Damian P. O’Doherty

New Sites/Sights: Exploring the White Spaces of Organization

Contemporary organization is increasingly understood as contingent and improvisational - and immersed in complex and shadowy realities where customary assumptions about the space and time of organization no longer hold. This Special Issue invites organization studies into an ambivalent space of sites/sights in organization, the double-play of this modest conceptual proposal necessary in order to open up the complex folding of the epistemological and the ontological in organization today. In this introduction we seek to establish and position a distinctive approach to what we claim to be ‘white spaces’ in organization. We show that any adequate treatment of these white spaces compels a significant breaching of the disciplinary norms of organization studies. Our argument derives from a consideration of a range of recently emerging concepts and analyses in the study of organization, all of which are suggestive of crisis and of emerging (anti-)forms of organization. This edition of Organization Studies publishes six papers and three originally commissioned book reviews that help advance this emerging problematic in organization, and which in their various ways extend our understanding of possible organizing futures.

Feline politics in organization: The nine lives of Olly the cat

The appearance of ‘Olly the cat’ on the doorsteps of a major UK international airport provides occasion to reconsider the role of the animal in organization and offers suggestive insight into how we might have to learn new ways of being within extended multi-species or interspecies ontologies. Olly is found to lead multiple lives that cannot be reduced to the status of object or media of human intentionality. Her increasing political involvement in the management and organization of the airport challenges orthodox understanding of agency and organizational action. As the ethnography becomes progressively more implicated in the entanglements between human and animal, the concept of ‘feline politics’ is proposed and deployed. This allows research to retain focus on actions and behaviour and modes of thinking that would ordinarily be occluded by conventional modes of organizational representation. In these ways the ethnography moves beyond the interpretative and symbolic treatment of organization analysis and finds resource in the recent ‘ontological turn’ in the social sciences. Embracing what is the inevitable participation of the social sciences in the reflexive and recursive enactment of its phenomena, the ethnography discovers new potentialities and new capacities for action as emergent properties of ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’ were mutually learnt, exchanged and acquired. This article adds to what we know about the limits of management as it confronts a radical undecidability characterized by the co-existence of multiple and interacting ontological becomings.

Revitalising labour process theory: a prolegomenon to fatal writing

This article attempts a revitalisation of labour process study by way of an oblique entry and transversal movement through the writing of contemporary labour process theory. Making use of a relatively novel and experimental mode of reading and writing, including ‘signature effects’ and homophonic and homonymic play, the paper proposes ways of escape from the double‐binds, infinite regress, and solipsism inherent to the labour process. Tracing the set of idiomatic marks that forms the signature effect of core labour process theory, the paper discovers the absent‐present play of the motor car in labour process writing forming a ‘crypt’ that gives rise to all manner of world‐text effects. In an attempt to subvert this repression we use the model of the motor car as an explicit mode of transport for our thinking that takes us out of labour process theory in ways that might delimit its boundaries and conditions of possibility/impossibility. In so doing we begin to exercise a very different form of organisation studies.

Missing Connexions: The politics of airport expansion in the United Kingdom

Airports have recently become a central preoccupation for scholars concerned with a range of issues in the social sciences and the wider academy focused around governance and the modern nation state, philosophy, political economy, economics, geography, society and community. There is, however, little critical scholarly interest in what can be learned about management and organisation from airports, which has meant that our discipline is ceding ground to unitarist and highly functional, prescriptive and practitioner-oriented literature. One of the most significant critical challenges to this managerial orthodoxy is the recent work of Griggs and Howarth who adopt the theoretical resources of Laclau and Mouffe to advance their thesis that a discourse built around ‘sustainable aviation’ is established within public policy in an attempt to develop ‘hegemonic’ consensus around airport expansion. Laclau and Mouffe have been a significant influence on organisation studies, but when applied empirically their work is discovered to embody contradictions and tensions that prove ultimately self-defeating for those interested in developing a ‘critical’ politics of organisation. We consider the possibilities for a more critical and politically engaged form of organisation analysis based upon what we call here an ‘interventionary ethnography’.

