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This article is a companion to "Pride: Alternative Entrepreneurship Enjoyed," a videography about the company Prezi's engagement in the Budapest Pride parade. The aim is to advance video ethnographic methods within Organization and Management Studies (OMS) based on Agamben's profanatory philosophical method, which puts into focus abstract "sacred" concepts and returns them to the sphere of the profane—of the everyday. A profanatory approach of use for OMS accounts for organizations, brands, and management in a way that do not reproduce their "sacredness"—entrepreneurial myths and management clichés. Instead, by opening them up to critical exposure, they can be moved from a "religious canon" of communication strategies, press releases, and policy documents, to everyday profane work. Through a methodological discussion of the videography, we show three ways in which profanation re-positions the myth of alternative entrepreneurship: by engaging in the logic of the sacred, by playing with notions of inside and outside, and by using musical soundtrack as an expressive tool. We suggest that these methodological strategies advance the analytical possibilities within video ethnography, also useful for other organizational phenomena, especially when economic interests are combined with ambitions of social change and ideals of self-realization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are we, as academics, stuck in a horizontal temporality, organised by the clock, that flattens our work, our words? In reading feminist work by Märta Tikkanen, Hélène Cixous, and others, a rupture strikes, establishing another temporality: vertical time. Is it possible, I ask, to learn from these authors and engage in academic writing in verticality? The answer is: Yes! Through an in-depth reading of special pieces, I see clearly that when we use our scholarly voice to write from within our vulnerabilities, it becomes possible to climb all the way up or dig ourselves deep down. In other words, we can 'go deep' in the sense of touching that which is most important, as well as finding ways to 'fly high,' through writing. This shows that writing and temporality are always already interweaved with each other because writing produces temporalities just as temporality at play produces writing. In this writing-temporality meshwork, there seems to be no set genre for vertical writing. Rather, it consists of a multitude of practices, written in the instant, from within the urgency of articulating that which matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, we draw on a personal experience of sexist cyberbullying unleashed, on social media, against one of our academic papers, to act up against increasing instances of cybersexism, in the academy. Reading our experience in the context of feminist insights on impurity and abjection, we assert the need to dismantle cybersexism targeting non-conforming academic knowledge, namely feminist. We also discuss the potentials of the cyberspace to provide opportunities for communal solidarity, as a source of empowerment for targets of academic cybersexism. Writing this text is an activist expression of voice and resistance, whereby we call our community to collective action and increased institutional support against sexism in academia, particularly in online spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Could the everyday affective relationships that we share with our animal companions inspire us to think, write and even care 'differently' in the field of organisation studies? In this paper, I suggest that organisational scholars have plenty to learn from post-qualitative writing and the posthumanist practice of feminist dog-writing. Drawing from literature on posthumanism, humanimal relations and post-qualitative methodology, I first frame feminist dog-writing as a practice that relies on post-qualitative writing and discuss what this framing potentially involves, in concrete terms. Second, I experiment with 'writing with the bitches' to illustrate how this kind of writing 'differently' – in ways in which the entangled co-becoming of the humanimal is highlighted in its multiplicity – could contribute to discussions of humanimal relations in the field of organisation studies and more disruptive, post-qualitative forms of writing in our scholarly field. Despite the many challenges of anthropocentric language and representation, I argue that feminist dog-writing has the capability to creatively confuse, disrupt, and transform more 'conventional', mechanical, and hu man -centred forms of academic writing. Finally, I suggest that feminist dog-writing invites human animals to engage differently with the sensate, more-than-human life-worlds that human-centred accounts of organisational life have typically sentimentalised, trivialised, or overlooked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dance with us, on the dance-floor and with words, as we reenact our individual and shared tango autoethnographic experiences to develop an understanding of field inter-corporeality as a phenomenological experience of nakedness empowered by the transformational potential of eros. We write as we dance to discuss how eroticizing through the other's presence our embodied nakedness, beyond sexual stereotypes, pushes us to meta-reflect on ourselves as organizational ethnographers and writers to reinvent our field and writing interactions as inter-corporeally relational and intersubjective. We problematize the sexual gaze that traditionally associates nakedness with shame and objectified vulnerability to stress the capacity of eroticizing our academic nakedness to enable free, embodied knowledge stripped of the traits of the dominant masculine academic order. In so doing, we join burgeoning autoethnographic and broader debates in the field of organization studies calling for the need to further unveil the embodied, erotic, and feminine aspects of organizational research and writing. Shall we dance? