Media, as the name suggests, mediate social communication and oftentimes also play a leading role in constructing it by manipulation (Nierenberg, 2011). Pierre Bourdieu (1998) points out that intellectuals have a moral obligation to react to media manipulation, by offering themes and ideas enriching discourses and helping to make symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1986) socially wider accessible. In this text we show how the media discourse currently dominating in Poland creates an image of the public sector. We claim that such an image may ignite a destructive conflict, provoking a number of managerial dysfunctions. Instead of cultivating such an image we propose an approach more oriented towards diversity, which may promote constructive conflicts, which are creative, and also support humanistic functions of management and makes the symbolic capital of the ethos of public service more easily socially available.
Management has been one of the driving forces of the last century, indeed an idea and a language that colonized most other institutions, areas of human activity and walks of life, even those that had until recently been regarded as completely unmanageable, such as art, academia and creativity. Some it supported and others it destroyed, but there are few areas in modern societies that have been untouched by it. What is the meaning of management now almost omnipresent and all-powerful in our current bleak times, in our current state of ‘interregnum’ that is characterized by an increasing sense of insecurity and hopelessness, a time when, paradoxically, the seemingly omnipotent force of management does not seem to work? Does it have a role to play today and in the future? What can it become and whom should it serve when the interregnum is over and a new, hopefully more humane, system begins to dawn? These are some of the questions explored in this timely new book by Zygmunt Bauman, one of the greatest thinkers of our times, architect and Urban Studies professor Irena Bauman, and two organization and management scholars, Jerzy Kociatkiewicz and Monika Kostera.
This paper is intended as a tribute to Andrzej Zawislak, one of the precursors of systems approach to organization theory in Poland. More specifically, we highlight four recurring themes in his work: learning by studying systemic paradoxes, theorizing about organizations as complex human systems, reflection on the role of university in its social context, and scepticism towards rationality of social science. We believe that Zawislak’s unique voice deserves to be heard and may serve as a fruitful starting point for theorizing about organizations.
Inspired by the alternative ethnographic tradition, the aim of this article is to contribute with an approach to organizational ethnography informed by the radical imperative to encounter and understand the Other in his/her complex otherness and difference. The approach is conceptualized in terms of alterethnography and it is outlined as a way of doing research/writing for change at odds with dominant patriarchal scientific writing orders. Illustrated by a study of creativity, written in the form of an academic postmodern detective novel fiction, alterethnography is envisioned as uncontained and disruptive, unpatriarchal and disconformist: it is an approach that transgresses the boundaries of the ego, striving to embrace otherness as togetherness.
"Det är dags för företagsekonomin att utveckla alternativa tolkningsstrategier som öppnar för alternativa samhällsbyggen"
Crumbling social institutions, disintegrating structures, and a profound sense of uncertainty are the signs of our time, stemming from a situation in which traditional systems are dying but the new cannot yet be born. In this timely book, this contemporary crisis is explored and illuminated, providing narratives that suggest how the notion of hope can be leveraged to create powerful methods of organizing for the future, in communities, workplaces and businesses.
In response to the increasing attention being paid to the shocking seriousness of the current state of the world, this innovative book offers a variety of ways of bringing hope into a situation otherwise defined by hopelessness, following a tradition of radical dissent by public intellectuals such as Zygmunt Bauman and Vaclav Havel. Chapters first consider theoretical and philosophical perspectives on hopeful organizing, followed by both empirical discussions about achieving change and more imaginative narratives of alternative and utopian futures, including an exploration of the differing roles of work, creativity, idealism, inclusivity and activism.
Organizing Hope will be a critical and thought-provoking read for researchers and students of organization theory and sociology, as well as other social sciences. Politicians, policy makers and other decision makers in government will also find the book insightful and useful.
Hopplöshet präglar dagens samhällsdebatt. Men det finns vägar ut ur hopplösheten. Att organisera sig och skapa en bild av det samhälle vi vill ha är en sådan väg. Det skriver Daniel Ericsson och Monika Kostera som står bakom forskningsantologin Organizing Hope.
In this text, our aim is to outline the scaffolding we believe is needed to build and shape the future role of the University. This scaffolding is an assemblage of three different strategies we have found to be fruitful in our attempt to present narratives for a better future: engagement with the arts, the development of sociological imagination, and the embracement of the Other, specifically in terms of alternative and different ways of organizing.