Ruin and Organization Studies

In this paper we offer a preliminary study of the various ways in which ‘ruin’ has significance for organization studies. One important motif associated with both modern and romantic treatments of ruins concerns the revelatory impressions they make. In this respect the tradition of ruin writing will talk of their ‘beauty’, their ‘strangeness’ or their capacity to ‘intimidate’, which somehow never fails to strike a responsive nerve in us. In order to attend to this elusive phenomenon we must necessarily breach some of the self-imposed boundaries of our ‘discipline’. Taking up this challenge we follow W. G. Sebald in his use of contiguity as both method and textual structuring device, allowing us to drift across iconic ruin images, ruin theories and our own ruinous research experiences. This helps us learn how to ‘dwell’ in the ruin – without any impatient reaching after fact or explaining away ruins in the terms of an established tradition of theorizing in organization – and open up new analytic spaces and associations for organizational researchers. These concern specifically (a) a distinctive approach to time, history and memory; (b) an increased awareness of the multiplicity of forces impinging on organization, forces from which we so easily retreat behind the cordon sanitaire of organization-studies-as-usual; and (c) a cognisance of how the very way we write is a mode of doing organization that is crucial for our ability and willingness to look into ‘all corners of reality’ so that we might better grasp organizational phenomena.

Off-Road and Spaced-Out in the City: Organization and the Interruption of Topology

The article reports on the methods and findings of an urban experiment/intervention that deployed mathematic formulae to design a series of random walks through the city of Manchester. In developing these methods, the letters of the words “order” and “disorder” were inscribed into an A-Z map of the city to provide the outline for these walks. This quest to seek alternative modes of conduct in the everyday life of the city attempts to find access to what Massumi has identified as the transitional qualities of a body-in-motion. In this systematic derangement of the senses, the city gives way to a proliferation of decontexualized objects and fragments that stimulate alternative forms of narrative and possible new political imaginaries. Folding the city in these ways brings into relief a number of important spatial features of Manchester that converge around the concept proposed here as “the interruption of topology.” This interruption demands a certain textual innovation that displaces the performative rituals of the academic article while improvising its own “mythologization” of the city.

Book Review: The Triumph of Emptiness: Consumption, Higher Education, and Work Organization

The Triumph of Emptiness brings to fruition over 25 years of research and writing in organization studies by an author who is perhaps among the most prominent exponents and indeed originators of critical management studies (CMS). This distinctive and influential ‘school’ of business and management studies has grown to prominence in the past quarter-century as the growth of business and management schools has swept through higher education in the UK and Europe. In part born out of debates with labour process analysis, critical management studies has, however, escaped the rather provincial and parochial preoccupations of those still wedded to labour process analysis, a school of research made up of Marxist, neo-Marxist and radical Weberians, and characterized by one protagonist in the debate, doubtless unfairly, as an ‘M6 corridor’1 of academics. By contrast, CMS has in recent years established a strong presence at the Academy of Management whose current chair (Paul Adler) is schooled in the foundational theories of CMS and has done much to extend its appeal in the United States. Alvesson can make strong claims to have helped lay these foundations. His ground-breaking coedited volume with Hugh Willmott in 1992 introduced CMS to a wide audience in business schools and beyond, showing the relevance of Frankfurt School Critical Theory to the understanding of mainstream management specialisms (accounting, marketing, strategy, HRM etc.). Making Sense of Management, also co-authored with Willmott (1996), built on this by carefully laying out the underlying key theoretical principles and inspirations of CMS. Rooted in the critical theory of Adorno and Horkheimer, Habermas, and Marcuse et al., Alvesson and Willmott sought conversation, debate and hybridity with more contemporary and emerging currents of feminist and post-structural theory and, in their more recent edition (2012), have drawn more fully on critical race theory, and post-colonial and radical ‘green’ political theory. While post-2008 the mainstream curricula of the MBA continue to promulgate standard business models of growth, within a wider promotion of ‘business as usual’, only CMS can make credible claims to have offered a critical and alternative diagnosis of the now permanent economic crisis and state of exception. This is currently the cause of some discomfort among Deans of business schools, but in reading The Triumph of Emptiness they might achieve a better grasp of why their teaching programmes designed to assist the continued marketing of the business school as a place to train and credentialize corporate executives is dangerous and will ultimately fail socially, politically, culturally and environmentally. The Triumph of Emptiness offers a powerful explanation of these dangers and failures, and has already attracted impressive reviews. The distinguished Cary Cooper has written that this is a 601573OSS0010.1177/0170840615601573Organization StudiesBook Review research-article2015