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since it was first articulated by Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks (1929–1935), Fordism has been understood at two interconnected levels. At one level, it is understood in secular materialist terms as an archetypal system of mass production. At another, as a techno-economic paradigm of capitalist expansion. However, little attention has been given to the philosophical influences and ideas that underpinned Henry Ford's (1863–1947) worldview and how this came to influence the formation of the factory systems at his Highland Park and River Rouge complexes. In most textbooks, it is assumed that Ford based his industrial design on a technological intensification of F.W. Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management. This article seeks to examine the origins and rationale behind Ford's factory system by exploring the relationship between his personal worldview and the 'ism' which came to bear his name. Through a cultural-historical analysis, this article critically explores Henry Ford's personal Fordism, and argues that what has come to be understood as one of the most 'secular' and 'materialist' processes of organising 'men and machine' began with an attempt by Henry Ford to realise a 'metaphysical' ideal that was informed by the popular philosophical and theological thought of the previous century. By returning to the ideas and the context of this period, Ford's engagement with the work of the American Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) is considered to both contextualise Henry Ford's Fordism and explore the philosophical tensions at the heart of his organisational theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spite of their distinctive normative and political differences, critical organizational scholars use a vocabulary which in several respects resembles that adopted by right-wing populists. This vocabulary, we argue, consists of components that can be deployed in the pursuit of radically conflicting goals. At its heart lies a profoundly antithetical stance toward bureaucracy and the state. In this article, we explore the components of this vocabulary as well as the role they play in both populist- and critical organizational theory-variants. In doing so, we further discuss the lack of critical potential this vocabulary has in the present. For critical organization scholars, we argue, this should perhaps lead to a renewed consideration and reflexivity concerning not only the merits of bureaucracy and the state, but also of how to conduct critique in populist times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the complexities encountered in attempts to strengthen the ethos of bureaucracy in public organization. It does so by stressing the ethical and organizational conflicts generated in the aspiration to revive this ethos. Empirically, this exploration is done by examining a code introduced in the Danish state-bureaucracy in the aftermath of a number of political-administrative scandals. We show how the ethos of bureaucracy on the one hand has been repressed and displaced and, on the other hand, in light of the scandals, now reappears as something indispensable. At the same time, the article exposes how the revitalization attempt encounters considerable obstacles. By situating the code in relation to changing bureaucratic structures, semantic ideals, and civil servants' reflections, we show how the revived ethos takes on monstrous proportions. Despite this transfiguration, we argue that the failed attempt at revitalization is no cause to dispense with the ethos of bureaucracy. The article is distinctive in how it bridges hitherto uncoupled streams of literature that are mobilized in the investigation of a critical case. In so doing, it adds to these literatures and seeks to revive critical organizational theorizing in light of current neo-liberal and populist sources of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a recent ethnographic enquiry, this article reports on a series of encounters with organization at a British shopping centre that can shed light on the ways in which time is understood by organizational scholars. This article argues that research on time has a tendency to reproduce certain images and metaphors which indicate an unquestioned set of metaphysical assumptions about the nature of time that dictate how it can be understood. These habits of thinking time render organization studies unable to conceptualize or adequately describe the encounters that characterize ethnography as a mode of research inquiry. As such, following in the tradition of Gilles Deleuze, this article advances the idea of a 'conceptual entanglement' and suggests thereby that the problem of time is an aesthetic one which is part of a complex and almost ineffable series of sensoria and connections; describable only by saying that the shopping centre keeps time with a rubato waltz. This work of unthinking time will be presented as a part of an account of ethnography as the tracing and parsing of the entanglements of many different concepts and field encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Organisational soul' has been used in popular management texts to celebrate corporations that are governed through the values and beliefs of their leaders. Apart from Bell, Taylor and Driscoll in this journal, organisational soul has received little critical scrutiny or conceptual exploration. This article examines the concept through significant texts and traditions in the West's long religio-philosophical engagement with soul – including poststructuralist and Nietzschean thought, Classical Greek philosophy, Aurelius Augustine's first hermeneutics of the subject and key constitutive moral practices of Late Antiquity and Early Christianity. Through such sources, I argue that we can understand neoliberal corporations to have souls, that this soul can be regarded as imperialist, that it is constituted through ethical-moral discourse and that it is subject to being disciplined – as we have come to understand human souls to be – through processes of governmentality. As such, this article posits that it may yet be possible to redeem organisational soul. