Damian O'Doherty

The Decline of Labour Process Analysis and the Future Sociology of Work

Labour process analysis (LPA) is a well-established approach to the sociological study of work which attends to the instabilities of capitalism and, more specifically, to the volatile and contested nature of social relations at work. However, an unreflexive ‘neo-orthodoxy’ has emerged in recent years that is constrained by a series of dualistic and (critical) realist assumptions which inhibit the development of this distinctive sociology of work. This article contends that the potential of LPA can best be fulfilled through a renewal of critical reflection upon the foundational assumptions of LPA that can open up an acknowledgement and appreciation of the embroilment of subjectivity in the reproduction and transformation of production relations. This development is consistent with the central analytical importance ascribed to the ‘indeterminacy of labour’ in LPA but invites the adoption of a negative ontology in order to advance a less narrow conception of its meaning and significance. Studies of the new media and creative industries are engaged to indicate how a revitalized labour process analysis might embrace this ontology as a way of exploring and explaining the radical contingency of organization in contemporary social relations.

Transformative Capacity, Information Technology, and the Making of Business ‘Experts’

This paper explores the making of experts and the basis of claims to expertise in corporate organisational settings. The performance of expertise within organisations is increasingly associated with the implementation and use of integrated business information systems which purport to abstract the world into an informational form to make businesses run more efficiently. We argue that as these systems are put to work to replace the calculations of human experts, we are required to rethink how expertise is constituted as a political and performative process. We focus on the provisos and qualifications that surround the use of calculative techniques and the worries and scepticism over the correctness, accuracy and interpretation of numbers and figures derived from systems of calculation. Rather than identifying expertise as the capacity to make calculations and to abstract ‘representations’ from the ‘real world’, a job increasingly done by information systems, we find expertise being performed in the transformation of things of different orders which enables representations to be returned to the world through allusions to their transformative effect.

Something happened: Spectres of organization/disorganization at the airport:

The article explores the practical accomplishment of organization at an international airport during the course of a number of ‘security alerts’ that disrupted routine ‘modes of ordering’ (Law, 1994). Airports, we suggest, invite us to re-think ‘organization’ as the partial, contingent and always-incomplete outcome of complex order(ing)s and disorder(ing)s played out across various spaces, agencies and materials. When ‘something happens’ we begin to see how spaces, agents and materials are subject to unexpected becomings: objects appear treacherous, spaces mutable, agencies ineffectual and informants unreliable. Following the work of Weick we might say that in such moments of uncertainty we are forced to reconsider our customary ways of thinking about objects, subjects and systems. We argue this thinking requires a relational understanding of organization so that we can better grasp how organizations are continuously being made and un-made through an on-going co-creation and dispersal of parts.

THE DEVIL AND CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

The paper takes as its starting point the diffusion of ICT applications associated with so-called ‘customer relationship management’ (CRM). CRM encourages organisations to shift their understanding of customers from an episodic and transaction-based perspective to one that emphasises continuous ‘relationship management’. CRM applications thus promise to deliver more, real-time accurate information about consumer habits and behaviours therefore allowing organisations to maximise their extraction of business value. This paper explores the ways in which such inscriptive technologies are not merely referential but also constitutive of contemporary re-presentations and ideals of the consuming subject. Focusing on what we might call the ‘digital doubles’ of customer relationship management the authors explore how such inscriptive apparatuses simultaneously work to perform an image of the consuming subject, whilst also appearing endemically prone to instability and representational excess. Through an investigation of managerial imagery of computer enabled CRM, the paper explores the ways in which ambiguity and ambivalence continue to haunt advances in corporate technologies of surveillance and tele-control.

David Knights and Hugh Willmott: The subjugation of identity and . . . and . . . and organization‐to‐come . . .

There will have been a time when ‘Knights and Willmott’ require no introduction, at least for that introduction which serves to respond and do justice to their work in organization. Our introduction is only going to work to the extent to which this will have been read (at least) more than once: there will have been a time. Read slowly, read quickly, there will have been a time when contemporary organization theory makes sense. We are, perhaps, going to have to learn to read differently in this wake that is coming after ‘Knights and Willmott’ – on the shores of contemporary organization theory. For now, we must remain with preliminaries. 1. Con-temporary: meaning, with the times. 2. Organ-ization: a ceaseless exstatic activity bordering reason and absurdity in a space(ing) that beats to the time of a heart rate recovered from seizure and attack. 3. Theory: of all these components theory offers some reassurance and orientation; it seems to be the most preliminary in the work of Knights and Willmott. It is what strikes the casual reader first. Their writings seem to demand an exercise of Herculean scholarship simply to surmount the preparatory building blocks that form the constituent parts of what is synthesized as ‘Theory’ in their mature studies of organization, management, and work. It still remains for us to ask, however, ‘what’ is ‘their theory’, or, what theoretical contribution do they make? This will be our test: introductions, responsibilities, justice. In organization and out of time, we will have risen and then fallen to this challenge to introduce and comprehend the importance of ‘Knights and Willmott’ in organization theory. For, you see, there really is no theory in ‘Knights and Willmott’. It is simply a double-barrel nomenclature, and as this chapter makes clear there is even no such thing as ‘Knights and Willmott’. To the extent that we can realize this insight we will have served the ethical demand and implication of their writings and in so doing helped introduce their work to the challenges of contemporary organization theory. On the other hand, there will be some who argue that there has been nothing but theory; at least, nothing much has changed for

Organization: On the Theory and Practice of Excess

Can organization theory truly grasp excess, or is this a constant paradoxical other of organization, a permanently elusive remainder? As a phenomenon might it mark out the contours of a configuration that points to an aporia of organization that scholarship and research in organization has yet to confront? In posing these questions we note that excess has proven notoriously tricky to handle through conventional modes of analytical scholarship, and has thus often been ignored when discussing contemporary economy. However, excess has much to teach about organization. In order to respond to this challenge the article discusses the possibilities and problems of theorizing excess and presents/exhibits an argument for developing the theory of general economy in order to open up and extend the persistent restricted economy of organization studies.

Speed Limits: Out of Time in Organization Studies

A screaming comes across the sky. Others glare with a vacant intensity. Solaris studies at the very same time that the world appears to be becoming one vast recording studio. Our cameras are in the process of dissolution and decay. This paper hurtles headlong into the Green Burning Car that is the crash of organization studies today. On the cusp of a promised new mode of study in organizational analysis we write on speed, attracting found objects, jump cuts, wierd juxtapositions, and chance encounters in a ‘pataphysical’ derive. As an exercise in sympathetic magic, or orgiastic ritual, we are able to exorcise here a number of ghosts in organization theory. Speed limits provide an occasion for shame: shame for its bombast and juvenility, its masculinity and narcissism; the end(s) of organization studies intrudes as event, a sacrifice for dreams of what might come.A screaming comes across the sky. Others glare with a vacant intensity. Solaris studies at the very same time that the world appears to be becoming one vast recording studio. Our cameras are in the process of dissolution and decay. This paper hurtles headlong into the Green Burning Car that is the crash of organization studies today. On the cusp of a promised new mode of study in organizational analysis we write on speed, attracting found objects, jump cuts, wierd juxtapositions, and chance encounters in a ‘pataphysical’ dérive. As an exercise in sympathetic magic, or orgiastic ritual, we are able to exorcise here a number of ghosts in organization theory. Speed limits provide an occasion for shame: shame for its bombast and juvenility, its masculinity and narcissism; the end(s) of organization studies intrudes as event, a sacrifice for dreams of what might come.