Gibson Burrell

An-Aesthetics and Architecture.

We consider it important to look at the built environment from the standpoint of critical management studies and ask how buildings contribute to the ideological, political and economic structures of domination. The chapter begins by asking what is meant by ‘aesthetics’. Using the work of Wolfgang Welsch (1997) and acknowledging his dependence on Theodor Adorno (1991/2001) we can see how polysemous the concept is. But hidden away in Welsch are a very few yet suggestive references to ‘anaesthetics’. The chapter, in part, seeks to develop this notion. Using Huxley’s Brave New World we can detect within the Foreword what is tantamount to an ironic manifesto for anaesthetization. We compare aesthetics with anaesthetics in the context of architecture and attempt to show how the ‘dazzle’ (Benjamin, circa 1930s/1999d) of buildings is often accompanied by desensitization of those who live and work within them. This is to say that almost every aesthetic development is matched with an anaesthetizing one.

Being occupied: An embodied re-reading of organizational ‘wellness’

‘Organizational wellness’ has become a high profile issue for businesses. We argue that a ‘wellness movement’ has sprung up around a particular coalescence of economic, ideological and organizational interests. In this article we re-read the discourse of this ‘movement’ through the lens of ‘organized embodiment’. We argue that organizational wellness operates as a rhetorical device which masks contradictory power relations. It serves to hide differential occupational effects and opportunities for workers, and obscures the relationship between wellness and its necessary Other, unwellness. The article suggests that employee unwellness is often produced—and required—by the different forms of organized embodiment that arise directly from occupations and employment. It analyses this corporeal ‘occupation’ in terms of the extortion, exchange and embrace of our bodies to the coercive, calculative and normative power of the organization. Thus, our organizational experiences produce an embodied individual who is ‘fit’ for purpose in a rather more circumscribed fashion than prevailing discourses of wellness might suggest.

Journals à la mode? Twenty years of living alongside Mode 2 and the new production of knowledge

This article considers the institutional and political background to the life of Organization associated with continuing debates about ‘modes of scientific knowledge’ and the supposed rise of Mode 2. It suggests that Organization should provide space for a more fully theorized and politically aware position of the new—and old—production of knowledge. It does so by, first, critically exploring the substantial volume of work that continues to insist that Mode 2—and its many variants—have tended to displace more traditional, so-called Mode 1, forms of scientific knowledge production. But its main contribution lies in suggesting that what has lurked behind scientific knowledge production for centuries is a more insidious and underlying mode of knowledge production—one which we label Mode 0—that corresponds to knowledge production based upon relations of power and patronage. We argue that not only does this notion allow us to develop a more penetrating critique of the claims made by proselytizers of Mode 2 but that Mode 0 has proved a more enduring form of knowledge production than Mode 1 and may well have greater longevity. Rather than becoming too embroiled in questions raised by the Mode 1/ Mode 2 debate about the utility of knowledge for managers, we suggest that readers may wish instead to pry further into the hidden world of Mode 0 patronage of knowledge production.

Disturbing structure : reading the ruins

In this paper, we look at buildings from the ‘disturbing’ perspective of ruin and ruination. The relationship between buildings and ruins appears to be an antithesis, one between organisation and disorganisation: a dyad of mutually exclusive opposites. However, we try to show how the relationship between buildings and ruins is more complex and multifaceted so that rather than being the play of opposites, it is one which is mutually enacting and inextricably entwined. We explore three aspects of the relationship of mutuality between building and ruin. The first is a consideration of ruins and their relationship to structuring and de‐structuring. Second, we look into the multiplicity of meanings that ruins engender, their inherent ambivalence. Finally, we argue that ruin and ruination are as related to construction and re‐ordering as they are to destruction, since they are not the absolute annihilation of building and organisation, but are themselves different forms of organisation and organising. Thus, the paper is not so much about ruins themselves, where ruins are seen as obliteration or the absence of form. Rather, it is about what ruins and ruination tell us about buildings, structure and the processes of organising.

Why Neo-Disciplinary? Why Now? [Editorial]

It is 10 years since we wrote our original outline of what and how we hoped Organization might contribute to the study of ‘organization’. As an opening to this 10th anniversary issue we are compelled to consider where the journal has been, where we see it now, and where we imagine it may be going. Alas, we feel obliged to produce another ‘manifesto’. Today we are celebrating what may be understood as a success story, if time is the measure of such, for we have indeed been present for 10 years in ‘the agora of academic ideas’. If number of issues per year counts as success, we can also think ourselves successful as we are inaugurating a bimonthly format in Volume 11 (2004). Yet, have we been successful intellectually in achieving what we intended to accomplish 10 years ago? Readers are likely to answer this question in ways different from ours. But we thought it important, nonetheless, to remind ourselves, as well as others, about what we were trying to attain when we began this enterprise, the context in which we were writing, and how things may have changed since. Several aspects of the original ‘manifesto’ are worth highlighting as we move along in these reflections, addressing how our earlier expectations differ from the way we see the journal’s current mandate, and articulating, as well, what we understand to be our main accomplishments and failures. In reading our editorial from 10 years ago it is poignant for us to observe how absorbed we were by what we thought were central issues for our academic community: attempts to intellectually colonize the field of organization studies by those who wanted to promote a developmental narrative of ‘origins’. This narrative offered a teleological view of the field as moving (normatively) from fragmentation to wholeness and coherence. We were particularly preoccupied with the possible dominance of this narrative, offered against ‘paradigm diversity’, for it would render invisible other very different facts about the field and could silence many possible voices within it. Prompted by that concern we wrote:

