The futures of power

Some may recall, or have read about, those heady days when history allegedly ended, as the Berlin Wall collapsed(3). When the wall came down it seemed to may observers as if, with the end of communism at least in Europe the only threat to existing democratic political power was vanquished. Liberal, plural democracy, the open society and open organizations seemed to stretch as a vista into a future full of promise offering peace in our time, with all its assumed dividends, and the triumph neither of the will nor the state but of decent, ordinary democracy. Surely the chance to build a better world of organizations was imminent

Politics of place: the meaningfulness of resisting places

The meaningfulness of the physical place within which resistance is nurtured and enacted has not been carefully considered in research on space and organizations. In this article, we offer two stories of middle managers developing resistance to managerial policies and decisions. We show that the appropriation and reconstruction of specific places by middle managers helps them to build autonomous resisting work thanks to the meanings that resisters attribute to the place in which they undertake resistance. We contribute to the literature on space and organizations by showing that resistance is a social experience through which individuals shape physical places and exploit the geographical blurring of organizations to develop political efforts that can be consequential. We also suggest the central role played by middle managers in the subversion of these meaningful places of resistanc

Réinvestir les enjeux organisationnels

Le texte critique la dérive dans laquelle sont pris beaucoup d'entreprises et qui consiste pour leur gestion des ressources humaines à renvoyer le malaise de ses cadres à des facteurs exclusivement psychiques. Il passe en revue les parties prenantes qui ont à gagner d'une telle pathologisation compassionnelle. Il invite les entreprises à considérer les contextes plus sociaux et organisationnels dans lesquels elles placent leurs collaborateurs comme des choix décisifs et il rappelle quelques-unes des découverts majeures révélées par les sociologues des organisations."Rebellion des cadres" "Facteurs psychiques" "Anomie organisationnelle" "gestion des ressources humaines"

Political hybrids: tocquevillian views on project organizations

For the past decade, project organization has become increasingly central to management and organization studies, particularly as these seek to discern the contours of post-modern organizations. Yet, these contours frequently seem to be sighted without bearings on the current realities of project management. In this paper we take such bearings, using data derived from detailed qualitative, ethnographic enquiry into the experience of project management. From this data we construct the contours of project management more sharply. Rather than being a harbinger of an autonomous and more democratic future, free from extant bureaucratic organization controls, we find that project management has distinct modalities of control that we outline in the paper: reputational, calculative, and professional. Indeed, rather than foreshadowing a future transformational form, we find traces of a much older design: that of de Tocqueville

Bloody suffering and durability: How chefs forge embodied identities in elite kitchens

In this article, we elaborate on the significance of suffering in processes of embodied identity construction. Drawing on interviews with 62 chefs employed in elite kitchens around the world, we make two main contributions. First, we extend our understanding of suffering as a traumatic, alienating experience by theorizing it as a distinctive form of embodied identity work. We show how suffering can function as a mechanism through which people forge an understanding of who they are. Our second contribution extends the first by elaborating on what we call the aesthetics of suffering. We show how suffering can be perversely appreciable, distinguishing and endured in culturally significant, identity-implicative ways. Via this theorization, we progress our understanding of how identities are forged through (and read from) suffering bodies, and add an additional layer of interpretation to research in which matters of embodied identity and suffering are nascent but largely neglected

Resistance as a way of life: How a group of workers perpetuated insubordination to neoliberal management

This article sheds light on how a group of workers manage to create an enduring collective resistance, in an uncongenial context of neoliberal management pushing for compliant behaviours. Research on resistance has given scant attention to the concrete conditions through which collective resisting efforts can be sustained, despite adverse contexts. We highlight the process through which everyday collective resistance produces substantial effects and becomes viewed by management and workers as an integral part of an organization’s power relations. We particularly illuminate how practices that mutually constitute belongingness and insubordination continuously reinforce collective resistance to make it the very texture of workers’ lives. We therefore analyse everyday resistance as a way of life, through which workers aim to simultaneously contest managerial authority and protect their own social boundaries in a neoliberal context. Thereby, we offer a way to reconcile recognition and post-recognition politics in a dialogue envisaging the ‘efficacy’ of resistance in a new light

Durkheim in the neoliberal organization: taking resistance and solidarity seriously

Durkheim’s contributions to organization studies have so far been decidedly marginal, and largely concentrated on culture. In this paper, we draw upon his theory of anomie and solidarity to show how a Durkheimian view of contemporary organizations and work has special relevance today for debates about how workers, particularly middle managers, can reshuffle a capacity to resist neoliberal efforts to profoundly disrupt their working conditions, in particular their autonomy to define what is a job well done. We show how Durkheim’s insights can account for the unexpected rekindling of forms of social solidarity in highly competitive and individualistic organizational settings, through dissident efforts that convey a renewal of a certain work ethos severed by neoliberal managerial policies and practices. Recent studies on resistance confirm Durkheim’s view that forms of collective activity, resembling supposedly ‘old’ mechanisms of former days, continue to exist and develop in contemporary societies and organizations, in response to pressure to put people in situations of inter-individual competition that disrupts social relationships