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an effort to build a manifesto for the academic acceptability of filmmaking as organisational research. While a film does not offer an argument with premises to reach a conclusion, it does accomplish its own distinctive manifestation of research as a performance of thought. Drawing on experience of academic film projects, we promote the idea of using filmmaking not only to convey research ideas but also to communicate the full sensory variety of organisational life. Finally, we see film as a powerful and valid feature of academic research output, providing opportunities for scholars to convey understanding to a broader public than the academy alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organisation studies has paid little attention to the contemporary private security industry, despite its enormous recent growth as a supplement to or replacement for state military services in theatres of conflict. To address this neglect, we investigate the workers at the heart of the industry: private security employees or contractors. Amidst widespread and extremely critical media coverage of their activities, we consider the individual contractor as a central agent of contemporary conflict, identifying three main objections to their deployment: a lack of just cause, virtue and professional legitimacy. Using scholarship on identity work and stigma management more specifically, we analyse contractors' accounts of their employment to identify the communicative strategies they employ to challenge the stigma attributed to their occupation and/or to them as incumbents. Our data set is memoirs written by five British contractors, published between 2006 and 2011. We also suggest that data such as these are under-utilised in organisation studies' treatment of identity work, because they represent a distinctive form of this work which we label identity writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Woman. Active. Passive. Erased, In writing and thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to an understanding of the nexus between humans and animals by drawing on ethnographic research conducted in a British chicken factory and, more particularly, by exploring the emotional subjectivity of Meat Inspectors employed by the Food Standards Agency to oversee quality, hygiene and consumer safety within this plant. We argue that these Inspectors displayed a complex range of often contradictory emotions from the ‘mechanized’ to the ‘humanized’ and link this, in part, to the technocratic organization of factory work that compartmentalizes and sanitizes slaughter. This serves to de-animalize and commodify certain animals, which fosters an emotional detachment from them. In contrast to research which suggests that emotions switch off and on in a dialectic between violence and non-violence, or that we are living in a post-emotional society, we elucidate the co-existence, fluidity and range of emotions that surface and submerge at work. While contributing to the extant literature on ‘emotionologies’, we add new insights by considering how emotions play out in relation to animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Foucault’s work has had a crucial impact on organizational research, the analytical potential of the dispositive has not been sufficiently developed. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the notion of the dispositive as a key conception in Foucault’s thought, particularly in his lectures at the Collège de France, and to develop dispositional analytics with specific reference to matters of organization. Foucault’s dispositional analysis articulates a history of interrelated social technologies that have been constructed to organize how we relate to each other. The article distinguishes various dispositional prototypes. It shows how dispositional analytics leads the way beyond general periodizations and established dichotomies such as the either-or of the discursive and non-discursive, power and freedom, determinism, and agency; and it demonstrates how dispositional analytics can contribute to a more complex understanding of organizational dynamics, power, strategy, resistance, and critique. Dispositional analytics allows for a new interpretation and use of Foucault in relation to organization studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While previous research in organization studies has utilized transgender to show how gender is done, overdone and undone, this literature lacks empirical grounding, and the theoretical arguments dominating it tend to idealize the transgressive power of transgender while reducing transgender to hyperbolic drag and stereotypical passing. To further advance the understanding of transgender within and around organizations, this article presents a qualitative study from a Northern European country to investigate how male-to-female transvestites do and undo gender in everyday life and work. In contrast to extant research, we found that participants did transgender and undid gender by underdoing gender, that is, by combining feminine, masculine and ungendered practices and attributes in ways that made passing and drag insignificant. As transvestites simultaneously expressed masculine and feminine forms of embodiment, we argue that they may more obviously challenge, though not