Karen Dale

Building a Social Materiality: Spatial and Embodied Politics in Organizational Control:

The purpose of this article is to explore the relevance of ‘materiality’ to understanding changing modes of control in organizational life. In doing this, materiality is not placed in a dualistic relationship with social relations. Rather a conceptualization of ‘social materiality’ is developed whereby social processes and structures and material processes and structures are seen as mutually enacting. In developing this concept of social materiality, I have drawn upon insights from three areas of social theory. These are studies of material culture, Lefebvre’s work on the ‘social production of space’, and sociological and phenomenological approaches to embodiment. The final section of the article explores how control and materiality are linked through spatial politics in one organizational case.

Anatomising Embodiment and Organisation Theory

Introduction: Body Politics The Body and Organisation Studies Written on the Body: Social Theory and the Body Bodily Knowledge: An Approach to Embodied Subjectivity The Scalpel: An Introduction to the Anatomising Urge Under the Knife: Anatomising Organisation Theory The Mirror Replicating Organisation Conclusions

Formal Opportunity, Informal Barriers: Black Women Managers within a Local Authority:

This article examines the equal opportunities policies of a local authority which were intended to improve the representation of black women managers. It reports the types of initiatives and proportions of black women employed in different grades over time; and discusses the organisational context, contrasting the views of personnel and line managers, and EO specialists, with those of black women who had achieved senior positions. These latter accounts illustrated how inequalities were sustained despite, and at times in articulation with, an EO policy which was relatively successful in formal terms. Findings are discussed with reference to two criticisms made of EO policies: inadequate implementation, and a failure to redress the effects of social inequalities or challenge white, male work norms. The article suggests that increasing formal controls or the range of initiatives is insufficient: better ways of understanding and challenging the role of organisational structures, cultures and politics in sustaining inequality is needed.

Ethics and entangled embodiment: Bodies–materialities–organization:

In this article, we are concerned with the ethical implications of the entanglement of embodiment and non-human materialities. We argue for an approach to embodiment which recognises its inextricable relationship with multiple materialities. From this, three ethical points are made: first, we argue for an ethical relation to ‘things’ not simply as inanimate objects but as the neglected Others of humanity’s (social and material) world. Second, there is a need to recognise different particularities within these entanglements. We draw on the work of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas to think through how the radical alterity of these Others can be acknowledged, whilst also recognising our intercorporeal intertwining with them. Third, we argue that recognition of this interconnectedness and entanglement is a necessary ethical and political position from which the drawing of boundaries and creation of separations that are inherent in social organising can be understood and which contribute to the denigration, discrimination and dismissal of particular forms of embodiment, including those of non-human Others. In order to explore the ethical implications of these entanglements, we draw upon fieldwork in a large UK-based not-for-profit organisation which seeks to provide support for disabled people through a diverse range of services. Examining entanglements in relation to the disabled body makes visible and problematises the multiple differences of embodiments and their various interrelationships with materiality.

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.

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.

Fit for work? Redefining ‘Normal’ and ‘Extreme’ through human enhancement technologies:

This article focuses on how the categories of ‘normal’ and ‘extreme’ in the context of work might be renegotiated through the development of human enhancement technologies which aim to enable the human body to be pushed beyond its biological limits. The ethical dimensions of human enhancement technologies have been widely considered, but there has been little debate about their role in the broader world of employment—nor, conversely, the recognition that prevailing employment relationships might shape the development and uptake of such technologies. Addressing the organisation of work within ‘advanced’ capitalist economies, this article considers the arguments for the potential use of cognitive enhancers, so-called ‘smart drugs’, in various domains of work such as surgery and transportation. We argue that the development of human enhancement technologies might foster the normalisation of ‘working extremely’—enabling longer working hours, greater effort or increased concentration—and yet at the same time promote the conditions of possibility under which workers are able to work on themselves so as to go beyond the norm, becoming ‘extreme workers’. Looking at human enhancement technologies not only enables us to see how they might facilitate ever greater possibilities for working extremely but also helps us to understand the conditions under which cultures of extreme work become the norm and how workers them/ourselves accept or even embrace such work.

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.

Spaces and places of remembering and commemoration

Organisations engage in remembering and commemorative practices, often to produce effects of stability and continuity and to create shared meanings and culture, yet commemoration has been a relatively neglected theme in the study of organisations. The articles in this Special Issue range across diverse examples to provide a rich understanding of the dynamic and complex processes involved in the organisation of commemoration. In particular, they illustrate the importance of paying attention to materialities, spatiality and embodiment in the lived experience of practices of remembering.