Human resource management practices and organizational performance. The mediator role of immaterial satisfaction in Italian Social Cooperatives

The paper deals with the mediating role of immaterial satisfaction between substantive human resources (HR) features and organizational performance. We address this relationship in the Italian social service sector using a survey dataset that includes 4134 workers and 320 not-for-profit social cooperatives. The obtained results show that human resource management (HRM) practices influence immaterial satisfaction and, satisfaction positively impacts on firm performance. However, the impact of the different HRM practices is not the same. In this sense, worker involvement and workload pressure have a positive impact on firm performance; but task autonomy or collaborative teamwork do not have impact on organizational performance

Resonances: The sound of performance

It is a hot summer night in August 2013, as the audience gathers near the entrance of the large Gray Hall at the south side of the former coal mine Göttelborn (Germany). The sun has set, and there is only the gray light of dusk in the performance space inside, streaming through the large glass façade, falling onto a small array of stones laid out on the floor. Additional light from a video projector streams over the stones, and a tiny figure of a dancer is seen crawling over rocks, moving in the strange, a-syncopated rhythm of jump cuts. Slowly the sound of rocks scratching against a stone surface begins to be heard, it will remain the only sound for a while, then Japanese instrumentalist Emi Watanabe steps into the empty space with her flute

Readymaintenance : systems, feminist economics, and the immaterial readymade in the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles

textIn 1968, Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote the Maintenance Art Manifesto. She announced a new art making practice as well as an original economic theory from a feminist perspective. Maintenance, "the back half of life," as she once called it, has been the lens through which Ukeles has made art for more than 45 years. To enact her theory, Ukeles uses the avant-garde tradition of claiming aspects of everyday life as art.'This thesis examines two key features of Ukeles work from before 1977. Her economic theory, Maintenance, is a rich and complex view that centralizes the experience of women and those efforts and workers who keep society going and people living. Leaning on Jean Baudrillard, I argue that this subaltern feminist economic theory refutes the productivist tendencies in avant-garde art and society at large, which Ukeles refers to as "development." Because Marxism, like capitalism, privileges production and growth over all other aspects of life, understanding Ukeles' unique contributions to both economics and art requires a different approach to labor and value than has been previously discussed by historians and critics who have relied largely on Marx's theory of labor value. Beginning with Antonio Gramsci, I offer a close analysis of Ukeles' theorization from the subaltern position of maintenance that aims to reveal the essential and ever present qualities of maintenance while resisting the hegemony of development.'Building from my economic analysis, I am able to examine how Ukeles successfully performs a subaltern critique in an art practice by developing a technique using immaterial readymades. To make maintenance work visible Ukeles developed a technique that extended the readymade practices of Duchamp and others to include the non-productive labor of maintenance. Her readymades manifest as conceptual performances of labor done in the settings in which they would occur --whether that is the largest garbage dump or the oldest public museum in America. Drawing heavily from Michel Foucault and Raymond Williams, I consider how Ukeles' immaterial readymades reveal discursive constructions of value and meaning. This analysis offers a new way of understanding the functions of readymades more generally.Art Histor

Normative Dualism and the Definition of Art

Defining art has been one of philosophy of art’s biggest projects. However, no definition offered has achieved to account for all objects we consider art. In this paper, I argue that normative dualism, an unjustifiable Western prejudice for the mental, plays a big part in this failure. The division between fine art and utilitarian and “low” art has been perpetuated because the former is associated with the mental processes involved in its appreciation and, thus, considered more valuable. Theories of art also tend to exclude production (a physical process), concentrating mostly on the appreciation of art (a mental process). Ridding theory of the bias of normative dualism, by abolishing the division that sets fine art apart as more valuable and writing theory that takes art production into consideration, is the only way art theory will succeed in accurately describing art objects

The Non-Place between Sacred and Profane: Utopian Gestures in the Apparatus of Semiocapitalism in Laurent Cantet’s L\u27emploi du temps

This paper demonstrates the possibility of the utopian use of late capitalist non-places through Laurent Cantet’s film L\u27emploi du temps, arguing that the protagonist’s mental breakdown caused by cognitive overstimulation open up an unexpected critical perspective through which the contradictions of the system become visible. With the help of Agamben’s theory of profanation I argue that the hero’s inoperative, free use of former sites mediating semiocapitalist flows offers an example of a form-of-life that is not captured by the apparatuses of commodification

