Recent work has highlighted how brands play an important role within organizational practice. To extend this discussion, we ask: how do gendered media brands come into being in an organization by ...connecting ideas, objects and people? This article challenges the assumption that brands simply reflect management norms by positioning the brand as an ‘assemblage’ of multiple connections and linkages, simultaneously shaping and being shaped by those that partake in its production. Employees engage in ‘brand work’; that is, the negotiation of the assemblages of the brand in situated and gendered practices. Brand work is explored here in the gendered creative labour of producing girls’ magazines. Two studies of pre-teen and teenage girls’ magazines in the UK and a Nordic country were analysed in relation to how multiple brand fragments were situated in gendered practices and power relations. Brand work offers an alternative, fragmented perspective to normative forms of control, introducing a simultaneous territorialization and deterritorialization process of stabilization and contestation of the assemblage.
Writing grief, breathing hope Kivinen, Nina
Gender, work, and organization,
March 2021, Letnik:
28, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This is an essay in three parts on writing differently, on grief and on breathing. The first part I wrote in one go, embodied and raw. The second part was written over two months, reflecting on my ...earlier words. The third part argues for the importance of writing differently. I write for hope. Hope is to voice that which has remained silent. Hope is to recognise the full human experience both in our research, our teaching and in our universities. Hope is the creation of different encounters, of momentary affective spaces with the potentiality of alternative endings.
Abstract We invite you to explore with us the enchanting affects that move us, through ordinary moments in writing for children. Enchantment shows how we are entangled with the world, that which ...surprises us and builds a sense of wonder. A wind in the trees, a gentle smile, a look of horror. The smell of fresh coffee and the final words of a manuscript. We explore enchantment as mundane but gendered experiences which entail a promise and a potentiality, one that is part of power relations, and where an ethical possibility to engage in the world differently emerges. This paper shows how enchantment is not a detachment from, but a connection to the world. Through interviews with children's writers, we ask how enchanting affect can help us to see work through a different ethical lens.
Coworking spaces have been established in great numbers around the globe over the past 10 years. Previous studies on coworking spaces argue that these spaces are designed to enable serendipitous ...encounters. Here we introduce the concept of an economy of encounters, arguing that both intended and unintended encounters have become a form of production in the knowledge-based new economy. This paper draws upon the critical analysis of three case studies of different coworking settings − two open coworking spaces and a corporate coworking office. Following Deleuze and Guattari, we see coworking spaces as affectual assemblages that create affects that push knowledge workers in flow and motion to enable the formation of new kinds of heterogeneous and constantly changing work communities, where serendipitous encounters become a force of production. We argue that this commodification of a social phenomenon, i.e. the intentional use of affectual assemblages of people, objects and ideas to create serendipitous opportunities, ignores the precariousness of contemporary work.
Girls' magazines act as important texts through which meanings of childhood, girlhood and womanhood are mediated and constructed. However, previous research has focused on either the conditions of ...work practices or cultural production of the magazine as a product. Separately in each context women or girls have been described as abject. The paper will argue that employees working on girls' magazines experienced a simultaneous double abjection: in the gendered working practices and as an outcome of the construction of girlhood they produced. Two studies of all female teams producing teenage and pre‐teen magazines were used, including interviews and observations. Our approach engaged with the difficulty of examining abjectivity in working practices, as present but marginalized, silenced and othered. As a result of scrutinizing the gendered embodiment in these studies, the findings suggest there is a relation between the working practices and gendered cultural production, forming a process of abjection. This process was threefold: a marginalization of a particular gendered embodiment, the cracks or leaks where abjectivity became apparent and the silencing of those leaks. This study will be of value to scholars interested in gendered embodiment in workplaces, abjectivity and cultural production, noting the interrelation between these areas.
Until the dust settles Helin, Jenny; Kivinen, Nina; Pullen, Alison
Ephemera,
11/2021, Letnik:
21, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Impatience rules the systems in which we operate. Since the inauguration of ephemera in 2001, we have witnessed increasing haste which continues until this day. There are endless possibilities for us ...to work smarter and harder, thereby delivering more in less time and writing to comply with sector and university publishing norms. In this situation, writing in academia becomes normalized to publishing in 'top' tiered journals, especially those that find themselves on some world ranking list. In contrast, we put patience at the heart of the academic profession. Proposing writing with patience, we envision writing without intent to complete a specific project, writing without clear boundaries, beginnings and endings. Such non-event writing holds potential for meeting the world as a verb, and for enduring a collective capacity to care.
Until the dust settles Helin, Jenny; Kivinen, Nina; Pullen, Alison
Ephemera,
2021, Letnik:
21, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Impatience rules the systems in which we operate. Since the inauguration of ephemera in 2001, we have witnessed increasing haste which continues until this day. There are endless possibilities for us ...to work smarter and harder, thereby delivering more in less time and writing to comply with sector and university publishing norms. In this situation, writing in academia becomes normalized to publishing in ‘top’ tiered journals, especially those that find themselves on some world ranking list. In contrast, we put patience at the heart of the academic profession. Proposing writing with patience, we envision writing without intent to complete a specific project, writing without clear boundaries, beginnings and endings. Such non-event writing holds potential for meeting the world as a verb, and for enduring a collective capacity to care.
Writing resistance together Ahonen, Pasi; Blomberg, Annika; Doerr, Katherine ...
Gender, work, and organization,
July 2020, Letnik:
27, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This piece of writing is a joint initiative by the participants in the Gender, Work and Organization writing workshop organized in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2019. This is a particular form of ...writing differently. We engage in collective writing and embody what it means to write resistance to established academic practices and conventions together. This is a form of emancipatory initiative where we care for each other as writers and as human beings. There are many author voices and we aim to keep the text open and dialogical. As such, this piece of writing is about suppressed thoughts and feelings that our collective picket line allows us to express. In order to maintain the open‐ended nature of the text, and perhaps also to retain some ‘dirtiness’ that is essential to writing, the article has not been language checked throughout by a native speaker of English.
The spread of COVID‐19 acutely challenges and affects not just economic markets, demographic statistics and healthcare systems, but indeed also the politics of organizing and becoming in a new ...everyday life of academia emerging in our homes. Through a collage of stories, snapshots, vignettes, photos and other reflections of everyday life, this collective contribution is catching a glimpse of corona‐life and its micro‐politics of multiple, often contradicting claims on practices as many of us live, work and care at home. It embodies concerns, dreams, anger, hope, numbness, passion and much more emerging amongst academics from across the world in response to the crisis. As such, this piece manifests a shared need to — together, apart — enact and explore constitutive relations of resistance, care and solidarity in these dis/organizing times of contested spaces, identities and agencies as we are living–working–caring at home during lockdowns.
This paper orchestrates alterethnographical reflections in which we, women, polyphonically document, celebrate and vocalize the sound of change. This change is represented in Kamala Harris's ...appointment as the first woman, woman of color, and South Asian American as the US Vice President, breaking new boundaries of political leadership, and harvesting new gains for women in leadership and power more broadly. With feminist awareness and curiosity, we organize and mobilize individual texts into a multivocal paper as a way to write solidarity between women. Recognizing our intersectional differences, and power differentials inherent in our different positions in academic hierarchies, we unite to write about our collective concerns regarding gendered, racialised, classed social relations. Coming together across intersectional differences in a writing community has been a vehicle to speak, relate, share, and voice our feelings and thoughts to document this historic moment and build a momentum to fulfill our hopes for social change. As feminists, we accept our responsibility to make this history written, rather than manipulated or erased, by breaking the mold in the form of multi‐layered embodied texts to expand writing and doing research differently through re/writing otherness.