For the United Kingdom, the 2008 financial crisis coupled with the subsequent economic austerity programme forced many public institutions to engage in various cost-cutting and fundraising ventures. ...In parallel, corporate ideologies came to dominate how academics, officials and professionals debated public activities, in turn profoundly affecting the provision of communal services. This paper explores how ‘corporate colonization’ (sensu Deetz, 1992), fuelled by austerity, claims public institutions for commercial interests. Drawing on in-depth interviews with senior staff, this paper demonstrates how retrenchment of external support in the UK museum sector has been an uneven process, resulting in the manifestation of three experiential states of corporate colonization: organizational perennity, organizational perseverance and organizational precarity. We thus investigate the differential and uneven ways in which corporate colonization affects organizations pertaining to the UK cultural sector. Overall, we argue that the austerity culture in the UK affects museums in largely negative ways by forcing them to respond to the progressive need to satisfy short-term financial interests.
Organizational life consists of an ever-changing world of encounters, experiences, and complex sociomaterial relations. Within this context, standard routines can be seen as a solution to problems of ...inefficiency within organizations, especially when associated with images of stability, repeatability, and standardization. This can bring a sense of order where there is disorder, and stability in the face of change. However, whereas standard routines may be seen as providing solutions within complex and ever-changing organizational worlds, they can also be viewed as sources of organizational problems. Through an ethnographic examination of two routines within a newspaper-printing factory, our paper seeks to build on and add to contributions within routine dynamics (RD) by highlighting the emergence and coexistence of change and stability and the enactment of standard routines through a performative process of difference and repetition. In particular, our paper examines how organizational stability and change emerge through the dynamic relations underlying the enactment of difference and repetition and how these relations involve various—sometimes hidden—microprocesses that include the simplification and amplification of facts, scripts, and concerns. By drawing together the findings from our ethnographic research, studies within the area of RD, and concepts relating to a Deleuzian and Latourian perspective, our paper therefore contributes to the work on the repetition of routines by further unpacking the generative sociomaterial dynamics, creative forces, and microprocesses that underlie the emergence of stability and change through difference and repetition.
Austerity measures and neoliberal policies have deeply affected the UK cultural sector. In particular they have been central to cementing the idea that contemporary cultural institutions should ...henceforth be regarded as commercial operations. As the language of business and management (B&M language) increasingly frames how organisations of the cultural sector are described, this paper defines the main discursive practices motivating this performative repositioning. Drawing theoretically from the concept of performativity, and building empirically on in-depth interviews with senior staff across the UK museum sector, we argue that the incursion of B&M language has reshaped the ‘reality’ of the sector by materialising new relations. Signally, we advance a concept of performative hegemonic language to describe a range of manifestations of linguistic re-labelling in the world of the museum. Our paper illustrates what happens when an organisation starts to classify activities through B&M language, considering the implications of framing this etymology as transcendent to its cultural counterpart. Relabelling, we contend, re-orients meaning, and this translates into the ascent of what we call the ‘neoliberal museum’. Overall, our paper unpacks the linguistic-material processes underpinning the ideological transformations affecting the cultural sector.
University governance is becoming increasingly autocratic as marketization intensifies. Far from the classical ideal of a professional collegium run according to academic norms, today’s universities ...feature corporate cultures and senior leadership teams disconnected from both staff and students, and intolerant of dissenting views. This is not a completely new phenomenon. In 1960s America, senior leaders developed a technocratic and managerialist model of the university, in keeping with theories around the ‘convergence’ of socio-economic systems towards a pluralist ‘industrial society’. This administrative-managerial vision was opposed by radical students, triggering punitive responses that reflected how universities’ control measures were at the time mostly aimed at students. Today, their primary target is academics. Informed by Critical Theory and based on an autoethnographic account of a university restructuring programme, we argue that the direction of convergence in universities has not been towards liberal, pluralist, democracy but towards neo-Stalinist organizing principles. Performance measurements – ‘targets and terror’ – are powerful mechanisms for the expansion of managerial power or, in Marcuse’s words, ‘total administration’. Total administration in the contemporary university damages teaching, learning, workplace democracy and freedom of speech on campus, suggesting that the critique of university autocracy by 1960s students and scholars remains highly relevant.
