Controlling service work: An ambiguous accomplishment between employees, management and customers

In order to understand the control of service work, most service literature has focused on its production while treating the customer as secondary. The consumption literature emphasizes the customer’s role but lacks empirical evidence for its claims. Using an ethnographic study of an ‘exclusive’ department store, this article aims to reduce the gap between these two bodies of literature by investigating how employees, management and customers control service work. The findings suggest that the maintenance of class difference combined with competing expectations of managers, employees and customers makes the management of service work highly ambiguous and reveals a continuing instability between managerial practices of control and consumer culture

Empirical Challenges in Organizational Aesthetics Research: Towards a Sensual Methodology

Despite growing scholarly interest in aesthetic dimensions of organizational life, there is a lack of literature expressly engaging with the methodological mechanics of 'doing aesthetics research'. This article addresses that gap. It begins with an overview of the conceptual idiosyncrasies of 'aesthetics' as a facet of human existence and maps out the challenges these pose for empirical research methodology. A review of methodological approaches adopted to date in empirical studies of organizational aesthetics is then presented. The remainder of the article draws on the author's experiences and suggests methods and techniques to address both conceptual and practical challenges encountered during the execution of an organizational aesthetics research project. The article calls for a firmer focus on the aesthetic experiences of organizational members in addition to those of researchers and concludes with some suggestions as to the future of such 'sensual methodologies' </jats:p

Feminist Collaboration in the Art Academy

Women\u27s activity in the visual arts both in and outside of the art institutions of Europe and the United States reveals a history of collaboration in artistic production and political activism This paper analyzes the effects of feminist collaboration upon the disciplines of art, the pedagogy of art, and the administration of art institutions. In Part I, the authors review the impact of feminist collaboration in art history, aesthetics, art criticism, and art production. Part II provides examples of collaborative experiences of women in higher education art institutions and in some art communities in the United States, Scandinavia, and Italy. Three conclusions emerged from the review: (a) Collaboration facilitated women\u27s entry into the visual arts; (b) collaborative dialogue has changed the academic structures of art criticism and art history, but collaboration has had a minimal effect in the areas of aesthetics and art production; and (c) collaboration has not resulted in a significant change in the administration or pedagogy of art institutions

Salsa magic: an exploratory netnographic analysis of the salsa experience

This is a paper about the promise of salsa dancing as unfolding social drama. We argue that a turn to dance offers much potential to reinvigorate ways of theorizing consumer culture, necessitating we take seriously talk around such experiences. Based on a netnographic analysis, which is inspired by the informative work of Kozinets (1997, 1998, 2001). We reveal how dance is a reflexive form of knowledge enacted in and through our bodies, where the settled and fixed becomes disturbed. Dance then makes possible shared passions, exhilarations and desires lacking from people's everyday lives granting them a space for expression

On emotions and salsa : some thoughts on dancing to rethink consumers

Dance forms are a big business, highly marketable commoditized cultural universes, with a plethora of markets constructed around their spirit, vitality and possibilities. In this paper, we explore one particular dance form, that of Salsa, arguing that as consumer researchers we look for a more vibrant vocabulary and mindset with which to capture the experiential and transcendental nature of such social associations. We demonstrate that the metaphor of dancing is useful to revitalize our notions of consumer actions; taking them out of the grey mundane of calculative and rational action into the possibilities of emotional economies constructed around the effervescence and vitality of the social (cf. Maffesoli, [1996])

E-Motion: being moved by fiction and media? : Notes on fictional worlds, virtual contacts and the reality of emotions

Our response to fictional cues is often as emotional as to occurrences in real life. Such emotional responses do not mean that each time we mistake fiction for reality; rather they are affected by our innate social behaviors and by complex neural structures. Some responses, as for instance fright or pity, take place spontaneously, comparably to a reflex act. Furthermore, emotions can be evoked by means of thoughts: some specific sorts of texts rouse the reader´s ability to share in the emotional experiences of a fictional character. Other emotions can refer to a work of art as a whole or to some implicit components of meaning or allusions to facts of the case external to the text. Further ways of emotional engagement are pleasure and suspense, the affective basic processes of each reception of art or any media.Menschen reagieren auf fiktionale Ereignisse ebenso emotional wie auf das wirkliche Leben. Solche Gefühlsreaktionen bedeuten jedoch keine Verwechslung von Realität und Fiktion, sondern sind ein Produkt angeborener sozialer Verhaltensweisen und komplexer neuronaler Vorgänge. Reaktionen wie Schrecken und Mitleid zum Beispiel geschehen spontan, fast reflexartig. Aber auch über Gedanken lassen sich Emotionen hervorrufen: Bestimmte literarische Textsorten appellieren an das Einfühlungsvermögen des Lesers und lassen ihn an der Gefühlswelt fiktionaler Personen teilhaben. Andere Emotionen können sich auf ein künstlerisches Werk als ganzes oder auf werkexterne Bedeutungskomponenten beziehen. Weitere Formen emotionaler Beteiligung sind Lust und Spannung, die affektiven Basisprozesse jeder Kunst- und Medienrezeption

SPIT IN MY MOUTH: Queer Intimacies, Material Intra-actions, and Sensuous Becoming

This document describes my multidisciplinary art practice as it intersects with New Materialism, Queer and Affect theory, Ecology, and my embodied and experiential knowledge as a queer subject. The writing is divided into two categories. One is more theoretical, thinking through these different discourses. The other realizes them through relationships and intra-actions between my material kin and me. With these two modes of writing,I propose that embodied and felt knowing is as valid and illuminating as more traditional forms of knowledge. These sections are interdependent and resist linear logic, offering relational meanings to each reader as they find their way through a terrain of text and image offering a multiplicity of readings. Renaming difficulties with articulation as a legitimate tension within my own way of thinking and experiencing, this document pushes against such exactitude of ideas. Ultimately the artworks in my thesis exhibition and this outlining document work to reveal queerness, or queering, as a basic tenet for existence. This text uses Open Dyslexic, an open-source font designed for readers with dyslexia, a learning difference whose wide range of effects alters the way a person takes in, processes, and utilizes language and graphic symbols