110 research outputs found
The Idea of Social Life
This paper reclaims the idea that human society is a form of life, an idea once vibrant in the work of Toennies, Durkheim, Simmel, Le Bon, Kroeber, Freud, Bion, and Follett but moribund today. Despite current disparagements, this idea remains the only and best answer to our primary experience of society as vital feeling. The main obstacle to conceiving society as a life is linguistic; the logical form of life is incommensurate with the logical form of language. However, it is possible to extend our conceptual reach by appealing to alternative symbolisms more congenial to living form such as, and especially, art.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68336/2/10.1177_004839319502500201.pd
Making sense of theory construction: Metaphor and disciplined imagination
This article draws upon Karl Weick’s insights into the nature of theorizing, and extends and refines his conception of theory construction as ‘disciplined imagination’. An essential ingredient in Weick’s ‘disciplined imagination’ involves his assertion that thought trials and theoretical representations typically involve a transfer from one epistemic sphere to another through the creative use of metaphor. The article follows up on this point and draws out how metaphor works, how processes of metaphorical imagination partake in theory construction, and how insightful metaphors and the theoretical representations that result from them can be selected. The paper also includes a discussion of metaphors-in-use (organizational improvisation as jazz and organizational behavior as collective mind) which Weick proposed in his own writings. The whole purpose of this exercise is to theoretically augment and ground the concept of ‘disciplined imagination’, and in particular to refine the nature of thought trials and selection within it. In doing so, we also aim to provide pointers for the use of metaphorical imagination in the process of theory construction
An academic challenge to the entrepreneurial university: the spatial power of the ‘Slow Swimming Club’
© 2018 Society for Research into Higher Education. The entrepreneurial university is a vague notion that has evolved by applying the concepts of enterprise and entrepreneurship to a university context. The blurring of enterprise with entrepreneurship has allowed the entrepreneurial university to be increasingly underpinned by a managerialist discourse, typified by functionalisation and marketisation; culminating in academic disempowerment, dissatisfaction and subsequent disengagement. In response to such dissatisfaction, this paper reflects on a playful space, called the Slow Swimming Club (SSC), produced by several academics. The research takes a collective auto-ethnographic approach and employs Foucault’s heterotopology, as a conceptual frame, to understand the collective impact of this SSC entrepreneuring space. We relate the disconnection of the SSC to the process of critically connecting academics, back to their universities and consider whether such academic resistance, rooted in play, corporeal sensibility and emancipation, has the potential to enact social change and enhance entrepreneurial potential
Powers of Romance: The Liminal Challenges of Managing Organizational Intimacy
© The Author(s) 2014 Problematic organizational relationships have recently been at the core of highly visible media coverage. Most analyses of sexual relations in organizations have been, however, simplistic and unidimensional, and have placed insufficient systematic emphasis on the role of governmentality in the social construction of organizational romance. In this article, we proceed in two theoretical steps. First, we elaborate a typology of organizational romance that covers different manifestations of this nuanced process. We think of these as organizational strategies of governmentality. Second, we elaborate and identify liminal cases that fall into the interstices of the four predominant ways of managing sexual relationships in organizations. We think of these as vases of liquid love and life that evade the border controls of regulation by governmentality. Finally, we relate these issues to debates about the nature of the civilizational process and suggest hypotheses for future research
Why so serious? Theorising playful model-driven group decision support with situated affectivity
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via the DOI in this record.An integrative approach to theorising behavioural, affective and cognitive processes in modeldriven
group decision support (GDS) interventions is needed to gain insight into the (micro-)processes
by which outcomes are accomplished. This paper proposes that the theoretical lens of situated
affectivity, grounded in recent extensions of scaffolded mind models, is suitable to understand the
performativity of affective micro-processes in model-driven GDS interventions. An illustrative vignette
of a humorous micro-moment in a group decision workshop is presented to reveal the performativity of
extended affective scaffolding processes for group decision development. The lens of situated
affectivity constitutes a novel approach for the study of interventionist practice in the context of group
decision making (and negotiation). An outlook with opportunities for future research is offered to
facilitate an integrated approach to the study of cognitive-affective and behavioural micro-processes in
model-driven GDS interventions.This work was supported in part by the EU FP7-ENERGY- SMARTCITIES-2012
