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Bernhard Resch
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Dr.
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Resch
First name
Bernhard
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PublicationAffective control in new collaborative work: Communal fantasies of purpose, growth and belongingWe 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.Type: journal articleJournal: Organization Studies
Scopus© Citations 17 -
PublicationPeer Collaboration as a Relational Practice: Theorizing Affective Oscillation in Radical Democratic OrganizingRecently, radical democratic initiatives have been undertaken by freelancers and founders who come together in a range of alternative forms such as ethical entrepreneurial coalitions, urban coworking spaces, and open cooperative networks. In this paper, we argue that these initiatives to invent alternative, more equal forms of organizing engage strongly with relational activities to replace hierarchical interaction with distributed peer collaboration. While the literature has emphasized the sense of experimentation and reflexivity of these alternative forms of organizing, this paper especially draws attention to the affective dynamics of everyday peer-to-peer collaboration. Drawing on an 18-month ethnography of a cooperative network of social entrepreneurs, we use a practice-based approach to study peer collaboration as a relational practice formed through a nexus of ‘weaving,’ ‘sharing,’ and ‘caring’ activities. Focusing on the affective orders enveloping relational practice, we document how the practice of peer collaboration is imbued by what we call an ‘affective oscillation’ forming contrasting amplitudes between confidence and frustration, exuberance and anxiety, and trust and exhaustion. As our core contribution, we problematize how the affirmative intent of radical democratic organizing is potentially jeopardized by this ‘cloudy affectivity,’ and we conclude that the collective pursuit of embodied ethical encounters is formed by slowing down and feeling into affective oscillation.Type: journal articleJournal: Journal of Business EthicsIssue: 164
Scopus© Citations 14 -
PublicationType: conference paper
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PublicationBetween critique and affirmation: An interventionist approach to entrepreneurship education(Routledge, 2018)
;Berglund, KarinVerduijn, KarenType: book section -
PublicationPlaying and the performing arts. Six memos for the future classroom(Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2016)
;Beyes, TimonParker, MartinType: book section -
PublicationType: conference contribution
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PublicationUNBOSS! On paradox, passion, and power in decentralized work( 2019-09-16)By examining a management trend that promotes the decentralization of authoritative hierarchies, this study comprises an exploration of the paradox, passion, and power in «bossless» organizing. In this dissertation, I show how discourses and everyday practices collude to produce affective mechanisms of control, and discuss their contradictory impacts. Departing from a discursive investigation that is based on the analysis of qualitative interviews, observational event visits, and practitioner-oriented management literature, the empirical research leads into a praxiographic field study to inquire into the practical adaptation of the discursive claims. I present a three-part analysis of the aftermath of «unbossing» and its power implications on a societal, organizational, and relational level. First, the management trend is divided into four discursive articulations, their different signifying strategies, and privileged subject positions. In order to assess the broader social relevance of these articulations, I discuss their conditions of production, circulation, and reception against the sociological framework of the «spirit of capitalism».Secondly, I conduct a psychoanalytically inspired, discursive reading of exuberant promises around a «hierarchy-less flatland».The analysis illustrates how excessive claims evoke three subconscious fantasies and delineates the development of unequal power relations if people become too passionately involved in these projections of ideal futures. Thirdly, I report on a praxiographic case study of a bossless organization and its everyday relational practices. I find an ambiguous affectivity that kept turning these affirmative practices around, and discuss a precarious «ethico-politics of incompleteness», the aim of which is to mitigate adverse effects. Methodologically, I draw from onto-epistemological studies of discourse, practice, and affect. I acknowledge their contingent entanglement and performative enactment in multiple becomings of worlds. With «post-foundational discourse analysis», «practice-based studies», and «agencement», I therefore mobilize conceptual frameworks that are situated between socio-constructionist and neo-materialist assumptions. By employing different theoretical angles and sources for data creation, I was able to trace reciprocal effects between large socio-economic and small everyday phenomena.
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PublicationType: newspaper articleJournal: The Conversation
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PublicationType: newspaper articleJournal: Salon
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PublicationType: presentation