dismantle, dominant forms of gender and identity than suggested by previous accounts. We conclude by discussing broader implications for the understanding of gender, identity, power and resistance in organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers changes in healthcare professional work afforded by technology. It uses the sociology of professionals’ literature together with a theory of affordances to examine how and when technology allows change in healthcare professional work. The study draws from research into the introduction of a national electronic patient record in an English hospital. We argue that electronic patient record affords changes through its materiality as it interacts with healthcare professional practice. Its affordances entail some level of standardisation of healthcare professional conduct and practice, curtailment of professional autonomy, enlargement of nurses’ roles and redistribution of clinical work within and across professional boundaries. The article makes a contribution to the growing literature advocating a cultural approach to the study of technological affordances in organisations and to studies that explore healthcare professional practice in conjunction with the materiality of technology. Two main lines of argument are developed here. First, that technological affordances do not solely lie with the materiality of technology nor with individual perceptions, but are cultivated and nurtured within a broader cultural–institutional context, in our case a professional context of use. Second, that technological affordance of change is realised when healthcare professionals’ (individual and collective) perceptions of technology (and of its materiality) fit with their sense of (professional) self. In this respect, the article shows the extent to which the materiality of technology plays out with professional identity and frames the level and extent to which technology can and cannot afford restructuring of work and redistribution of power across professional groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature and extent of changes in management remain subject to debate, especially around the notion of post-bureaucracy. Most research concedes that there has been some change, but towards hybrid or neo-bureaucratic practices. However, the mechanisms through which these changes have occurred, and their precise forms and outcomes have received less attention. This article addresses these issues by focusing on an emerging group of managers that closely resembles images of new management (e.g. project-based, change focused, externally oriented and advisory in style). Drawing on interview-based research in the United Kingdom and Australia, it examines consulting practices and orientations adopted within management roles. It first constructs an ideal type of neo-bureaucracy and then explores different elements of management as consultancy empirically. It shows how they are inspired by anti-bureaucratic rationales but assume a hybrid neo-bureaucratic form. We also show that, far from resolving tensions between rational and post-bureaucratic forms, management as consultancy both reproduces and changes the tensions of management and organisation. Thus, rather than denying or heralding changes in management towards a ‘new spirit of capitalism’, we focus on a context in which such changes are occurring and demonstrate their wider implications for both management and consultancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The label 'extreme' has traditionally been used to describe out-of-the-ordinary and quasi-deviant leisure subcultures which aim at an escape from commercialized and over-rationalized modernity or for occupations involving high risk, exposure to 'dirty work' and a threat to life (such as military, healthcare or policing). In recent years, however, the notion of 'extreme' is starting to define more 'normal' and mainstream realms of work and organization. Even in occupations not known for intense, dirty or risky work tasks, there is a growing sense in which 'normal' workplaces are becoming 'extreme', especially in relation to work intensity, long-hours cultures and the normalizing of extreme work behaviours and cultures. This article explores extreme work via a broader discussion of related notions of 'edgework' and 'extreme jobs' and suggests two main reasons why extremity is moving into everyday organizational domains; the first relates to the acceleration and intensification of work conditions and the second to the hypermediation of, and increased appetite for, extreme storytelling. Definitions of extreme and normal remain socially constructed and widely contested, but as social and organizational realities take on ever more extreme features, we argue that theoretical and scholarly engagement with the extreme is both relevant and timely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the dark and hidden aspects of experience economy events. These aspects are framed as the shadow in the Jungian sense, i.e. an archetype of the unconscious domain. Individuals and organizations create a shadow as a side effect of attempts at control and ordering of their identity. The article presents stories based on ethnographically inspired field studies of experience economy events to show how staged experience produces an experiential shadow side. The process is problematized and reflected upon as a shadow producing side effect of identity production and management in experience economy settings. The possibilities for the integration of the shadow into the normal operation of experience economy organizations are considered with the help of images of the carnival and the archetype the fool. The acceptance of the paradoxical and strange side of such events they may be better understood and their dark side integrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]