‘The Lounger’: Re-assembling the Airport Customer

This ethnography of the lounge has already discovered that ‘management’ does not exist in the form of a well-defined entity, and in this chapter we discover similar things about the consumer. Better conceived as an unseemly amalgam shaped by the immense struggle involved in the development of a product or service – to which customers might become attached – we find ‘the customer’ does not exist in any ontologically reliable way. Instead, it is always being made and re-made, and more often than not in ways that would be considered failures rather than success. Without an object (a lounge), without a subject (a lounger), management finds itself in a most invidious position, and one that simultaneously demands the self-invention of management as well. To help advance our ethnography of this difficult dimension of organization-inaction we draw once again on recent work in economic sociology that has addressed the role of market devices, intermediaries, and new market professionals in the making-up of the consumer (Callon, The laws of the markets. Blackwell Publishers/Sociological Review, Oxford, 1998; Araujo, Mark Theory 7(3):211–226, 2007; Cochoy, Theory Cult Soc 24:203–223, 2007, Mark Theory 8(1):15–44, 2008; Araujo et al., Reconnecting marketing to markets. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010). Here we find on-going trials and experimentations that bring into association and configurations different relations of people, materials and practices that circulate across (whilst also transgressing) established dualisms in organization studies. Attending to this level of practical detail, and allowing a more extended space and time for this organization-in-action, multiplies the number of actors – human and non-human – relevant to the achievement of organization.

The Management of Escape: Scattered Attention and Disorderly Convulsion

This chapter follows the various office technologies and materials that come to bear on the Escape Lounge project and as they transpire and coalesce in the working practices of one manifestation of ‘MAG men’ – namely the character we call ‘Robyn’ – the project manager assigned to the lounge. As the project progresses Robyn finds himself immersed in ever-greater entanglements of process and matter that threaten to overwhelm and paralyse the project. This chapter derives a concept of ‘scattered attention’ to show one might cope with this threat of this paralysis. When deployed this concept also brings into association things that are normally kept distinct and separate in business and management studies stimulating forms of creativity and insight that often provide breakthroughs and solutions to organizational problems. However, scattered attention is always at risk from what we discover to be ‘disorderly convulsions’. The re-working of ‘disorderly convulsion’ in this chapter helps gives access to and understanding of an extraordinary denouement experienced during the project that seemed to bring about the suspension of conventional ontological assumptions about organization. In this moment, the most basic spatial and temporal coordinates of organization appear to come ‘out of joint’ such that organization ‘takes flight’ (so to speak) in ways that also make something like an Escape Lounge even more attractive.

Extending Politics in Organization Studies: The Bob Cut and ‘Crinicultural’ Politics

Taking materialism seriously, this chapter begins to open up a possible politics of the lounger around the question: what political difference does the Bob-cut hairstyle make? This chapter introduces the concept of a ‘crinicultural politics’ and shows how this is a politics enmeshed in a heterogeneous range of materials: popular magazines, city council economic development strategies, furniture and design catalogues, project briefs, architectural colour charts, light analysis, games designers, food presentation, cappuccinos, and ‘makeover’ TV. These are the principal characters at work in the lounge, some of which we have explored in previous chapters. The chapter then explores the ways in which hair and its styling is variously mobilised by nascent management groups-in-formation associated with the Escape Lounge that is revealing of another dimension of ‘crinicultural’ politics. Hair is not, however, a simple object under the control of a subject; instead, analysis is compelled to move beyond the idea that hair is a symbol or object of representation and manipulation to consider the ways in which it becomes unruly and agency-like in its activities.