Christoph Michels

The production of educational space : Heterotopia and the business university

This article responds to recent calls for rethinking management education and fostering a spatial understanding of educational practices. We propose to introduce Foucault’s notion of heterotopic space and the spatial thought of Lefebvre into the debate about the current and future state of business schools. In particular, we conceptually and empirically discuss the potential for understanding space in a way that addresses its productive force, its multiplicity and its inherent contradictions. Using the example of an experimental teaching project dedicated to the conception and physical design of a city of the future, we reflect upon the possibility of the emergence of ‘other’, heterotopic spaces within an institution of management learning. Our findings suggest that spatial interventions facilitate critically affirmative engagement with the business school by offering an imaginative approach to management education.

Multiplicity and reflexivity in organizational research : Towards a performative approach to the visual

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is, first, to assess the potential of the visual to enact multiplicity and reflexivity in organizational research, and second, to develop a performative approach to the visual, which offers aesthetic strategies for creating future research accounts in organization and management studies.Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews existing visual research in organization and management studies and presents an in‐depth analysis of two early, almost classical, and yet very different endeavors to create visual accounts based on ethnography: the multi‐media enactments by Bruno Latour, Emilie Hermant, Susanna Shannon, and Patricia Reed, and the filmic and written work by Trinh T. Minh‐ha and her collaborators.Findings – The authors’ analysis of how the visual is performed in both cases identifies a repertoire of three distinct and paradoxical aesthetic strategies: de/synchronizing, de/centralizing, and dis/covering.Originality/value – The authors analyze two rarely acknow...

By accident and by design: Composing affective atmospheres in an urban art intervention

This article argues that the notion of affective atmosphere provides a privileged access to the study of organizational affect as it relates to a spatial ontology of ‘being-together-in-a-sphere’. Drawing on the study of affective atmospheres in philosophy and cultural geography, we develop a conceptual positioning from which to analyze a musical intervention in the streets and squares of Berlin. The study traces the preparation and enactment of a 2-day music event that breaks with the emotional experience of a ‘mainstream’ classical concert, and instead intervenes in urban atmospheres by mingling music performances with everyday urban life in an attempt to affect chance spectators. Tracing how the concert’s atmospheres emerged through a series of encounters between various bodies and their specific affective capacities, the analysis emphasizes the tension between the possibility of designing and crafting atmospheres and its emergence in erratic, ephemeral, and excessive ways. Therefore, we propose that affective atmospheres make perceptible the potentialities of organizational space and give scope to our feelings as we experience their spatial recomposition. In the conclusion, we emphasize affective atmospheres as a key concept for the critical study of affect, as it advances a politics that attends to new possibilities of feeling and acting collectively in spaces of organizing.

Performing participation: reassembling a new museum

This book offers a lively illustration of the dynamic relationship between discourse and organizational psychology. Contributions include empirically rich discussions of both traditional and widely studied topics such as resistance to change, inclusion and exclusion, participation, multi-stakeholder collaboration and diversity management, as well as newer research areas such as language negotiations, work time arrangements, technology development and change as intervention.