A conversion disorder

Interrogating the relationship between reading, writing and ‘conversion disorder’, this creative-critical essay explores the eversion of the glove in the work of Woolf, Genet, Freud and Derrida. Gathering together reflections on gloves and glove anaesthesia, doubles and pairs, and flowers and the death knell (glas), it offers a series of literary, philosophical and psychoanalytic conversions in order to return to and rethink the question of ‘disorder’

The Digital Condition

The acceleration in science, technology, communication, and production that began in the second half of the twentieth century— developments which make up the concept of the “digital”—has brought us to what might be the most contradictory moment in human history. The digital revolution has made it possible not only to imagine but to actually realize a world in which social inequality and poverty are vanquished. But instead these developments have led to an unprecedented level of accumulation of private profits. Rather than the end of social inequality we are witness to its global expansion. In The Digital Condition, Rob Wilkie advances a groundbreaking analysis of digital culture which argues that the digital geist—which has its genealogy in such concepts as the “body without organs,” “spectrality,” and “différance”—has obscured the implications of class difference with the phantom of a digital divide

Labor Activities and Anti-Monopoly Legislation

The uproar of the ancient market place was the symbol of competition until contemporary times. Each purchase or barter was a thing of its own; each buyer was to be treated according to what this part of the traffic will bear ; each seller was to be heckled until the price would be cut no lower. Although survival of the fittest was the keyword, by and large the majority survived. Contrary to popular opinion, however, history has numerous examples of ancient and semi-modern attempts to control some of the unwanted effects of the competitive system. Furthermore, while early civilizations may have agreed in practice, the doctrine of laissez faire did not get a firm foothold until the end of the 18th century. The United States started its great century of expansion under the political and governmental philosophy of hands off , and until 1890 unrestricted free competition had a fine opportunity to demonstrate its over-all results. Men discovered not only that too few were proving themselves fit in some industries, but that, horrible as it seemed to the advocate of free competition, the healthier boys were making agreements not to fight with one another. Mr. Business Without Restriction had to be prosecuted. He was not jailed, but was paroled in the care of the Sherman Act. This was our first important governmental control which aimed to foster free competition and, in a broad sense, the beginning of a series of Congressional paradoxes

The Work of Communication

The Work of Communication: Relational Perspectives on Working and Organizing in Contemporary Capitalism revolves around a two-part question: "What have work and organization become under contemporary capitalism—and how should organization studies approach them?" Changes in the texture of capitalism, heralded by social and organizational theorists alike, increasingly focus attention on communication as both vital to the conduct of work and as imperative to organizational performance. Yet most accounts of communication in organization studies fail to understand an alternate sense of the "work of communication" in the constitution of organizations, work practices, and economies. This book responds to that lack by portraying communicative practices—as opposed to individuals, interests, technologies, structures, organizations, or institutions—as the focal units of analysis in studies of the social and organizational problems occasioned by contemporary capitalism. Rather than suggesting that there exists a canonically "correct" route communicative analyses must follow, The Work of Communication: Relational Perspectives on Working and Organizing in Contemporary Capitalism explores the value of transcending longstanding divides between symbolic and material factors in studies of working and organizing. The recognition of dramatic shifts in technological, economic, and political forces, along with deep interconnections among the myriad of factors shaping working and organizing, sows doubts about whether organization studies is up to the vital task of addressing the social problems capitalism now creates. Kuhn, Ashcraft, and Cooren argue that novel insights into those social problems are possible if we tell different stories about working and organizing. To aid authors of those stories, they develop a set of conceptual resources that they capture under the mantle of communicative relationality. These resources allow analysts to profit from burgeoning interest in notions such as sociomateriality, posthumanism, performativity, and affect. It goes on to illustrate the benefits that investigations of work and organization can realize from communicative relationality by presenting case studies that analyze (a) the becoming of an idea, from its inception to solidification, (b) the emergence of what is taken to be the "the product" in high-tech startup entrepreneurship, and (c) the branding of work (in this case, academic writing and commercial aviation) through affective economies. Taken together, the book portrays "the work of communication" as simultaneously about how work in the "new economy" revolves around communicative practice and about how communication serves as a mode of explanation with the potential to cultivate novel stories about working and organizing. Aimed at academics, researchers, and policy makers, this book’s goal is to make tangible the contributions of communication for thinking about contemporary social and organizational problems