Liminal Roles as a Source of Creative Agency in Management: The Case of Knowledge-Sharing Communities

Studies suggest that the experience of liminality – of being in an ambiguous, ‘betwixt and between’ position – has creative potential for organizations. We contribute to theory on the link between liminality and creative agency through a study of the coordinators of ‘knowledge-sharing communities’; one of the latest examples of a ‘neo-bureaucratic’ practice that seeks to elicit innovative responses from employees while intensifying control by the organization. Through a role-centred perspective, our study found that both the structural and interpretive aspects of coordinators’ role enactments promoted a degree of creative agency. ‘Front-stage’ and ‘back-stage’ activities were developed to meet the divergent expectations posed by senior management and community members, and the ambiguity of their roles prompted an array of different role interpretations. Our findings contribute to theory by showing how the link between liminality and creative agency is not confined to roles and spaces (consultancy work, professional expertise) that are positioned across organizational boundaries, or free from norms and expectations, but may also apply to roles that are ambiguously situated within organizational contexts and which are subject to divergent expectations. This shows how neo-bureaucratic forms may be both reproduced and renewed through the creative responses of individual managers

Everyday Secrecy:Boundaries of Confidential Gossip

Gossip is an everyday part of organizational life and has been increasingly researched. However, some gossip has a particular character, whereby it is to some degree secret. Drawing on studies of both gossip and secrecy, in this paper we explore this ‘confidential gossip’ via a participant observation case study. This was based on an internship with Quinza, a British media company, and had a covert element which is discussed and justified. Specifically, we show how the boundaries around confidential gossip are marked in organizational interactions. The paper contributes to existing knowledge about organizational gossip by showing the particular significance of secrecy which makes confidential gossip a more potent source of group inclusion and exclusion

Embedded Fixers, Pragmatic Experimenters, Dedicated Activists: Evaluating Third-Party Labour Market Actors’ Initiatives for Skilled Project-Based Workers in the Gig Economy

Non-standard career paths — in which workers jump from one employment arrangement to another according to the projects they work on — have become more frequent in modern labour markets. The traditional solutions for organizing and managing work relationships and job transitions have become less effective for such workers regarding the risks of precariousness and economic dependence they may experience. Envisioning ways forward requires an appreciation of what was achieved over the past century and an understanding of what is needed to replace and adapt these achievements. Emerging solutions for managing work relationships are provided by a growing range of third-party labour market actors, but the evaluation of their contributions in the literature remains limited. In this article, we build an original theoretical framework to evaluate such contributions according to the kind of services they provide and their respective engagement in institutional innovation. We give examples of solutions developed for skilled workers in two institutional contexts: the Netherlands and Belgium and show how our framework can help distinguish at least three groups of actors that contribute to labour market development in different ways

Deliberation, Unjust Exclusion, and the Rhetorical Turn

Theories of deliberative democracy have faced the charge of leading to the unjust exclusion of voices from public deliberation. The recent rhetorical turn in deliberative theory aims to respond to this charge. I distinguish between two variants of this response: the supplementing approach and the systemic approach. On the supplementing approach, rhetorical modes of political speech may legitimately supplement the deliberative process, for the sake of those excluded from the latter. On the systemic approach, rhetorical modes of political speech are legitimate within public deliberation, just so long as they result in net benefits to the deliberative system. I argue that neither of these two approaches adequately meets the unjust exclusion charge. Whereas the supplementing approach does not go far enough to incorporate rhetorical speech into public deliberation, the systemic approach goes too far by legitimizing forms of rhetoric that risk only exacerbating the problem of unjust exclusion. More constructively, I draw on Aristotle’s conception of rhetoric, as an art (technē) that is a counterpart to dialectic, to argue for a constitutive approach to rhetoric. I show how this approach provides a more expansive notion of deliberation that remains normatively orientated

The Developments in Ethnographic Studies of Organizing: Towards Objects of Ignorance and Objects of Concern

In this introduction to the Special Issue, we review the rich tradition of ethnographic studies in organisation studies and critically examine the place of ethnography in organisation studies as practised in schools of business and management. Drawing on the findings of the articles published here, we reflect on the need for a significant extension of the content and syllabus of our discipline to include what we call objects of concern and objects of ignorance. The articles we publish show that decision makers in organizations are not always humans, and nor can we assume the human and its groups monopolise the capacity for agency in organisation. Where we still labour in organisation theory with dualisms such as structure or agent, or subject and object, these articles trace objects and their relations which point to new forms of non-human co-ordination and agency. The organisational realities to which these objects give rise demand careful methodological enquiry, and we show that recent experiments in a genre we call ‘post-reflexive ethnography’ are likely to prove helpful for developing ethnographic enquiry in contemporary organisation