Helene Ratner

The return of the Freudian Couch®: managing affectivity through technologies of comfort

This article explores how the affective “set-up” of Freud’s legendary couch has been exported into modern education relations. The so-called psy-sciences from pedagogy, psychology, and psychiatry have informed self-management in school. Managing self-management has a material-affective dimension. Through affective encounters with the couch, we argue, management can foster and maintain students’ desire to take part in school and enhance their own learning. Combining Karen Barad’s notion of intra-activity, a Gilles Deleuzian/Brian Massumian concept of affectivity, and Malou Juelskjær’s concept of comfort technology, we explore how the couch participates in transforming intensities and shaping desires by affecting bodies, voices, atmospheres, and relations. We look into the Danish school, which over the past decade has intensified its focus on preparing students to take part in a workforce in the knowledge economy. This means that much focus is on cultivating a learning subject that desires personal development and lifelong learning. We look at the couches placed near or inside the principal’s office to explore their role in affective management and how they tune and charge subject formation. Through our material-affective perspective we zoom in on everyday practices in the offices of principals to see how the couch, a mundane comfort technology, affects management relations between principal, students, parents, and teachers.

It Was The Night Of The Long Knives

Abstract This article explores through ethnography how public servant identities are affected by organizational change. Using an organizational becoming perspective, it studies the introduction of Lean in a recently merged public logistics department. Lean divides the department into two groups and conflict arises. Later, another institutional change is introduced. Here, the employee attitudes towards Lean change, now unifying rather than dividing the department. Rather than a professional-managerial split, the article concludes that the interplay between public sector change and employee identity is shaped by the apprehension of uncertainty and related group conflicts.

The Social Life of Learning Theory: The “Ideal” and “Real” of Reflective Learning

There is a growing understanding that public institutions need to be proactive in not only developing their welfare services but doing so continually through various concepts of learning. This article presents an ethnographic study of a public school that aims at working strategically with organizational learning through Donald Schöns concept of “the reflective practitioner.” Schöns concepts provide the school manager with a vocabulary to criticize the destructive effects of New Public Managements linear steering technologies. The study also illustrates that expectations of reflective practitioners produce new uncertainties and managerial challenges, especially in manager-employee relations. The implications of these are discussed.

Suggestive Objects at Work: A New Form of Organizational Spirituality?

In Western secular societies, spiritual life is no longer limited to classical religious institutions but can also be found at workplace organizations. While spirituality is conventionally understood as a subjective and internal process, this paper proposes the concept of ‘suggestive objects’, constructed by combining insights from Gabriel Tardes sociology with Bruno Latours actor-network theory, to theorize the material dimension of organizational spirituality. The sacred in organizations arises not from the internalization of collective values but through the establishment of material scaffolding. This has deep implications for our understanding of the sacred, including a better appreciation of the way that suggestive objects make the sacred durable, the way they organize it.

Who is the Monster? Welfare Agencies’ Suspension of Power

Welfare institutions and their programmes for help often rest upon naturalized ideas about how to transform the citizen. However, they may act out these as markedly colliding rationalities (Andersen 2008). This mechanism is also true for institutions that care for highly marginalized groups such as the homeless. These institutions employ ‘help programmes’ that construct the homeless through their own internal criteria of what counts as needs, motivation and client-development. Several incompatible programmes may exist across different re-housing institutions, constructing the ‘roles’ of helper and client in radically different ways. By exploring how different welfare institutions suspend and hybridize logics of help, this chapter questions the possibility of realizing the ideal of social integration, a core value of the welfare system.

Modern Settlements in Special Needs Education: Segregated Versus Inclusive Education

Abstract In the history of special needs education, the distinction between human nature and its social environment has been a controversial matter. The controversy regards whether special needs are primarily caused by the childs psycho-medical body or by cultural concepts of normality and deviance. Settlements of this controversy govern whether the pupil or the educational institution becomes the main point of intervention. In Denmark, the particularities of settlements can be identified by juxtaposing the introduction of intelligence testing in the 1930s with the contemporary policy agenda of inclusion. With intelligence testing, special needs education was to service children whose needs were seen as part of their human nature. Inclusion, in turn, assumes special needs to be stigmatizing cultural labels that need to be abandoned by changing school cultures. Drawing on actor-network theory we can approach such settlements as a product of a modern division between human nature and social environment. Although both these settlements depend on a distinction between human nature and social environment, this distinction generates practical tensions for each settlement.

Lean production of intensive cities: Using the power of Italo Calvino's imagination to grasp organizational change

This article analyses the introduction of Lean Production to ‘the Procurement Office’ (the Procurement Office is made anonymous due to promises of confidentiality in the research project ‘Lean without stress’), a work place marked by continuous organizational changes, unfavourable image and high turnover. This is analysed in terms of Italo Calvinos Invisible cities. It is argued that Calvinos themes and prose help us understand change as a multiplicity of temporal intensities producing ambivalence and affect. We describe this use of literary abstractions as a ‘hyperbolic social epistemology’. Through the depiction of four intensifications of Lean Production, the metaphors of Calvinos cities show how reality and illusion; hope and poverty; dreams and death and utopia and dystopia are intricately mingled and produce temporary and equally ambivalent affects of alienation, hypocrisy, self-governance, job-satisfaction, antagonisms and empowerment.