In the same way that movement and nomadism as a lifestyles opposite to sedentism involve not only the abandonment of the idea of a permanent home, but also an active challenge or furtive avoidance of the state's sedentary authority, movement and nomadism as epistemologies confront the generally fixed order of languages, discourses and perspectives with which science tries to explain our social world. New ways of thinking about movement, subjectivities, groups and institutions emerge, in a world that is not only global, but real and virtual at the same time. In this special issue we have gathered the contributions that experiment and questioning static thinking.
The authors – two anthropologists and an organisational theorist, all organisational ethnographers – discuss their understanding and practices of organisational ethnography (OE) as a way of imagining and reflect on how similar this understanding may be for young organisational researchers and students in particular. The discussion leads to the conclusion that OE may be regarded as a methodology but that it has a much greater potential when it is reclaiming its roots: to become a mode of doing social science on the meso-level. The discussion is based on an analysis of both historical material and the contemporary learning experiences of teaching OE as more than a method to our students.
Hugo Gaggiotti, Monika Kostera and Pawel Krzyworzeka revisit the role of anthropology in the genesis and development of academic organization studies. Rather than approaching anthropology as a methodological tool for the qualitative study of organizing and culture, they advocate a considerably broader theoretical relevance for anthropological and ethnographic inquiry in the midst of the ongoing discussions about the status and future of organizational analysis. As the authors contend, the full potential of anthropology as a comprehensive paradigm of understanding organizing has not been embraced in the ensuing development of organization studies. Echoing the call of C. Wright Mills to practise sociological imagination in enlightened inquiry, Gaggiotti et al. provide a vision for future scholarship which fully embraces interpretative ethnographic enquiry in the spirit of Warner and Whyte.
Autorki i Autorzy niniejszej publikacji opowiadają o roli dziedzictwa kultury we współczesnych muzeach i instytucjach sztuki, a także w organizacjach niekojarzących się bezpośrednio z kulturą, ale w których odgrywa ona ważną rolę w określaniu tożsamości i wyznaczaniu etosu. Większość Autorek i Autorów jest związana z Wydziałem Zarządzania i Komunikacji Społecznej Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego jako pracowniczki i pracownicy, doktorantki i doktoranci, studentki i studenci, ale do naszego wspólnego projektu dołączyli również badacze i badaczki z innych ośrodków, od Gdańska i Warszawy po Wielką Brytanię. Redaktorzy są pracownikami UJ, zajmują się zarządzaniem w kulturze w teorii, a Łukasz Gaweł – także w praktyce. W czasie wolnym są zaś pasjonatami kultury, dla których dzień bez teatru lub muzeum jest dniem straconym. Wszystkie badania prowadzono za pomocą metod etnograficznych. Opisane przypadki zostały przedstawione w sposób jak najbardziej autentyczny i zbliżony do praktyki, z jednoczesnym zachowaniem dystansu i zaangażowania, co sprawia, że są żywe i wciągające dla Czytelnika, który może rozpatrywać różne warianty rozwiązań. Każdy rozdział zawiera opis przypadku oraz charakterystykę organizacji, ludzi, zwyczajów i sposobu, w jaki dorobek kultury przejawia się w każdym z opisywanych miejsc.
Gazing at Raphael’s masterpiece The School of Athens, one is confronted with a range of characters epitomizing distinct branches of knowledge; you notice a spirit of theoretical exchange and intellectual pursuit imbuing the canvass. This has been a heritage universities across ages have been cherishing and considering to be a defining trait of their identity. Nowadays, such interactions are disappearing under the influence of the short-term demands of the societies and markets. The surrendering of universities to these demands turns them incapable of remaining critical or independent. Universities used to be sites of dissent, civil courage and societal conscience but have now instead become pseudo-businesses. And yet, there is a strong resistance to the notion that the university as a collegial and critical institution is dead, among academics as well as broader public. This book is a result of such conversations taking place in different places and among different people, going well beyond stating the facts or providing ready-made recipes. We hope it will generate momentum for further discussion on the future of university education, and, potentially, will become a small contribution towards change.
