to possible forms of resistance and solutions.
The term ‘platform capitalism’ captures a dynamic set of new work modalities that are mediated by platforms and have been brought about through advances in Information and Communication Technologies, ...adjustments in consumption modes and preferences, and changes in how work is conceived. Beyond work‐related changes, the ascent of platform capitalism reflects wider societal and political as well as economic changes. While research on platform capitalism and its manifold manifestations abounds, there is a lack of consensus in the literature regarding its key features and characteristics. Seeking to provide conceptual clarity and to contribute to efforts of theorization, we here analyse four main facets of platform capitalism, namely, crowdsourcing, sharing economy, gig economy and platform economy. We review key definitions of each term and provide an overview of their distinctive features. This allows us to identify both similarities and differences in the framing of these four terms. We also delve into the ideologies underlying these four terms, thus providing a critique of the neophilia characterizing the discourse framing platform capitalism.
PurposeIn an ever-complexifying business context, organizations need to continuously adapt, adjust and change their routines in order to remain competitive. Drawing upon a qualitative study focusing ...on three Southeastern European countries (Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia), this paper explores the role played by managerial feedback on routine change within small and medium enterprises (SMEs).Design/methodology/approachThe authors draw from an in-depth qualitative study of six manufacturing SMEs located in three Southeastern European countries: Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia. The process of data collection, which spanned over a period of fifteen months, was centred around both interviews and observations.FindingsThe authors argue that feedback is a powerful and constructive managerial practice that sets to initiate changes in routines through three different means: (1) making sense of the changes required (by channelling information), (2) rationalizing the decision for changing the unproductive routines and (3) reviewing the process of change through the legitimization of situational routines. In addition to this, the authors found that managers perceive that routines need to change for four main reasons: inability to meet targets (e.g. performance); too cumbersome to deal with complex environments; inflexibility and failing to provide control; obsolete in terms of providing a sense of confidence.Practical implicationsThis research provides evidence that feedback is an important managerial means of changing routines in informal, less bureaucratic and less formalized workplaces such as SMEs. Managers might embrace deformalized approaches to feedback when dealing with routines in SMEs. Working within a very sensitive structure where the majority of changes on routines need to be operationalized through their hands, managers and practitioners should deploy feedback in order to highlight the importance of routines as sources of guiding actions, activities and operations occurring in SMEs that create better internal challenges and processes.Originality/valueThe authors’ research suggests that routines are subject of change in dynamic and turbulent situations. Perceiving routines as antithetical to change fails to capture the distinctive features of change such as its fluidity, open-endedness, and inseparability. Likewise, the authors claim that routines are socially constructed organizational phenomena that can be modulated in different ways in SMEs.
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