Browsing by Division "OPSY - Research Institute for Organizational Psychology"

In this paper, we argue that ‘good care’ in residential nursing homes is enacted through different care practices that are either inspired by a ‘professional logic of care’ that aims for justice and non-maleficence in the professional treatment of residents, or by a ‘relational logic of care’, which attends to the relational quality and the meaning of interpersonal connectedness in people’s lives. Rather than favoring one care logic over the other, this paper indicates how important aspects of care are constantly negotiated between different care practices. Based on the intricate everyday negotiations observed during an ethnographic field study at an elderly nursing home in Germany, the paper puts forth the argument that care is always a matter of tinkering with different, sometimes competing ‘goods’. This tinkering process, which unfolds through ‘intuitive deliberation’, ‘situated assessment’ and ‘affective juggling’ is then theorized along the conceptualization of a ‘practical ethics of care’: an ethics which makes no a priori judgments of what may be considered as good or bad care, but instead calls for momentary judgments that are pliable across changing situations.

Sustainable consumption is often reduced to consumer choices or forms of product appropriation. Such a narrow focus on individual acts neglects their role in reproducing social order and only shows the top of the iceberg of consumption. In contrast, reconstructing consumption as a part of social practices sheds light on the fundament of the iceberg and shows how everyday consumption patterns are embedded in socio-cultural and socio-technical settings. A qualitative study on life course transitions to parenthood is taken as an example to show how changes in a household's consumption patterns is pre-structured by the social construction of parental practices. The paper concludes with a call for a more reflexive, collaborating and experimental policy approach towards sustainable consumption.

This paper turns to practice theory as a new theoretical lens to better understand the complexity of diversity in organizations. Questioning the field’s ontological dualism between individualism and societism, we propose to engage with practice theory’s relational ontology and its main conceptual and methodological ideas. From this, we develop a practice-based theory of diversity, arguing that practices and their connections, not individuals or discourses, are the unit of analysis to study and understand the social life of a diverse organization. We apply this theoretical lens to (in)equality through two research examples, showing how the practicing of career mentoring is connected with other inequality-(re)producing practices, and how the equal social order of a dance organization is accomplished through the situated practice of mixing. In the discussion, we highlight the value of a practice theory for diversity. A practice-based theory of diversity renews the research agenda of diversity studies, forwarding post-dualistic forms of theorizing, re-conceptualizing diversity practices along the theoretical logic of practice, and conceiving diversity-related phenomena as the net-effect of social order-producing practices.

We examine the increasing popularity of collaborative work practices to understand its consequences for organizational control. Applying a Lacanian framework, we pay attention to how this (re-)emerging trend of collaborative work is underpinned by affect-laden fantasies of community-driven co-creation. Based on a multi-source study design to explore collaborative work, we identified three interrelated fantasies that arouse passionate attachments to collaborative community involvement: a spiritual fantasy of ‘purpose,’ an entrepreneurial fantasy of ‘growth,’ and a tribal fantasy of ‘belonging.’ To preserve the relevance of Lacan’s thought for the inquiry of distributed, post-heroic, and post-hierarchical work practice, we propose the notion of ‘communal Other.’ This notion provides insights into the unfolding of control through the fantasmatic desire for wholeness by working in collaborative communities. Conceptually, we theorize how tensions between the paradoxical enjoyment of pleasure and pain – what Lacan called ‘jouissance’ – highlight the central importance of affective control in collaborative work.

In recent times, practice-based approaches have gained momentum as theoretical tools to understand entrepreneurship. Even if this project is far from finished, in this paper we argue that it needs its own critical assessment by zooming in on one of the major implications which comes with taking the practice turn, namely the question of reflexivity. Drawing on Bourdieu’s conception of reflexivity which forms an inherent part of this theory of practice, we delineate the importance of incorporating this notion in how we further develop and expand the practice turn in entrepreneurship studies. In particular, we point at Bourdieu’s idea of the scholastic space – the social and intellectual unconscious embedded in our research and analytical tools – to inform how practice theory can stimulate reflexive research in the context of entrepreneurship. In conclusion, we argue that the practice turn-cum-reflexivity can form an invitation to transform entrepreneurship research into a reflexive entrepreneurship studies.