This collected volume of essays offers glimpses of the future of university education. While universities consider the spirit of theoretical exchange and intellectual pursuit to be a defining trait of their identity, this book argues that this heritage is disappearing under the influence of the short-term demands of societies and markets. Universities used to be sites of dissent, civil courage and societal conscience, but have now instead become little more than pseudo-businesses, rendering them incapable of remaining critical or independent. However, with more people going to university every year, there is a strong resistance to the notion that the university as a collegial and critical institution is dead, among academics as well as the broader public. With contributions from scholars across the world, this edited collection explores the ramifications of marketization on universities, and provides glimpses of what higher education will look like in the future. It will be of great interest to teachers and students in higher education, as well as policy makers and those interested in the current and future state of higher education.
The chapter by Michał Izak and Monika Kostera, “King Popiel, the Killer Mice and the Story of the Post-Lie Leadership”, retells the legend of old king Popiel and the killer mice and reveals the problems of consequences of disconnecting leadership from the people and the land, while also showing a way out of the seemingly desperate situation this kind of leadership produces. They situate and relate their story to our current context as a time of uncertainty and turbulence, placed in a “Baumanian” interregnum (eroding Capitalism, disintegration of democratic and economic institutions and the eco-crisis). What they show is the importance of using imagination in order to point to natural and social roots and consequences of leadership inviting us to a creative journey to find ways of reclaiming the missing roots, or what we regard as the truth (and practice) of leadership. The morale of their story emphasizes that leadership needs to be in contact with land and people, as otherwise it and its power lose legitimization, turning into usurpation in need of constructed justifications to persevere as their retelling demonstrates revealingly.
Organizational ethnography is one of the most valued approaches to qualitative studies of organizations. Much attention has been given to the development of the research process, of which the researcher's identity is an integral part. However, we believe that the analysis of research failures has been much less developed in the discourse of ethnographic methods for the study of organizations. Therefore, we have explored some of the "slips" in ethnographic work, as described in accounts of fellow organizational anthropologists. As the study is qualitative, we have adopted a narrative research method. We have divided the "slips" (i.e., errors) into four categories important for the ethnographer's identity: (a) one's role; (b) one's project, (c) one's relation to "the Other"; and (d) the social context of the slip.
The main body of work of Zygmunt Bauman concerns his home discipline of sociology, but his insights have been influential also in the field of organization studies. In this text, we provide an overview of the extent of this influence, providing some additional context for positioning the other contributions to this special section. Afterwards, we explore in more detail two notions central for Bauman’s late thought: that of liquidity and retrotopia. The former constitutes the root metaphor for theorizing the current global predicament. In this text, we analyse how two modes of interpreting it, using the assumptions behind Kurt Lewin’s CATS model and the alchemical tradition underpinning Carl Gustav Jung’s conception of archetypes respectively, can help us theorize the alternative modes of organizing and managing encountered in a study of contemporary alternative organizations.
These insights form the starting point for our second goal: to explore Bauman’s notion of retrotopia as a potentially fruitful starting point for discussing both the deficiencies of current visions of our future society, and the possibilities and vicissitudes of developing new forms of organizing and managing. Such new forms, both as practice and as theoretical constructs, are urgently needed if we are to face the numerous, and potentially catastrophic global challenges facing our society today.
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.
Widely known as a leading intellectual, Zygmunt Bauman’s thinking is often categorized as sociology or philosophy. But his work has been hugely influential in other fields as well, not least within organization studies. From increasing management control and growing standardization of work activities, to the increase in uncertainty and insecurity experienced by contemporary workers, organizations themselves are becoming ever more ephemeral entities. Bauman’s themes: globalization, liquid modernity and postmodern ethics are arguably fundamental to contemporary notions of organization and management and his thinking has never been more relevant.
However, despite the obvious and continuing influence of Bauman’s ideas on business studies, there has been no comprehensive attempt to chart his impact on organization theory. In this innovative and insightful collection, an international selection of leading management scholars explore key topics in current organizational discourse, including networked organizations, control and ambiguity, technologies, work and responsibility, extending Bauman’s liquid modernity to the "liquid organization".
The book will be essential reading for scholars and academics and students in management and organizational theory, and also sociology, managing culture and organizational ethnography.
