Christoph Michels

This article responds to the recent calls for rethinking management education, particularly to those that emphasize space, affect and atmosphere, and makes the case for the practice of dérive as a way of infusing management education with experiential, experimental and reflexive learning processes. The authors draw on ideas and practices of the art movement Situationist International who proposed the dérive, informed by the concept of psychogeography as a way of exploring and reimagining the atmospheres of everyday life. The paper is illustrated by the authors’ teaching experiences in this area (or space as one might say). The authors argue that the dérive in management education may foster future managers’ imaginative skills and inspire an imaginative self-reflection of the business school and its spatial organization. The paper concludes that in re-enacting their experience of educational space, participants may learn about, reflect on, and develop their affective capacities for becoming part of organizational processes, both as students of the business school and as future managers.

This article argues that the notion of affective atmosphere provides a privileged access to the study of organizational affect as it relates to a spatial ontology of ‘being-together-in-a-sphere’. Drawing on the study of affective atmospheres in philosophy and cultural geography, we develop a conceptual positioning from which to analyze a musical intervention in the streets and squares of Berlin. The study traces the preparation and enactment of a 2-day music event that breaks with the emotional experience of a ‘mainstream’ classical concert, and instead intervenes in urban atmospheres by mingling music performances with everyday urban life in an attempt to affect chance spectators. Tracing how the concert’s atmospheres emerged through a series of encounters between various bodies and their specific affective capacities, the analysis emphasizes the tension between the possibility of designing and crafting atmospheres and its emergence in erratic, ephemeral, and excessive ways. Therefore, we propose that affective atmospheres make perceptible the potentialities of organizational space and give scope to our feelings as we experience their spatial recomposition. In the conclusion, we emphasize affective atmospheres as a key concept for the critical study of affect, as it advances a politics that attends to new possibilities of feeling and acting collectively in spaces of organizing.

In this contribution, I suggest activating the notion of atmospheres as a heuristic device to empirically research affects. I will argue that analysing the composition of atmospheres allows one to take into account three key dimensions of affects: their spatio-materiality, their sensuality and their (in)stability. Building on a process understanding of atmospheres, I reflect on how each of the three dimensions can be empirically researched and how they interplay in the emergence of atmospheres. I will illustrate these reflections with examples from a current research project on an artistic intervention into public spaces in Berlin.

With the transformation of urban governance into a mode of entrepreneurialism, Museums have become prominent and privileged sites for reshaping cities as attractive places for cultural and artistic consumption. Using an ethnographic field study, the authors investigate how the logic of the creative city is at work in the planning of a new art Museum in a medium-sized Swiss city. The analysis shows how the entrepreneurial rationale is contested and re-appropriated through the use of classic and situational modes to organize this cultural institution. The ways of imagining the museum are described as the effects of these three modes of ordering - entrepreneurial, classic, and situational - as well as their hybridization. The authors conclude that by attending to the multiple layers of urban life, which unfold in and around museums, we can imagine other ‘new museums' than those of the entrepreneurial city.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is, first, to assess the potential of the visual to enact multiplicity and reflexivity in organizational research, and second, to develop a performative approach to the visual, which offers aesthetic strategies for creating future research accounts in organization and management studies. Design/methodology/approach - The paper reviews existing visual research in organization and management studies and presents an in-depth analysis of two early, almost classical, and yet very different endeavors to create visual accounts based on ethnography: the multi-media enactments by Bruno Latour, Emilie Hermant, Susanna Shannon, and Patricia Reed, and the filmic and written work by Trinh T. Minh-ha and her collaborators. Findings - The authors' analysis of how the visual is performed in both cases identifies a repertoire of three distinct and paradoxical aesthetic strategies: de/synchronizing, de/centralizing, and dis/covering. Originality/value - The authors analyze two rarely acknowledged but ground-breaking research presentations, identify aesthetic strategies to perform multiplicity and reflexivity in research accounts, and question the ways that research accounts are written and published in organization and management studies by acknowledging the consequences of a performative approach to the visual.

This article responds to recent calls for rethinking management education and fostering a spatial understanding of educational practices. We propose to introduce Foucault's notion of heterotopic space and the spatial thought of Lefebvre into the debate about the current and future state of business schools. In particular, we conceptually and empirically discuss the potential for understanding space in a way that addresses its productive force, its multiplicity and its inherent contradictions. Using the example of an experimental teaching project dedicated to the conception and physical design of a city of the future, we reflect upon the possibility of the emergence of ‘other', heterotopic spaces within an institution of management learning. Our findings suggest that spatial interventions facilitate critically affirmative engagement with the business school by offering an imaginative approach to management education.

The presentation reviews methodologies for researching affective encounters in space and reflects on how existing methodologies can be used and developed further for researching spaces of higher education. In particular, we will address methodological routes towards understanding spaces of creativity and reflexivity that emerge from encounters between universities and their environment. While the concept of ”affective atmospheres” (Anderson, 2009, 2014; Michels, 2015; Michels & Steyaert, 2017) has been used for addressing how bodies are moved through encounters in space, empirical research and methodological approaches remain scarce in both the social sciences and architecture. The presentation will contribute to fill this gap by reviewing and developing further methodologies for researching affective atmospheres. In this endeavour, we will draw on ethnographic methodologies that attend to the sensual and emotional experience of space. Our discussion of sensory methods for researching affective atmospheres on university campuses responds to recent calls for exploring the sensory landscapes of universities (Cox, 2017; Pink, 2015). In order to develop an understanding of how new learning encounters emerge, this methodological approach entails participating in, observing and paying attention to sensory experience. The paper yields methodological insights for qualitative approaches to researching affective atmospheres. The contribution is part of the research project “Organizing Spaces of Creativity and Reflexivity (OSCAR)” at the University of Liechtenstein.

Framing of the ‘locus academicus’ as a reservoir of reflection and imagination the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s (2008) has suggested to conceptualize the university in terms of Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, as an ‘other space’ of experimentation and invention. In our contribution we take up Sloterdijk’s suggestion and discuss how the design and use of campus architecture contributes to the emergence of reflexive and imaginative learning spaces at institutions of higher education. In particular, we focus on ways of unsettling geographies of education through the (re)design and (re)use of institutional architecture and its boundaries. We describe how the boundaries of university spaces are made permeable and how learning spaces are re-assembled in- and outside of the university buildings. Conceptually, we present an interdisciplinary review of contributions that have considered learning spaces as heterotopic spaces (Beyes & Michels, 2011; Sloterdijk, 2008). In a second step we relate this stream of literature with concepts of learning as an affective process and learning spaces as “affective atmospheres” (Finn, 2016; Michels & Beyes, 2016). We argue that learning can be considered as a process that moves its participants not only intellectually but is inseparable from the body and how it encounters its environment affectively. Interrelating the material and spatial with the aesthetic and affective dimensions of learning we seek to develop an understanding of how heterotopic learning spaces can maintain their affective capacities. Methodologically, we will present our approach to empirically researching and analyzing the composition of learning spaces as affective atmospheres (Michels, 2015). In particular, we seek to understand the ways in which the material environment (e.g. architecture) participates in these encounters (Dovey & Fisher, 2014), by means of ethnographic research. Empirically, the project aims to research, systematize and reflect established and emerging interspaces, which breach the boundaries between institutions of higher education and society and allows the emergence of new geographies of learning. The paper will present first findings of an explorative case analysis.

Sub-Theme: The Temporal Experience of Organizing