Organising against appropriation. How self-employed workers in the creative industries make things work

Although larger firms have several advantages when it comes to operating in competitive markets, western economies have a growing number of one-person firms or individual entrepreneurs. This creates new relevance for the question of how selfemployed workers can organise themselves in order to capture some of the benefits that come with being part of an organisation. This dissertation looks at this question by using three qualitative case studies, each zooming in on a particular setting where self-employed workers share space and work together. It employs a practicebased approach to organising and borrows from literature on labour in the creative and cultural industries across various disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, and management. The main theoretical approach adopted in this dissertation sees organisations as temporary results of communicative practices. Such practices are explored in the context of two creative spaces and a network-like organisation of community artists in Amsterdam. Countering the widely-held idea that organisations must have a clear identity, or display unity in how they present themselves to the outside world, it is argued that the organising and organisations discussed in this dissertation all rely on selective modes of appropriation. This term is put forward to capture the fact that the organisations and the modes of organising discussed, make no attempt to appropriate the artistic and creative content their members produce. It is theorized that this allows for flexible modes of membership negotiation and institutional positioning, which better serves the members’ fluctuating strategic needs

Management and Organization in the work of Michel Houellebecq

Research in management and organization may only gain by being inspired from arts, culture and humanities in order to rethink practices but also to nourish its own perspectives. Life in organizations is artificially separate from ordinary life: all of mundane objects are thus conducive to astonishment, inspiration, and even problematization. The unplugged subsection “voices” gives the opportunity to academics and non-academics to deliver an interpretation about an object from the cultural or artistic world. Interpreted objects are or not directly related to organizational life, resonate or not with the moment, but share some intriguing features. These interpretations suggest a patchwork of variations on the same object

The alternative world of Michel Houellebecq

"In La possibilité d’une île , Houellebecq describes the fall of humanity and the emergence of a society of neo-humans. These neo-humans are a result of the scientific efforts of the Elohimites, a religious cult. The Elohimites preserve their genetic material for the future in order to gain immortality through the creation of clones. Houellebecq modelled the cult in his book on the Raelians, an existing religious community originating in France. The novel consists of two story lines. The first storyline is a first-person account of Daniel, a successful French comedian who lives in Paris. To Daniel, his financial wealth and his fame are the only benefits he gets from his job, because these ensure he has access to sex. 8 He starts a relationship with Isabelle, the editor of Lolita , a magazine whose target audience, as the name suggests, consists of young women. A few years into their relationship, both Daniel and Isabelle realise they are unable to overcome the fact that Isabelle is losing her youth and beauty, and they separate. Daniel then starts a relationship with Esther, a Spanish actress in her early twenties. Not long after he has met Esther, Daniel joins the Elohimites. Visiting a conference organised by the religious community on the island of Lanzarote, he hears a neurologist talk about the difficulty of preserving a person’s character through cloning. Daniel then conceives of the idea of writing his autobiography. He believes the writing of personal accounts will inform future clones of their heritage, and as a result, they resemble their ancestor even more. The example of writing an autobiography is met with much approval by Daniel’s fellow Elohimites and becomes common practice within their community. In the post-human society that comes to emerge in the novel, neo-humans do nothing more than read and interpret the history of their predecessors. The second storyline of La possibilité d’une île is told from the viewpoint of Daniel24 and Daniel25. They are neo-humans and both clones of Daniel, to whom they refer as Daniel1. They live in an apocalyptic environment, incarcerated in their small apartment, unable to go outside. They know neither love nor any other emotion. They have no mouth, so they have lost the capacity of speech. It turns out that the neo-human condition is not the state of happiness that the Elohimites were hoping for. Instead, it is a state of utter numbness. The religious leader of the neo-humans, who is called the Soeur Suprême, calls it ‘the freedom of indifference, the condition for the possibility of perfect serenity’. <br/