Leadership and space in 3D: distance, dissent and disembodiment in the case of a new academic building

We demonstrate, through a single case that neither architectural spaces nor leadership are ‘monolithic’, the form predominantly associated with dictatorial leadership – hard, impervious, unyielding and dominant, reflecting a single figure in a landscape. The case of a new academic building presents the lived and embodied experience of one author as researcher and subject, thus providing an ‘insider’ account that can be compared to the rhetoric produced by architects, consultants and senior management. The architect’s account, given on an architectural tour of ‘his’ building, is supplemented by documents and experiential accounts from colleagues. For those professionally concerned with quasi-participative control systems, the twin thrusts of ‘managerialism’ and ‘leaderism’ are very evident in the case, with the typical academic’s experience of formal leadership being one of distance, dissent and disembodiment.

Styles of Organizing: The Will to Form

1. Introduction 2. The Terror of Nothingness and the Rise of Representations 3. The Styling of Styles 4. Geometry in the Organization of Style 5. The Design Envelope 6. Three Dimensions, Eight Points, and Six Planes 7. Lines of Fight in the Built Environment 8. Lines of Fight in Organizing 9. Points of Difference in Aesthetics (and Politics) 10. Points of Difference in Organizing Ourselves 11. Planes of Agreement in Architecture 12. Planes of Agreement in Organization Theory 13. Conclusions: The Face of the Other

Licence to kill? On the organization of destruction in the 21st century:

War, the organized destruction of human beings, of human lifeworlds and modes of livelihood, has long been regarded as outside the usual preoccupations of organization studies. And yet, as the various on-going “asymmetric wars” increasingly become the taken for granted background noise of contemporary life, this aloofness becomes difficult to maintain. This special issue then is an initial contribution to a long overdue conversation. By way of introduction to the articles that comprise the special issue this essay seeks to highlight some of the key connections between organization theory, forms of organized destruction and their ongoing mutations in the still young, but already quite bloody, 21st century.

The role of coal-mining towns in social theory: past, present and future

ABSTRACTCoal mining has ceased in Britain to all intents and purposes. For centuries, it was a source of employment and even economic security for thousands of men, and the women who lived with them. Miners clung on to life in dangerous occupations – second only to fishing in accident and mortality rates – but strong trade unionism and collectivism mean that for some periods they were regarded as relatively well-off within the working class, if one used internal comparisons. And whilst this group may have all but disappeared from the United Kingdom and most parts of Western Europe, today in other regions of the world, coal mining continues to expand. This article discusses a brief comparison of two pit villages in the 1950s when arguably coal mining in Britain was at its height, both in terms of tons produced and recorded manpower at work. It then turns to look to coal-mining villages in China today as sources of sociological insight for our collective futures.

Theory and Organization Studies: The Need for Contestation:

In this piece of provocation we focus on the words of people who we view as increasingly powerful institutional actors in the field of organization theory and what they signify about ‘what needs to be done’ and ‘how it needs to be done’ in order to rectify the many failings they identify. We suggest that their actions reflect a desire for an integrated, general theory of organizations and the conception of organization studies as a nomothetic science to which they (and perforce we) are philosophically and ideologically committed. These are seen to be intellectual and ideological forces at work on both sides of the Atlantic. We provide a critique of this emerging orthodoxy within contemporary organization theory, briefly drawing on Swift’s metaphor of Lilliputian ‘big enders’ and ‘little enders’ but also offer contemplation of the architectural metaphors of ‘cathedral’, ‘mystery house’ and ‘the tower of Babel’ (conceived of as ruination) to consider the alternative imaginary edifices that may influence the structure of our studies. Finally, we specify an alternative research agenda for organization theory which focuses upon ‘the organization of destruction’ rather than ‘the organization of production’ or ‘the organization of consumption’. Rather than seeing any contestation of intellectual traditions, analytical frameworks and methodological strategies as mental manacles and shackles which we need to ‘throw off’ to rediscover our true vocation as organization scientists, we contend that organization theory needs to reignite a fierce dialogue over ‘organization’ and its relation to order and disorder that has stretched over, at least, two millennia and still speaks to our lives today and tomorrow.