Dancing in the office: A study of gestures as resistance

Following the art-body-ethics turn in management studies we use dance as an analogy in order to explore how the body can resist organisational control in office work contexts. We argue that in office work gestures can be a site of post-recognition resistance. Drawing on two art videos and on dance studies, we explain that this is operated either through arrest or through flow. In fact aesthetic experiments in gesturing disrupt the work rhythm needed for organisational efficiency and enforced by organisational control. This allows us to contribute primarily to the literature on resistance in organisation studies and relatedly to the growing literature on dance in organisation studies through demonstrating how dance can be a source of resistance

Integration and continuity of primary care: polyclinics and alternatives - a patient-centred analysis of how organisation constrains care co-ordination

Background An ageing population, the increasing specialisation of clinical services and diverse health-care provider ownership make the co-ordination and continuity of complex care increasingly problematic. The way in which the provision of complex health care is co-ordinated produces – or fails to produce – six forms of continuity of care (cross-sectional, longitudinal, flexible, access, informational and relational). Care co-ordination is accomplished by a combination of activities by patients themselves; provider organisations; care networks co-ordinating the separate provider organisations; and overall health-system governance. This research examines how far organisational integration might promote care co-ordination at the clinical level. Objectives To examine (1) what differences the organisational integration of primary care makes, compared with network governance, to horizontal and vertical co-ordination of care; (2) what difference provider ownership (corporate, partnership, public) makes; (3) how much scope either structure allows for managerial discretion and ‘performance’; (4) differences between networked and hierarchical governance regarding the continuity and integration of primary care; and (5) the implications of the above for managerial practice in primary care. Methods Multiple-methods design combining (1) the assembly of an analytic framework by non-systematic review; (2) a framework analysis of patients’ experiences of the continuities of care; (3) a systematic comparison of organisational case studies made in the same study sites; (4) a cross-country comparison of care co-ordination mechanisms found in our NHS study sites with those in publicly owned and managed Swedish polyclinics; and (5) the analysis and synthesis of data using an ‘inside-out’ analytic strategy. Study sites included professional partnership, corporate and publicly owned and managed primary care providers, and different configurations of organisational integration or separation of community health services, mental health services, social services and acute inpatient care. Results Starting from data about patients’ experiences of the co-ordination or under-co-ordination of care, we identified five care co-ordination mechanisms present in both the integrated organisations and the care networks; four main obstacles to care co-ordination within the integrated organisations, of which two were also present in the care networks; seven main obstacles to care co-ordination that were specific to the care networks; and nine care co-ordination mechanisms present in the integrated organisations. Taking everything into consideration, integrated organisations appeared more favourable to producing continuities of care than did care networks. Network structures demonstrated more flexibility in adding services for small care groups temporarily, but the expansion of integrated organisations had advantages when adding new services on a longer term and a larger scale. Ownership differences affected the range of services to which patients had direct access; primary care doctors’ managerial responsibilities (relevant to care co-ordination because of their impact on general practitioner workload); and the scope for doctors to develop special interests. We found little difference between integrated organisations and care networks in terms of managerial discretion and performance. Conclusions On balance, an integrated organisation seems more likely to favour the development of care co-ordination and, therefore, continuities of care than a system of care networks. At least four different variants of ownership and management of organisationally integrated primary care providers are practicable in NHS-like settings. Future research is therefore required, above all to evaluate comparatively the different techniques for coordinating patient discharge across the triple interface between hospitals, general practices and community health services; and to discover what effects increasing the scale and scope of general practice activities will have on continuity of care

The road not taken: international aid’s choice of Copenhagen over Beijing

A decade after the United Nations conferences on gender equality and social development, this paper explores their policy origins and discusses their differential impact on international aid since 1995. The author draws on her direct experience to consider why Copenhagen led to Poverty Reduction Strategies and the first Millennium Development Goal whereas Beijing has become largely invisible in the mainstream world of aid. She argues that the powerful influence of economic rational choice theory associated with bureaucratic modes of thought has meant that the central debate in development policy has remained that of growth versus equity. Beijing's agenda of societal transformation offered another paradigm of development that has remained marginal. The paper concludes with a proposal. If international aid policy could handle more than one paradigm and thus be more open to different ways of thinking about economy, society and politics, aid agencies would be better able to support transformative processes for social justice