Now showing 1 - 10 of 305
  • Publication
    Unsettling bodies of knowledge: Walking as a pedagogy of affect
    (Sage Publishers, 2021)
    Beyes, Timon
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    In this article, we connect with recent attempts to rethink management learning as an embodied and affective process and we propose walking as a significant learning practice of a pedagogy of affect. Walking enables a postdualist view on learning and education. Based on course work focused on urban ethnography, we discuss walking as affect-pedagogical practice through the intertwined activities of straying, drifting and witnessing, and we reflect upon the implications for a pedagogy of affect. In conclusion, we speculate about the potential of a pedagogy of affect for future understandings and practices of management learning.
  • Publication
    The accomplishement of inclusion in intergenerational dance
    (Wiley, 2020-09)
    Janssens, Maddy
    ;
    In this study, we aim to revisit theorizing on inclusion by turning to practice theory. Challenging the individualist ontological assumption of most diversity and inclusion studies, we follow a practice‐based theory of diversity to understand how an inclusive social order is accomplished. Our empirical case centres on the real‐time practicing of a dance production where diversity was central to its production process as well as final performance. Using a research strategy of connected situationalism, we uncover and document three practices: mixing, inverting and affirming, that are recursively intertwined into a nexus, producing inclusion. We advance the inclusion literature by proposing the notion ‘a site of diversalizing’ that processually captures the accomplishment of multiplicity through practices and their associations in time and space, highlighting the necessity to understand ‘practice’ as the entanglement of bodily, discursive and material components, and approaching context as comprised of mutually constituting relations instead of micro/macro levels.
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  • Publication
    Affective control in new collaborative work: Communal fantasies of purpose, growth and belonging
    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.
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    Scopus© Citations 17
  • Publication
    Peer Collaboration as a Relational Practice: Theorizing Affective Oscillation in Radical Democratic Organizing
    (Springer Link, 2020-01-03) ;
    Recently, 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.
    Scopus© Citations 14
  • Publication
    Reflecting with Pierre Bourdieu: towards a reflexive outlook for parctice-based studies of entrepreneurship
    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 rich and refined conception of reflexivity, which forms an inherent part of his practice theory, we delineate the importance of incorporating this notion in how we further apply Bourdieu in practice-based entrepreneurship studies, while also opening up for a reflexive outlook of the practice turn in entrepreneurship studies. In particular, we argue that reflexivity is not so much a self-involved scholarly issue but rather a matter of attending to the social and intellectual unconscious embedded in our research and analytical tools, which can bring both epistemic and civic renewal in the ways practice-based approaches are developed in entrepreneurship studies. In the conclusion, we underline that the practice turn, without a reflexive outlook, will rather maintain the status quo of the field of entrepreneurship studies instead of realizing the promise it holds for the study of entrepreneurship.
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  • Publication
    The site of diversalizing: The accomplishment of inclusion in intergenerational dance
    (Wiley Online Library, 2019-07-10)
    Janssens, Maddy
    ;
    In this study, we aim to revisit theorizing on inclusion by turning to practice theory. Challenging the individualist ontological assumption of most diversity and inclusion studies, we follow a practice‐based theory of diversity to understand how an inclusive social order is accomplished. Our empirical case centers on the real‐time practicing of a dance production where diversity was central to its production process as well as final performance. Using a research strategy of connected situationalism, we uncover and document three practices: mixing, inverting and affirming, that are recursively intertwined into a nexus, producing inclusion. We advance the inclusion literature by proposing the notion ‘a site of diversalizing' that processually captures the accomplishment of multiplicity through practices and their associations in time and space, highlighting the necessity to understand ‘practice' as the entanglement of bodily, discursive and material components, and approaching context as comprised of mutually constituting relations instead of micro/macro levels.
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    Scopus© Citations 17
  • Publication
    The onto-politics of entrepreneurial experimentation: re-reading Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's understanding of 'experimental systems'
    (Routledge, 2019-04-08) ;
    In this article, we argue that there is a need to theorize the relationship between entrepreneurship and the political beyond the currently dominant neo-liberal and emancipatory narrative by turning to an onto-political conception of entrepreneurship based on the processes of entrepreneurial experimentation. In entrepreneurship studies, the relevance and the potential of experimentation for shaping new organizational realities has only been explored marginally. Through re-reading the thinking on ‘experimental systems’ by the science historian Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and connecting it to Annemarie Mol’s notion of ‘ontological politics’, we develop a conceptual framework for entrepreneurial experimentation which we document with the illustration of an art enterprise. The framework that we propose focuses on the interwoven embodied, material and processual dynamics of entrepreneurial experimentation and reframes entrepreneurial world-making as a speculative process driven by material reconfigurations and bodily connections. As a consequence, we argue that this model is able to emphasize the intricate political dimension inscribed in processes of entrepreneurial experimentation through their onto-political force of reconfiguring systems of ‘self-others-things’. Furthermore, the model highlights that this capacity of ‘world-making’ cannot be realized without articulating the tensions and resistances that entrepreneurial endeavours often need to navigate and negotiate while reconfiguring and challenging dominant socio-material orders.
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  • Publication
    A Practical Ethics of Care: Tinkering with Different 'Goods' in Residential Nursing Homes
    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.
    Scopus© Citations 22
  • Publication
    Fashioning ethical subjectivity: The embodied ethics of entrepreneurial self-formation
    (Sage Publ., 2019-03-19) ;
    Branzei, Oana
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    Organizational ethics has attracted increasing attention, but how individuals make sense of themselves as ethical subjects is a yet to be explored domain. The few empirical articles on ethical subjectivity have focused on how people within organizations seek to find a balance between a sense of ethical selfhood and dominant organizational discourse. We are interested in the role of the body and embodied experiences in constructing the entrepreneurial self and how this process unfolds over time. Viewing entrepreneuring as an ethical practice, we rely on a larger study of 58 entrepreneurs and a smaller multi-modal ethnography of three entrepreneurs in the ethical fashion industry. Drawing on the Deleuzian four folds of subjectivity that we employ as an analytical device, the data analysis reveals how our protagonists use the body as sensor, source, and processor in constructing themselves as ethical subjects. Our study complements rational perspectives on ethical decision making in entrepreneurship and establishes the body as a primary mechanism for one’s formation as an ethical subject. Through connecting the body with ethics, we aim to disclose the continuous subtle interaction between morality and materiality in the process of entrepreneuring. Our abductive framework discloses how one’s body prompts and informs the development of moral actions and material artifacts.
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  • Publication
    A practice-based theory of diversity: Re-specifying (in) equality in organizations
    (Academy of Management, 2018-11-07)
    Janssens, Maddy
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    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.
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    Scopus© Citations 62