(314277) project STEEP (Systems Thinking for Comprehensive City Efficient Energy Planning
Management Ideologies and Organizational Spirituality: a Typology
The topic of spirituality is gaining an increasing visibility in organization studies. It is our contention that every theory of organization is a theory of organizational spirituality. Based on Barley and Kunda’s 1992 Administrative Science Quarterly article, we discuss the evolution of management theories as spirituality theories. From such analysis, we suggest that there may be both a meaningful/liberating and an instrumental/exploitative side in the relationship between organizations and spirituality. Such a possibility is illustrated with a typology that advances four possible types of organizations regarding spirituality: the soulful organization, the holistic organization, the ascetic organization, and the professional organization. The expression of spirituality in each of these forms is discussed with the aim of contributing to a theoretically-based analysis of organizational spirituality.N/
A Model of Collective Interpretation
We propose a cognitively plausible formal model of collective interpretation. The model represents how members of a collective interact to interpret their environment. Current theories of collective interpretation focus on how heedful communication among members of a collective (i.e., how much individuals pay attention to others' interpretations) improves interpretive performance; their general assumption is that heed tends to be uniformly beneficial. By unpacking the micromechanisms that underlie such performance, our model reveals a more complex story. Heedfulness can benefit interpretive performance. It can help collectives properly interpret situations that are especially ambiguous, unknown, or novel. Conversely, heedfulness also generates conformity pressures that induce agents to give too much weight to others' interpretations, even if erroneous, thereby potentially degrading interpretive performance. These two effects join into a nonmonotonic trajectory that represents how heed relates to interpretive performance: due to its beneficial properties, performance increases with heed until it peaks before degrading due to conformity pressures. The form of this nonmonotonic relationship is contingent on the nature of the task: ambiguous situations make collectives vulnerable to too much heed: ambiguity ignites conformism; novel situations make collectives dependent on heed: novelty requires multiple eyes to be seen. In addition to these results, our model offers a flexible platform that future work can use to explore collective interpretation in a variety of organizational and supraorganizational contexts.We propose a cognitively plausible formal model of collective interpretation. The model represents how members of a collective interact to interpret their environment. Current theories of collective interpretation focus on how heedful communication among members of a collective (i.e., how much individuals pay attention to others' interpretations) improves interpretive performance; their general assumption is that heed tends to be uniformly beneficial. By unpacking the micromechanisms that underlie such performance, our model reveals a more complex story. Heedfulness can benefit interpretive performance. It can help collectives properly interpret situations that are especially ambiguous, unknown, or novel. Conversely, heedfulness also generates conformity pressures that induce agents to give too much weight to others' interpretations, even if erroneous, thereby potentially degrading interpretive performance. These two effects join into a nonmonotonic trajectory that represents how heed relates to interpretive performance: due to its beneficial properties, performance increases with heed until it peaks before degrading due to conformity pressures. The form of this nonmonotonic relationship is contingent on the nature of the task: ambiguous situations make collectives vulnerable to too much heed: ambiguity ignites conformism; novel situations make collectives dependent on heed: novelty requires multiple eyes to be seen. In addition to these results, our model offers a flexible platform that future work can use to explore collective interpretation in a variety of organizational and supraorganizational contexts
Why so Serious? Theorising Playful Model-Driven Group Decision Support with Situated Affectivity
When job performance is all relative: how family motivation energizes effort and compensates for intrinsic motivation
Supporting one's family is a major reason why many people work, yet surprisingly little research has examined the implications of family motivation. Drawing on theories of prosocial motivation and action identification, we propose that family motivation increases job performance by enhancing energy and reducing stress, and it is especially important when intrinsic motivation is lacking. Survey and diary data collected across multiple time points in a Mexican maquiladora generally support our model. Specifically, we find that family motivation enhances job performance when intrinsic motivation is low—in part by providing energy, but not by reducing stress. We conclude that supporting a family provides a powerful source of motivation that can boost performance in the workplace, offering meaningful implications for research on motivation and the dynamics of work and family engagement
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