Varda Wasserman

Organizational Aesthetics: Caught Between Identity Regulation and Culture Jamming

Applying insights from Lefebvres spatial theory [Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Blackwell, Oxford, UK] to an analysis of Israels Ministry of Foreign Affairs---recently relocated to its new award-winning building---the present study seeks to offer a more comprehensive model of the role of organizational aesthetics (OA) in identity regulation and culture jamming. Our contribution is threefold. (1) At the empirical/methodological level, this study attempts to simultaneously analyze the three Lefebvrian spaces in a single organization, demonstrating negotiations and struggles over interpretations of OA. (2) We analyze aesthetic jamming as a form of intentional and unintentional efforts at collective resistance that not only reveals the aesthetic mechanisms of regulation, but actually uses them as a method of counter-regulation. (3) Whereas most studies in this emerging body of literature focus on the regulation of organization-based identities (bureaucratic and professional), we show how the translation of extraorganizational hierarchies of identities (national, ethnic, and gendered) into the organizational control system is also mediated by OA.

Spatial Work in Between Glass Ceilings and Glass Walls: Gender-Class Intersectionality and Organizational Aesthetics

This study explores the relations between organizational spatiality, gender, and class. It examines the work performed by managers and architects on the one hand, and by various groups of female employees on the other, in constructing, reproducing, and challenging gender-class identities through space-related means. Three types of gender-class spatial work are identified―discursive, material, and interpretive-emotional―to highlight the role of space in constructing and reconstructing inequality regimes within organizations. Applying insights from Lefebvre’s spatial theory, we analyze the case of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ new headquarters, demonstrating how the spatial work of various actors is both gendered and gendering. We also show how space is enacted by women from different social groups in accordance with their habitus and with the aim of distinguishing themselves from others.

(Un)dressing masculinity: The body as a site of ethno-gendered resistance

This article explores the ways in which the aesthetics of employees’ bodies are used as a site of control and resistance, processes which are activated through ethnic and gendered practices. By exploring three resistance strategies used by Israeli combat soldiers, we demonstrate the construction of competing identities of military masculinity. We demonstrate how, by activating a process of self-ethnicization, Israeli soldiers use an ethnic identity that empowers them and challenges the ‘appropriate‘ professionalism expected from them. This process illuminates the interrelations between ethnic and masculine identities, and emphasizes the dynamic and fluid nature of the constructing of identities within organizations.

To be (alike) or not to be (at all): aesthetic isomorphism in organisational spaces

Applying insights from neo-institutional theory to an analysis of two case studies - the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (IMFA) and the Open University of Israel, both recently relocated to new award-winning buildings - this study suggests regarding organisational aesthetics as an important actor in isomorphic processes and exploring the processes of translating and editing, which evolved in the architectural decisions made in relocating to newly designed buildings .The contribution of the paper is in combining concepts used in studies of organisational aesthetics (especially Lefebvres theory) and concepts of the neo-institutionalism. This theoretical combination is offered to better understand the architectural fashions and trends, which have become popular in contemporary organisational architecture, and to explore the adaptation processes.

Between a Western Career and Traditional Community: Narratives of Successful Ethiopian Immigrant Women

The study’s objective was to examine the relations between successful Ethiopian immigrant women in Israel and their traditional community, as well as the strategies they adopt to contend with its expectations. Based on a qualitative life and work history methodology, the data were collected from 34 successful women who emigrated from Ethiopia to Israel. Results show three dialectical axes scrutinizing the interrelations of the participants with their community (found both between different participants and within the same woman): (a) trenchant criticism of the community coupled with praise and pride, (b) community as a support base or as hindering personal development, and (c) a desire for separation/detachment from community coupled with a desire to support the community. The findings demonstrate how the Ethiopian women contend with the normative demands of two different, clashing systems: the Ethiopian community-family system and Israel’s neoliberal labor market.

Upgraded Masculinity: A Gendered Analysis of the Debriefing in the Israeli Air Force:

This article examines the importation of new gender ideals into a highly masculine organization through top-down and bottom-up processes. We analyze how a dominant group of men undo and redo gender to reproduce their supremacy and create a new, “improved” form of masculinity. Based on qualitative research on the practice of debriefing in the Israel Air Force, we explore how new practices of masculinity are incorporated into a hegemonic masculinity by introducing so-called “soft” organizational practices and thus constructing a new form of “upgraded” masculinity. We show that pilots are involved in two continual and dialectical processes of performing masculinity. The first includes top-down practices neutralizing opportunities to execute exaggerated masculine performances, including new technologies allowing recording and documenting of all flights, a safety discourse emphasizing the protection of human life, and organizational learning based on self- and group critiques aimed at improved performance. The second, a bottom-up process enacted by pilots, is aimed at restoring and mobilizing masculinity and includes rationalized professionalism, competitiveness, and patronizing. Taken together, these constitute a hybrid, “upgraded” masculinity where “soft” characteristics are appropriated by men to reinforce a privileged status and reproduce their dominance within and outside the military. Our case study focuses on the debriefing, a process in which air teams formally reflect on their performance after a particular task/event to improve it.

