Jörg Metelmann

Pushing the Envelope: Creating Public Value in the Labor Market: An Empirical Study on the Role of Middle Managers

Abstract This article analyzes public value creation by the German Federal Labour Agency (FLA) from a middle management perspective. We relate the role description of a public value manager by Mark Moore with middle management research inspired by Floyd and Wooldridge. As a result of a case study we conceptualize critical experience of middle management and its antecedents in balancing different value dimensions. The conflict potential is seen less in managing different expectations from the top and the front line, but rather in enacting an integrative public value manager role itself which requires significant adaptive and value-balancing work customarily attributed to professional (private) leadership.

Rogue Logics: Organization in the Grey Zone

This paper explores the concept of the ‘rogue’ through an examination of how the figure appears in business ethics and as the rogue trader. Reading the rogue trader through institutional logics and Jacques Derrida’s book Rogues, we suggest that the rogue is not on the dark side of organization so much as in an indeterminate grey zone, where the boundary between acceptable behaviour and misconduct is unclear. We further argue that this boundary is necessarily unclear as it is in the nature of organization, at least within capitalist trading systems, to push the boundaries of what is possible and acceptable. The rogue thus helps produce the boundaries of ethically acceptable organizational behaviour in the very act of transgressing them. The location-bound specificity of the rogue, as well as the symbolic process of naming an individual or a state a rogue, finds a relevant correlate in the villain, as Derrida suggests. But what we call ‘rogue organization’ may be constitutive of organization per se. As such, there is a potential roguishness in organization that should be addressed when considering the dark side of ethics in organization studies.

Putting Oneself Out There: The “Selfie” and the Alter-Rithmic Transformations of Subjectivity

In spite of recent interpretation according to which “selfing,” that is, taking “selfies” of oneself, realizes the transparency dream because it renders someone completely visible, the chapter argues that the “selfie” should be seen as an exemplary device for a subjectivation process which at the same time thwarts the aim of full subjectification. The storage, serialization and dissemination of the “selfies” point to a “selfing” project that takes place under conditions of sociality and sharedness. In this respect, the “selfie” is neither a diminished version of the “I,” nor an idealized type; neither merely self-referential, nor merely self-quantificational. Rather, it is a device of an ongoing “selfing” process, which opacifies a given identity all the while it pretends making it transparent.

Pop Und Die Ökonomie Des Massenoriginals

D as Massenoriginal ist zu einem ubiquitären Phänomen der Gegenwart geworden. Sei es in der Idee der ›Industrie 4.0‹ mit dem Akzent auf der Mass Customization, sei es im Selfie als massenhaftem Selbstporträt, im digitalen Google-Double eines personalisierten Standard-Ichs oder in der sozialen Figur des »Otto Normalabweichers« (Jürgen Kaube) – überall ist die Logik einer paradoxen Verschränkung von Individualisierung und Totalisierung am Werke, die zwei zuvor als unvereinbar gedachte Eigenschaften synthetisiert. Mit dem Verschwinden des emphatischen Pop-Begriffs tritt das Massenoriginal hervor, entkoppelt von dessen politischen Setzungen. Es wird so zur emblematischen symbolischen Form unserer Zeit, post-antagonistisch, post-konsumistisch und post-evolutiv. Das Phänomen Selfie rückt den Sachverhalt deutlich vor Augen. Niemand sucht hier visuell sich selbst (wie in der Tradition des künstlerischen Selbstporträts), es findet keine Suche über das hinaus statt, was sie oder er sowieso schon sehen oder wissen. Vielmehr geht es darum, massenhaft das Selbst der anderen zu sein. Der Imperativ lautet: ›Ich zeige mich, wie ich mir vorstelle, dass du mich sehen solltest, wenn ich dir gefallen wollte.‹ Im Rahmen der technischen Möglichkeiten und der gängigen Bild-Praktiken – mit einem Arm gehalten, mit beiden etc. – entsteht so ein sozial opportunes Profil, das Massenproduktion, anders kann man das ja nicht nennen, und Ich-Funktion miteinander neuartig koppelt. Der Sneaker auf Bestellung stiftet eine weitere scheinbar paradoxe Verbindung, handelt es sich doch weder um eine Einzelfertigung im herkömmlichen e s s A Y

Melodrama After the Tears. New Perspectives on the Politics of Victimhood

Melodrama,it is said, has expanded beyond the borders of genre and fiction to become a pervasive cultural mode, with distinct signifying practices and interpretive codes for meaning-making that assist in determining parameters for identification throughout a variety of discourses and mediated spaces, be it the public spectacle of personal suffering, the emotive coding of consumer practices, or the sentimentalization of national politics. If melodrama is so culturally pervasive and emotionally persuasive, then what is its political potential, both within and beyond symbolic fictions, and what might its limitations be? This volume represents both a condensation and an expansion of melodrama studies. It condenses elements of theory on melodrama by bringing into focus what it recognizes as the locus for subjective identification within melodramatic narratives: the suffering victim. Taking as its point of departure Thomas Elsaesser’s claim that “[o]ne of the characteristic features of melodramas is that they concentrate on the point of view of the victim,”4 this volume provides an expansion by going beyond the methodology of examining primarily fictive works, whether from the stage, the screen or the written word, for their explicit or latent commentary on and connection to the historical contexts within which they are produced. Though many of the contributions also address melodramatic works of fiction in relation to historical contexts, most of them apply theory from melodrama studies and the analysis of victimhood directly to historical events, social conditions and non-fictive cultural artifacts. Thus the expansion is not one beyond genre, a move that has been important in melodrama studies, but an expansion completely beyond generic and fictive forms, to contribute to a socio-cultural theory of melodrama.

What’s the Matter: Race as Res

Calling for a reconsideration of race in response to ‘post-race’ discourses, W.J.T. Mitchell’s inspiring address at the first congress of the International Association for Visual Culture Studies made at least three major claims.1 First, and perhaps most central to his argument, is that the power of deeply ingrained social ontologies is not to be underestimated. Notions that have served to organize and structure thoughts on the nature of being are neither easily nor quickly altered. Race, it must be recognized, is everywhere. Perception in and of the world is encoded, if often unconsciously or indirectly, through race. This leads to a second claim: that the notion of nature, or of second nature, stemming from the beginning of a critical left theory following Hegel and Marx up to Benjamin and Adorno/Horkheimer, needs to be revived. Cultural studies, indeed the greater portion of the humanities, has become so convinced of its social constructivist logic that it is in danger of neglecting nature – or something like it, a second nature – altogether. Mitchell argues that this is a mistake; that if we neglect the immovable truth of nature, or let’s say the tenacious tendencies of second nature, we run the risk of all-too-easily replacing one socially ontologizing concept with another. The point is well taken: paradigm shifts and social ontologies don’t change overnight, but are rather subject to long, uneasy processes. Following this logic, it is more and more often said that the tendency to prematurely hail the end of an era is a symptom of the time after modernism, and the eagerness to ‘post-’ an era, a logic, a paradigm, or an ontology often runs the risk of being counterproductive: thus we have Mitchell’s welcome call for a reconsideration of race.