Meta-work – the work that makes work possible – is an important aspect of professional lives. Yet, it is also one that remains understudied, in particular in the context of work activities ...characterised by continuous and global mobility. Building on a qualitative approach to online content analysis, this article sets out to explore the meta-work underlying digital nomadism, a leisure-driven lifestyle premised on a ‘work from anywhere’ logic. This article explores the four main dimensions of meta-work (resource mobilisation, articulation, transition and migration work) of digital nomads. In doing so, it shows the distinctiveness of the meta-work activities of digital nomads, thus conceptualising meta-work in the context of continuous, global mobility. Importantly, this article also challenges mainstream depictions of digital nomadism as a glamorous lifestyle accessible to anyone with the ‘right mind’ and the willingness to work less, be happier and live in some far-away paradisiac setting.
Some occupations are subject to more complex identity work processes than others. This rings true for those professional endeavours that are relatively poorly known and that cannot rely on ...institutions as a reference for identification, such as digital nomadism. Digital nomads can broadly be defined as professionals who embrace extreme forms of mobile work to combine their interest in travel with the possibility to work remotely. Building on a two-stage data collection process, this paper proposes a typology that characterises four archetypes of digital nomad lifestyle promoters’ narratives found online and show how these online narratives play a role in the process of identity work of other digital nomads. Our contributions are two-fold. First, we show that while the archetypes act as an important online identity regulatory force, they do so through dis-identification. Second, we explain how identity work for digital nomads involves evaluating discursively available subjectivities and propose a three-step reflexive process that entails (i) interpreting, (ii) dis-identifying and (iii) contextualising. We contend that our findings extend beyond the specific case of digital nomads and shed light onto the intricacies of work identity for ‘new’ occupations that are romanticised and monetised through social media and beyond.
This article focuses on workplace discrimination against LGBT employees in Mauritius – a multi-ethnic society in the Indian Ocean. Drawing from the insights of sociological studies that highlight how ...the manifestation of practices across settings is shaped by the process by which it is framed, the analysis illustrates the importance of the local context in accounting for the specific forms taken by LGBT workplace discrimination in Mauritius. Reflecting the importance of respect for different ethnic groups in the stability of the Mauritian democracy, the empirical results highlight how instances of workplace discrimination against LGBT employees are pervasive but framed to avoid inter-ethnic conflicts whilst stigmatising LGBT identities as problematic.
Drawing on a rich two-year ethnographic study that followed evolutionary biologists in their everyday work, this paper explores the making of scientific knowledge through the spatial conceptual ...imagery developed by Deleuze and Guattari. In particular, this paper focuses on a field expedition to the South Pacific and investigates how different rhythms, forces and intensities are harmonized and assembled in the production of scientific knowledge. Within this setting, maintaining a balance between striating and smoothing forces is an important yet difficult task. On many occasions, alternative rhythms and ‘tropical forces’ jeopardized the success of the expedition, despite the scientists’ best efforts to formalize the research process and bring the striations of the laboratory into the forest. Paradoxically, these challenges also played a key role in the inquiry as they opened new possibilities and ultimately led to more intense engagements with the tropical forest and its rhythms and spatiality.
Digitalisation offers a wide array of opportunities, but also challenges, for universities and business schools alike, regarding the provision and delivery of their teaching and learning activities. ...The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted some of these challenges, as it forced educational institutions to move their pedagogic activities online in line with new governmental regulations. In this article, we identify and discuss critically the following three interconnected challenges: (1) shifting from direct embodied co-presence to technologically mediated telepresence, (2) re-embodying teaching and learning activities and (3) rethinking the purpose and relevance of teachings in business schools. We explore these challenges through a phenomenological lens, informed by the Heideggerian concepts of enframing (Gestell) and releasement (Gelassenheit), with a focus on (re-)embodiment. Finally, we discuss the need, for teachers and learners, to be able to reflectively move between embodied and digital(ised) forms of learning and teaching and outline some implications and perspectives regarding the development of an integral pedagogy.
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