Jeremy Aroles

Rethinking Stability and Change in the Study of Organizational Routines: Difference and Repetition in a Newspaper-Printing Factory

Organizational life consists of an ever-changing world of encounters, experiences, and complex sociomaterial relations. Within this context, standard routines can be seen as a solution to problems of inefficiency within organizations, especially when associated with images of stability, repeatability, and standardization. This can bring a sense of order where there is disorder, and stability in the face of change. However, whereas standard routines may be seen as providing solutions within complex and ever-changing organizational worlds, they can also be viewed as sources of organizational problems. Through an ethnographic examination of two routines within a newspaper-printing factory, our paper seeks to build on and add to contributions within routine dynamics (RD) by highlighting the emergence and coexistence of change and stability and the enactment of standard routines through a performative process of difference and repetition. In particular, our paper examines how organizational stability and change emerge through the dynamic relations underlying the enactment of difference and repetition and how these relations involve various—sometimes hidden—microprocesses that include the simplification and amplification of facts, scripts, and concerns. By drawing together the findings from our ethnographic research, studies within the area of RD, and concepts relating to a Deleuzian and Latourian perspective, our paper therefore contributes to the work on the repetition of routines by further unpacking the generative sociomaterial dynamics, creative forces, and microprocesses that underlie the emergence of stability and change through difference and repetition.

Deciphering signs: An empirical apprenticeship

The aim of the article is to explore how an apprenticeship through signs can inform ethnographic inquiries. Upon engaging with signs, one can develop new empirical sensibilities that could allow for the appreciation of the flows, forces and intensities encountered during such research processes. In particular, it enables us to attend to those aspects of research that we may struggle to capture or illuminate. We suggest naming such endeavour nomadography in order to emphasize the move away from anthropocentric accounts and to reflect the iterative, polymorphic and experiential nature of this approach. We also draw on a brief extract from some fieldwork in Fiji that focused on the ‘discovery’ of a new plant species. In particular, we wish to explore how a nomadographic approach provides a way of rejuvenating our thinking conceptually, empirically and methodologically by rethinking these three interconnecting and overlapping aspects of the research process.

Performance and Becoming: Rethinking Nativeness in Virtual Communities

This article seeks to examine how the notions of belonging and nativeness are enacted in virtual communities. It draws from an ethnographically inspired study of the players of a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) that is explored through three key dimensions: space, time, and language. Drawing on concepts developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I argue that the notion of nativeness, in the case of virtual communities, is best approached as a performance embedded in the process of becoming. In that sense, one is not but rather becomes a member of a virtual community. This process of becoming entails an exploration of smooth forms of space and the appropriation of a vernacular form of language.

Making Organizational Facts, Standards, and Routines: Tracing Materialities and Materializing Traces

“One area where we are looking to cut waste and costs at the moment, is ink usage” described Peter, the Managing Director (MD) of a newspaper printing factory.1 He explained how ink usage had stood out as a particular issue when he was reviewing the monthly group figures that are centrally produced: “I noticed that others [other factories in the group] were performing better than us on ink usage. We needed to find ways of reducing costs and waste in this area, so I got Matthew to look at it in more detail”. In addition to raising questions about how certain issues become seen as a “matter of concern” within this organizational setting — a problem to be solved — it also draws our attention to how we might study these issues in terms of the practices and process of organizing. While reducing ink usage is just one example of the complex and heterogeneous practices and relations which underlie newspaper printing, it provides an ideal case to study the process of fact, truth, and decision-making within such a setting and how certain issues become translated into ideas of “good” and “bad” practices. Furthermore, through the concept of material memory traces, we can begin to rethink the ideas of materiality, space, time, and action in relation to the practices of organizing by unpacking and enhancing our sensitivity to these fact-making processes.

Ethnographic encounters : towards a minor politics of field access.

ABSTRACT This paper aims to explore the insight that can be brought by Deleuze and Guattaris concept of minor literature with regard to questions of field access within the context of organizational ethnography. This paper draws from an ethnographic account of scientists negotiating access during a field expedition to Fiji. While the scientists could secure access prior to their departure by abiding by the legal dimension of plant collecting in the field, they had to renegotiate access in the field by engaging with different epistemologies, codes and forms of relationality. Positioned as an ethnography of field access, this paper highlights the enmeshment of codes, practices and trajectories in the negotiation of field access and seeks to set the lines of a ‘minor politics of access’ within the context of organizational ethnography.

Death and the Penguin: modularity, alienation and organising

ABSTRACT The originality of this paper lies in the ways in which it explores how the depiction of organised crime within Andrey Kurkov’s novel Death and the Penguin can inform our understanding of organisational modularity. This non-orthodox approach might open up new avenues of thought in the study of organisational modularity while further illustrating how novelistic worlds can inform accounts of organisational realities. Two main research questions underlie the paper. How can Andrey Kurkov’s novel further our understanding of the complexity of organisational worlds and realities by focusing our attention on different landscapes of organising? How does Kurkov’s novel help us grasp the concept of modularity by drawing attention to new forms of modular organisation? Drawing from our reading of Kurkov’s novel, we primarily explore organisational modularity through Kurkov’s depiction of organised crime and consider the themes of alienation and isolation in the context of modular organising.

Critical Realism and Actor-Network Theory/Deleuzian Thinking: A Critical Comparison in the Area of Information Systems, Technology and Organizational Studies

Much debate has encircled studies of information systems (IS), technology and organizations with regards to ideas of process, stability and change, performance and materiality. This encapsulates different ways of viewing dualities (e.g. subjective/objective, social/technical, local/global, macro/micro, structure/agency, reality/construction, being/becoming, etc.) as well as alternative ontological and epistemological commitments underlying particular approaches and research perspectives. This paper seeks to explore two specific approaches by focusing on a comparison of critical realism (CR) and actor-network theory (ANT)/Deleuze-inspired forms of inquiry. In particular, we focus on the notion of morphogenesis in order to explore in greater detail how this concept conjures up rather different images in relation to approaches centred around CR and ANT/Deleuze.

Becoming, assemblages and intensities: re-exploring rules and routines

As we log into our computers, type in our passwords and connect to our extended world of networks, contacts and associations through email, the Internet and a wealth of applications, there can be a feeling that this electronic world appears automatically at our fingertips with an endless series of connections, standards and routines being performed effortlessly. When things fail or go wrong (e.g., network errors, hardware problems, etc.), we may begin to question ideas of agency, process and accountability as we explore problems and possible solutions. Even in these occasions, we can easily slip into deterministic accounts that rely on certain a priori divides (e.g., subject/object, structure/ agency, technology/society and nature/culture), simplistic cause-effect relations and a realist version of the ‘truth’ as existing out-there. Thus, in order to ‘explain’ or ‘account’ for the situation, certain object/subject positions, sets of relations and divides may be taken for granted and performed as such through this process. While such an approach has been evident in studies seeking to research the role of routines, procedures and standards within organizations, there is also an increasing number of approaches and theorists who seek to open up new spaces of enquiry by unpacking these divides and going beyond a realist representation of objectivity and ‘truth’.