Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou

A Theory of Imagination for Organization Studies Using the Work of Cornelius Castoriadis

At a time when organizations are asked to imagine themselves anew in order to survive, organizational treatments of ‘imagination’ lack engagement with its profound political and generative nature. To address this gap, the paper draws on the works of Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997) and proposes a politically situated theory of imagination for organization studies. We build on Castoriadis’s core ideas of representation, signification and affect to develop a radical proposition: imagination is ‘where it all begins’, an inexhaustible psychosocial force driving organizations and organizing, and setting the institutionalization process in motion. To illustrate the great potential contributions of this proposition for organization studies, we discuss how three key persisting dualisms in organizational thinking, those between ‘representational’ and ‘non-representational’ inquiry, ‘body’ and ‘mind’, and between the ‘private’ and ‘public’, begin to dissolve when considered under our suggested framework. We then draw some important implications of Castoriadian imagination for charting alternative futures at times of economic and social crises, and identify some directions for future research.

Policy as a struggle for meaning: disentangling knowledge translation across international health contexts

Over the last decade, research in medical science has focused on knowledge translation and diffusion of best practices to enable improved health outcomes. However, there has been less attention given to the role of policy in influencing the translation of best practice across different national contexts. This paper argues that the underlying set of public discourses of healthcare policy significantly influences its development with implications for the dissemination of best practices. Our research uses Critical Discourse Analysis to examine the policy discourses surrounding the treatment of stroke across Canada and the U.K. It focuses in specific on how concepts of knowledge translation, user empowerment, and service innovation construct different accounts of the ‘health service’ in the two countries. These findings provide an important yet overlooked starting point for understanding the role of policy development in knowledge transfer and the translation of science into health practice.

Experience as Evidence: The Dialogic Construction of Health Professional Knowledge through Patient Involvement

This article investigates how healthcare professionals articulate the relationship between patient experience and ‘evidence’, creating hybrid forms of knowledge. We propose a Bakhtinian dialogical framework to theorise this process. Drawing on ethnographic work from patient involvement initiatives in England, we show how patient experiences are re-articulated by professionals who add their own intentions and accents in a dialogical process which incorporates diverse forms of knowledge and the conflicting demands of healthcare services. In this process, patient experiences become useful epistemic commodities, helping professionals to respond to workplace pressures by abstracting experiences from patients’ biographies, instrumentalising experiences and privileging ‘disembodied’ forms of involvement. Understanding knowledge as relational and hybrid helps move beyond the assumption that there is a clear dichotomy between ‘objective science’ and ‘subjective experience’. This article illuminates how new knowledge is produced when professionals engage with ‘lay’ patient knowledge, and helps inform the sociology of knowledge production more widely.

Citizen Participation as Political Ritual: Towards a Sociological Theorizing of ‘Health Citizenship’

This article examines citizen participation in health research, where funders increasingly seek to promote and define ‘patient and public involvement’ (PPI). In England, the focus of our study, government policy articulates a specific set of meanings attached to PPI that fuse patients’ rights and responsibilities as citizens, as ‘consumers’ and as ‘lay experts’. However, little is known about the meanings those who take part in PPI activities attach to this participation. Drawing on ethnographic data of PPI in three clinical areas (stroke, cancer and pre-term birth) we investigate citizen participation in health research as political ritual. We identify tensions between policy-driven and ground-level performance of citizenship, and use ritual theory to show how such tensions are accommodated in participatory structures. We argue that the ritual performance of PPI neutralizes the transformational potential of citizen participation, and we draw wider sociological implications for citizen participation beyond the health arena.

Learning subversion in the business school: An ‘improbable’ encounter

Entrepreneurs develop activities that aim to challenge the status quo, break rules and subvert systems. How can such a thing be taught/learnt in a business school? This article contributes to current debates within entrepreneurship studies that seek to address the subversive nature of entrepreneurial activity. It presents an ethnographic case study of an entrepreneurship course that attempts to re-define the teaching and learning boundaries of subversive activities in a leading European business school. Drawing on the theory of Bakhtin, which has thus far been overlooked in entrepreneurship studies, we unpick the potentiality of art practices in the learning and experiencing of the subversive dimension of entrepreneurship. We employ the concept of ‘dialogical pedagogy’ in order to address calls for more ‘relationally experienced’ approaches to management learning that foreground the conflicts, emotional strains and uncertainties that are embedded in the fabric of entrepreneurial practice. We show how ‘subversive dialogues’ are enacted between students and teachers as they engage in the learning process, and we discuss implications for critical entrepreneurship teaching in an increasingly commoditized education environment.

