Timon Beyes

Spacing Organization: non-representational theory and performing organizational space

This article connects to and extends the attempts to bring space back into critical organizational theory, which, we argue, has mainly been based on the socio-spatial perspective as pioneered by Henri Lefebvre. Taking issue with the various ways in which Lefebvre’s work can be interpreted, we develop an alternative route. Adopting a mode of non-representational theorizing as outlined in human geography, we propose the concept of ‘spacing’, which orients the understanding of organizational space towards its material, embodied, affective and minor configurations. In discussing the consequences of such a performative approach to space for the practice and craft of organizational scholarship, we argue that our conceptual opening entails a move from representational strategies of extracting representations of the (organizational) world from the world to embodied apprehensions of the everyday performing of organizational space. What can be termed the enactment of organizational geographies in slow motion is inspired and illustrated by the video ‘The Raft’ conceived by the artist Bill Viola.

The production of educational space : Heterotopia and the business university

This article responds to recent calls for rethinking management education and fostering a spatial understanding of educational practices. We propose to introduce Foucault’s notion of heterotopic space and the spatial thought of Lefebvre into the debate about the current and future state of business schools. In particular, we conceptually and empirically discuss the potential for understanding space in a way that addresses its productive force, its multiplicity and its inherent contradictions. Using the example of an experimental teaching project dedicated to the conception and physical design of a city of the future, we reflect upon the possibility of the emergence of ‘other’, heterotopic spaces within an institution of management learning. Our findings suggest that spatial interventions facilitate critically affirmative engagement with the business school by offering an imaginative approach to management education.

Strangely Familiar: The Uncanny and Unsiting Organizational Analysis

This paper focuses on the aesthetics of the uncanny to inquire into and perform affective sites of organizing that are imbued with feelings of uncertainty and uneasiness. We argue that the uncanny forms an ‘unconcept’ that allows us to think and apprehend ‘white spaces’ of organization not as new or other spaces but through a process of relating intensively with the conventional places, streets and squares that form the backdrop to everyday life. We also make use of the notion of ‘unsiting’ to show how organizational research is able to enhance our appreciation of the aesthetic dimension of organization in ways that expose and undermine that which has become familiar and taken-for-granted. Based on an artistic intervention by the theatre collective Rimini Protokoll, we encounter and analyse such processes of unsiting through the affective and spatial doublings at work in the organization of urban space. Theorizing the organizational uncanny opens up new sites/sights in organization by forging an interconnection of the recent affective, spatial and aesthetic ‘turns’ in organizational theory. To do this demands what we call scholarly performances that involve the witnessing and enacting of everyday sites of organizing.

The ontological politics of artistic interventions: Implications for performing action research

The aim of our article is to reflect upon intervention as a threshold where art and action research meet. For this, we will relate calls to apply the capacity of the performing arts to the social sciences to examples of neo-avant-garde art practices which show a renewed interest in (intervening into) the everyday production of public space. We recount and analyze two vignettes of artistic interventions to illustrate the politico-aesthetic power of art to interfere with how the social is assembled and to provoke new constellations of what is visible and sayable. Such experimental forms of engaging with the public raise the issue of a minoritarian politics of participation. Rather than being just another tool in the researcher’s toolkit, taking into account these practices can illustrate and inform certain dimensions of what could be called performative action research.

Balancing Acts: NPO-Leadership and Volunteering

Volunteering is regarded as an increasingly important phenomenon and the employment of volunteers as one of the typical traits of nonprofit organizations. However, the consequences of volunteering for everyday practices of NPO-leadership, i.e. the question of how non-paid employees are treated in settings where formal power is lacking, have so far not received the attention they deserve. Our paper discusses practices for leading without formal power by presenting findings from an empirical research project. Using a Grounded Theory approach, we identify five interrelated practices that question conventional notions of transformative or charismatic leadership.

Uncontained: The art and politics of reconfiguring urban space

The aim of this paper is to explore (a vocabulary for) the potential effects of urban artistic interventions on the configuration of city space. It engages with a particular art project that took place in Vienna, Austria, in the summer of 2000. Through juxtaposing descriptions of the particular time space of the intervention with reflections on how the ensuing excess of spatial trajectories disrupts urban orders, I seek to illustrate the potential of art to reorganise what is visible and expressible, and ponder the question whether such ‘provocations in situ (…)’ can ‘recompose political spaces, or if they must be content to parody them’ (Rancière). Constructed as a dialogue between empirical narratives and conceptual reflections, the form and the style of this paper attempt to embrace the ambiguity and openness unleashed by the performance/installation in question and ‘to stay within the compass of [its] force and imagination’ (Taussig). Resisting interpretative closure and exacerbating spatial multiplicity, or so I will try to show, constitutes a powerful effect of politically engaged urban art.

Justifying Theatre in Organisational Analysis: A Carnivalesque Alternative?

Drawing upon recent developments in “post‐dramatic theatre”, this article inquires how the aesthetics and art of theatre has been justified and used in the organisational context and tries to re‐imagine possible relations between theatre and organisation. Referring to the simultaneously provocative and self‐reflective staging of Dostojevski’s “The Idiot” by the German director Castorf, we suggest to break up an all‐too‐easily established relationship between theatre and organisation and to demand that the “art” of theatre in organisations requires a performative demonstration that there is always an other way of organising. A carnivalesque relationship between theatre and organisation is conceived as a performative (and, hence, political) assemblage playing out hybridity, riskiness, and irony.

An aesthetics of displacement: Thomas Pynchon's symptomatology of organization

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore Thomas Pynchons novel Against the Day as a symptomatology of organization and examine the (un)easy relationship between the novel and organization.Design/methodology/approach – The novel is explored through three interrelated readings: first, the novel is considered as a representation of the gruesome nature of capitalist ordering; Second, the novels textual strategies are examined to consider its co‐implication and knotting into the very logic of organization it abhors; Third, the novel is read as a search for other spaces haunting the broken machine of capitalist organizing.Findings – The paper shows how Pynchons writing and critique of capitalist organizing occupies an indeterminate space characterised by the ambivalence of ambivalence, where deciding upon its final meaning is a reductivist strategy ill suited to this complex text. Instead the novel functions through a complex process of displacement and emplacement.Originality/value – Theoretically,...

The fantasy of the organizational One

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to reflect upon the politics of and in organizational transformations in the wake of the fall of the Berlin wall and Germanys reunification.Design/methodology/approach – The paper juxtaposes a political‐philosophical perspective informed by Ranciere – what we call a dramaturgy of politics – with the findings of an ethnographic study conducted in the Berlin State Library in 2002/2003.Findings – The paper outlines a reading of the event of November 9, 1989 and its aftermath as a dissensual event of politics proper, i.e. the emergence of a new political subjectivity, followed by a consensual process of social organization. In the state library, both the consensual “fantasy of the organizational One” as well its disruption are causing struggles over what is visible and sayable. A dramaturgy of politics thus encourages us to add our voices to the specific time‐spaces in which an excess of words, signs and forms alters the configuration of what is visible and expressible....

Colour and Organization Studies

Colour is inescapable. It fills and forms the world, shaping what can be felt and known, desired and expressed. It thus becomes social technology and organizational tool. At the same time, however, colour betrays, undermines and subverts the attempts to manage it. Based on an understanding of colour as aesthetic force and medium of transformation, the essay presents a montage of scenes that set up encounters with what colour does: how it affects organization, and how it is affected by organization; how it organizes what is given to perception, knowledge and organization itself, and how it is reorganized in return.