Jerzy Kociatkiewicz

City festivals: creativity and control in staged urban experiences

In a global market, cities aim to develop a distinct profile to attract mobile consumers. One means increasingly used to attain distinction is to brand the city as experience space. In particular, the urban festival has become a popular organizational form for creating experience spaces and for marketing cities. Festivals are often strategically conceived with the purpose of promoting a ‘distinctive city’, in line with uniqueness being the keystone of success in the experience economy. This paper applies an experience economy framework to analyse city festivals as potentially transformative practices, helping re-imagine urban space and reshape urban identity. Building on empirical studies of the Stockholm Culture Festival and the Nowy Kercelak Fair in Warsaw, it examines the tension between controlled image production and carnivalesque celebration and the extent to which the meanings and flow of urban space can be managed. Using Lefèbvre’s notion of the production of space and Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of de-territorialization and re-territorialization, this paper critically assesses the possibility of reshaping urban practices through the staging of festivals, and the potential for creativity and expression extant in managed staging of experience.

The Anthropology of Empty Spaces

We would like to tell an anthropologic story about how we see reality and how we feel about it, with no intention to generalize our reflections. Our version of anthropology is intentionally self-reflexive and self-reflective. This text is a narrative study of the feelings of anthropologists out in the field. The anthropologic frame of mind is a certain openness of the mind of the researcher/observer of social reality (Czarniawska-Joerges 1992). On the one hand, it means the openness to new realities and meanings, and on the other, a constant need to problematize, a refusal to take anything for granted, to treat things as obvious and familiar. The researcher makes use of her or his curiosity, the ability to be surprised by what she or he observes, even if it is “just” the everyday world. Our explorations concern an experience of space. It aims at investigating the space not belonging to anyone. While “anthropologically” moving around different organizations, we suddenly realized that we were part of stories of the space we were moving in. Areas of poetic emptiness can be experienced, often in the physical sense, on the boundaries and inside of organizations.

The Good Manager: An Archetypical Quest for Morally Sustainable Leadership:

This paper explores the potential for morally sustainable leadership, i.e., leadership with an awareness of both light and dark sides contained in the role of the leader, as symbolized by the archetype of the king. A narrative enquiry aiming at the study of fictive stories authored by management theorists and practitioners from different contexts, interweaving collective individual elements, brings to light how issues of leadership goodness are related to each other and to other themes. The stories are presented as archetypical tales, that is, stories that touch profound aspects of culture and the psyche. They reveal what happens when people are asked to imagine a good manager, and how this results in tragic ironic representations, rather than tales of straightforward goodness.

Experiencing the Shadow: Organizational Exclusion and Denial within Experience Economy

This article focuses on the dark and hidden aspects of experience economy events. These aspects are framed as the shadow in the Jungian sense, i.e. an archetype of the unconscious domain. Individuals and organizations create a shadow as a side effect of attempts at control and ordering of their identity. The article presents stories based on ethnographically inspired field studies of experience economy events to show how staged experience produces an experiential shadow side. The process is problematized and reflected upon as a shadow producing side effect of identity production and management in experience economy settings. The possibilities for the integration of the shadow into the normal operation of experience economy organizations are considered with the help of images of the carnival and the archetype the fool. The acceptance of the paradoxical and strange side of such events they may be better understood and their dark side integrated.

Handbook of research on knowledge-intensive organizations

The Handbook of Research on Knowledge-Intensive Organizations offers an international collection of studies on knowledge-intensive organizations. As one of the first comprehensive books to cover the topics vitally important for the whole theory of organization and management, this Handbook of Research delivers a state-of-the-art view on this timely issue.

Into the Labyrinth: Tales of Organizational Nomadism:

Labyrinths and mazes have constituted significant spaces for tales of transformation, from prehistoric designs through the myth of the Minotaur and the pilgrimage design in Chartres cathedral to contemporary novels and pictorial representations. Labyrinths and labyrinthine designs can also commonly be found in present-day organizations. This text, based on an ethnographic study as well as on an analysis of academic discourse, explores their significance as symbol and as physical structure. Drawing upon the notion of transitional space, it presents labyrinths as an indelible part of human experience, an archetype, and a sensemaking tool for understanding and explaining organizational complexity. The unavoidable presence of labyrinthine structures is presented as a counterpoise to the reductionist tendency towards simplification, streamlining and staying on-message, allowing or demanding space for reflection, doubt and uncertainty.

Committed qualitative research in management studies

Artykul podejmuje sie refleksji nad tym, czemu i komu sluzyc mają nauki zarządzania? Ukazane są glowne sposoby widzenia roli tych nauk: jako nieaplikacyjna nauka czysta, jako nauka praktyczna oraz jako zaangazowane dzialanie mające na celu wspolne dobro wszystkich uczestnikow organizacji i, szerzej, calego spoleczenstwa. Przyblizamy ten ostatni punkt widzenia i argumentujemy, iz jest on szczegolnie wskazany we wspolczesnych czasach. Nastepnie prezentujemy metody jakościowe jako dobrze nadające sie do praktykowania badan w ramach tak rozumianych nauk zarządzania oraz glowne kryteria wiarygodności i poprawności stosowania tych metod. = This paper is dedicated to a reflection on the topic of purpose and aim of organization and management studies. It presents the three main approaches: management studies regarded as pure science, as a practical discipline, and as an engagement undertaken with the aim of increasing the wellbeing of organizational participants and, in broader terms, of society. We focus on the last perspective and argue for its value, especially in contemporary times. Further, we present qualitative methods as particularly well suited for the practice of such management and organization studies and, finally, we introduce the main criteria of credibility and quality of research undertaken with the use of these methods.