Re-theorizing Organizational Creativity through a Psychosocial Lens: Introducing the Radical Imagination of Cornelius Castoriadis

This chapter draws on the works of Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997) in order to explore the under-researched role of imagination in organizational practice. Although rarely mentioned in extant reviews of psychosocial approaches, Castoriadis’s philosophy presents an important contribution to the field, resonating greatly with the latter’s dynamic view of the psychic and social. It offers a radical ontology of being that is couched in the interplay between human desires, affects and representations as a source of creativity in society. In what follows, we argue that Castoriadis’s alternative theorizing of creativity advances psychosocial accounts of organizational identity, agency and emotionality, accounting for both individual and collective dimensions of organizational creativity, and positioning it as a process of ‘meaning-giving’ that places human imagination at its core. To date, these affective and unconscious dimensions of creativity (Vygotsky, 2004) remain largely overlooked in the organizational creativity literature, which often displays a marked insistence on ‘outputs’ and ‘controllable’, individual-level characteristics (Drazin et al., 1999; Driver, 2008; Unsworth, 2001), as a ‘creative behaviour’ or ‘the products’ of such behaviour within an organizational context (Woodman et al., 1993: 293). Organizational creativity is also typically examined through a normalizing and neutral concept of ‘novelty’ (Amabile, 1996; Osborne, 2003), leaving out important power and political considerations that are at the heart of psychosocial understandings of organization.

Information Technology Outsourcing in the Service Economy: Client Maturity and Knowledge/Power Asymmetries

The service economy calls for a new, interdisciplinary methodology for defining and valuing information technology services outsourcing needs. Parameters such as ill-informed provider selection and poor contract management have hitherto dominated the IT consulting literature, yet have offered inadequate explanations to the high failure rates in global outsourcing arrangements. This paper takes a different approach in examining the causes of the problem; we discuss the knowledge and power asymmetries that appear to prevent both parties from realizing potential benefits in the market. The concept of self-knowledge as opposed to relationship management is suggested. We posit that knowledge/power asymmetries can be better comprehended when the two parties are considered as interacting entities that influence each other in a dynamic way. Under this spectrum, we discuss the value of a client-focused maturity assessment in realizing potential outsourcing benefits.

Performing accountability in health research: A socio-spatial framework

The article explores how spaces aimed at improving accountability in health systems are socially produced. It addresses the implications of an initiative to promote patient involvement in government-funded research in the context of a large cancer research network in England. We employ a socio-spatial theoretical framework inspired by insights from Henri Lefebvre and Judith Butler to examine how professional researchers, doctors and patients understand and perform accountability in an empirical context. Our data reveal fundamental tensions between formally required and routinely enacted dimensions of accountability as these are experienced by patients. Consequently, our analysis argues for a need to challenge abstract, professionalized discourse about accountability in health services by acknowledging embodied spaces of representation, in which patients themselves can contribute to making participatory accountability a reality. We suggest that such a shift will provide a more rounded appraisal of patient experiences within health research, and health systems more widely.

The Social Spaces of Accountability in Hybridized Healthcare Organizations

UK healthcare organizations are undergoing progressive changes to become more flexible and cost-effective (Kernaghan, 2000). Recently, the government’s latest incarnation of New Public Management, ‘open public services’ (Cabinet Office, 2012), has articulated a shift from traditional organizational forms to a more indeterminate organizational landscape of shifting social and spatial relations (James and Manning, 1996; McNulty and Ferlie, 2004; Dunleavy et al., 2005). As a result, formulation and execution of public health policy occurs increasingly in complex networks featuring multiple, overlapping coordination between government, third sector organizations and the citizen/service user, so that ‘accountability… gets lost in the cracks of horizontal and hybrid governance’ (Ferlie et al., 2007: 240; also see Frolich, 2011). It is to an interrogation of accountability within such increasingly hybridized healthcare organizations that we address ourselves in this chapter.

Discourses in healthcare policy : comparing UK and Canada

Health care policy has long provided an arena for debate around themes of services restructuring and the challenges associated with implementation initiatives in the public sector (Dawson et al 2007). Increasingly, researchers have been concerned with unpacking the ‘gaps’ between policy and practice in the process of health care reform. Notably, it has been argued that whilst evidence-based medicine has transformed clinical practice by rendering it more effective, this trend has not been followed by a similar logic in health management and policy-making, ultimately resulting in significant discrepancies between policy and practice (Walshe and Rundall 2001).