Exploring narratives of non-faculty professionals in neoliberal higher education: a cultural appropriation perspective on librarians

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to explore how the rise of the new public management (NPM) culture in higher education affected librarians. Librarians are a central part of the traditional intellectual model of academia, whose professional ethos is challenged and threatened by the new market-oriented culture. Using a qualitative methodology based on semi-structured interviews with managers and professional staff of academic libraries at a public university, the present study provides insights into the perceptions of non-faculty professionals on the infiltration of NPM into higher education. Our findings reflect a cultural appropriation of integration taking place under the dominant NPM, resulting in a hybrid traditional-NPM culture. Theoretical and practical implications of the effect of NPM on professional staff of academia are offered.

Book Review: The Oxford Handbook of Diversity in OrganizationsBendlR.BleijenberghI.HenttonenE.MillsA.J.The Oxford Handbook of Diversity in OrganizationsOxford: Oxford University Press, 2015; 635 pp.

The growing heterogeneity of workplaces in the last few decades has turned the interest in workplace diversity into the bon-ton of many managers and organizational researchers. Recent social changes, including globalization, the growing number of multinational corporations, and the mass migration of waves of job-seekers and war refugees from developing countries to Europe and the United States (Appadurai, 1996), have accelerated the awareness of difference and prompted many HR mangers to seek ways to “manage” diversity—that is, not only to see diversity as something that has to be “dealt with” or “coped with,” but also to use it as a managerial tool for increasing production and creativity in work teams. Much of this literature has been led by American researchers who have sought to advance a reactive approach against discrimination and prejudice; only in the 1990s did critical researchers, inspired mostly by feminist, post-colonial, and/or post-structural theories, begin to seriously challenge this approach by exploring power relations related to diversity both in local and global contexts. The melting-pot approach, which encouraged assimilation into the hegemonic culture and which was the most accepted approach in organizations and in research, is now being increasingly replaced by a celebration of pluralism that does not necessitate putting aside one’s cultural ideologies and lifestyle. In this respect, the editors of The Oxford Handbook of Diversity in Organizations—Regine Bendl, Inge Bleijenbergh, Elina Henttonen, and Albert Mills—make a substantial contribution to these attempts to promote a pluralistic and critical understanding of diversity in the workplace. The Handbook is an extensive and impressive project that comprises 28 chapters by very wellknown, highly regarded authors in the field of diversity. Though it would have been much easier for the editors to present only studies employing a critical approach, with the aim of promoting this relatively neglected perspective (as compared to the popular and widespread American approach, which emphasizes diversity management), they have made a much-appreciated effort to integrate some positivistic and American-inspired chapters. While I personally feel more sympathetic to the critical perspective, I think that by integrating these positivist chapters the editors have gained at least two advantages: first, they have succeeded in avoiding the common confrontational discourse between critical and positivist traditions; second, they have done an excellent job in echoing the subject of diversity in their handbook by giving voice to varied theoretical perspectives and have thereby managed to embrace diversity as an ideology-in-practice—that is, not only “saying” and “telling about” diversity, but also actually “doing” diversity. To achieve this goal, the editors have included in their collection works by authors from around the globe (including, to name a few, Brazil, South Africa, India, and Pakistan) and introduced many 674867OSS0010.1177/0170840616674867Organization StudiesBook Reviews book-review2016

Juggling resistance and compliance: The case of Israeli ultra-orthodox media

ABSTRACT In an attempt to examine how resistant discourses are constructed in a highly conservative society, this article presents four discursive forms of resistance used by an Israeli ultra-orthodox Jewish magazine juggling between compliance and resistance in its attempt to subvert hegemonic rabbinical authority. These resistance forms are: cushioning, discursive hybrids, explicit provocation and trivializing. Based on a qualitative content analysis of 229 articles published in the weekly magazine Mishpacha (Family), the study seeks to contribute to the existing literature on resistance in and around organizations by exposing the complex and heterogeneous nature of discursive resistance in authoritarian-religious environments. Furthermore, the paper offers a glimpse into the ways that a social group within a religious society resists authority though without shattering its ideological basis.

Toward a theory of effective aesthetic communication

This paper focuses on aesthetic communication-communication based on aesthetic attributes-color, size, shape, ornamentation, or texture, for example -in the context of organizational communication. We argue that aesthetic communication is potent because, when done effectively, it leads message receivers, such as the organization’s various stakeholders, employees, customers, etc., to accept an organization’s message as natural and obvious. Our paper theorizes the conditions that render aesthetic communication effective in this regard. To develop our theory, we highlight that aesthetic communication consists of three distinct modes: one linked to the associations the aesthetic attributes evoke, one linked to the habitual bodily responses the attributes form, and one linked to the linguistic communication articulating the effect of the aesthetic attributes. We suggest that aesthetic communication is more effective when there is a high degree of internal consistency among these modes. Additionally, we argue t...