Summary Rationality has since long been one of the central been issues in the discourse ofmanagement. Among the classics voices propagating a reductionist rationalism dominated andthere are still many contexts where such a view is taken for granted. On the other hand, criticssince the times of classics have been arguing for a less linear approach to management andmanagement thinking. However, little attention has been paid to some of the different dimensions of management rationality, such as imagination. This paper sets out to address this gap inknowledge through presenting a narrative study focused on a literary character well known for hisrationality, Sherlock Holmes, and revealing that this, to many, very epitome of rationality isactually an example of an extended type of rationality, including imagination. Following thefictional protagonist of our study, we consider some aspects of its relevance for management thought and practice
Following Agatha Christie (1942), we investigate the mysterious case of the body found in the library. A dead body of an older woman is found in the public library, well dressed, with platinum blonde hair, and completely unknown to everyone at the premises. She appears to have been strangled, though we are still waiting for the coroner's report. The police have been called, but can they be trusted to uncover the truth? Meanwhile, the unprepossessing Miss Marple, conducting her own investigation, has established beyond doubt the identity of the dead woman: it is the body of Knowledge.
But who has killed Knowledge and why? It is clear that the culprit is one of the characters present at the murder scene, but who? Was it Monsieur Foucault, with his basilisk like panoptical gaze, revolting against her power? Could it have been Herr Nietzsche, who one drafted her into the mobile army of metaphors and no one has truly spoken with her since? Or perhaps kind Polányi úr, who is said to have been enamoured with her once? Did her tacit acceptance of social mores drive the mild-mannered professor to murder? Meanwhile, Mr Karl Popper has been observed acting quite suspiciously; did he falsify the clues while testing his hypothesis on ignorance not being the same as the absence of Knowledge?
This paper will be written in the old school dialogical style of a SCOS from before the formatting era (b.f.e.) and presented in a theatrical fashion of that same style. No apologies will be given. Powerpoints are unlikely. A mystery will be solved though complications will abound. If references are required, please allow the aforementioned Ms Christie and Mr Guillet de Monthoux (2004) to fulfil these noble roles.
The unexpected, if still clichéd, discovery of a body in the library introduces Agatha Christie’s plot starring the genius amateur detective, elderly Miss Marple. We will use the same situation as the starting point of our article and investigation, promising both the unmasking of the culprit and the departure from the currently standard form of an academic text. In a self-consciously rambling and digressive text, we will touch on various issues relevant to writing what we consider good social science, and the difficulties in doing so. Firmly reaffirming the need for writing organization studies and social science in the narrative mode, we trace what we see as the decline in quality and joyousness of contemporary management journal articles, and attempt to demonstrate, both through narrative means and by more traditional academic reasoning, how and why it is important to embrace variety in the ways knowledge in the social sciences is constructed and communicated.
This paper explores the potential for morally sustainable leadership, i.e., leadership with an awareness of both light and dark sides contained in the role of the leader, as symbolized by the archetype of the king. A narrative enquiry aiming at the study of fictive stories authored by management theorists and practitioners from different contexts, interweaving collective individual elements, brings to light how issues of leadership goodness are related to each other and to other themes. The stories are presented as archetypical tales, that is, stories that touch profound aspects of culture and the psyche. They reveal what happens when people are asked to imagine a good manager, and how this results in tragic ironic representations, rather than tales of straightforward goodness.
This paper proposes a management learning technique called the co-narrative method. This approach is seen as a useful means of capturing the subtler nuances of experience economy interactions, as well as learning ethics and corporate social responsibility, by nurturing empathy and compassion. A method is presented based on the example of the idea of slow as fast side of organizational and festival experiences, which is explored through autoethnographic studies of participation in experience economy events. It builds upon insights into improving management education through the use of the humanistic approach. The so-called co-narrative method is based on a syzygic mode uniting the two oppositions (while preserving their inherent contradictions). It encourages its users to exercise understanding of the experience of the Other, while teaching about concrete cases and events.
This paper is dedicated to abreflection on the topic of purpose and aim of organization and manage-ment studies. It presents the three main approaches: management studies regarded as pure science, as abpractical discipline, and as an engagement undertaken with the aim of increasing the wellbeing of organizational participants and, in broader terms, of society. We focus on the last perspective and argue for its value, especially in contemporary times. Further, we present qualitative methods as particularly well suited for the practice of such management and organization studies and, finally, we introduce the main criteria of credibility and quality of research undertaken with the use of these methods
The humanistic turn in management is rapidly developing in the broader international academic context, as well as in Poland, were it even has acquired an official status as a specific academic discipline. However, there is a distinct paucity of published reflections on the links between management and the humanities and the legitimacy of the separation of a humanistic and economic approach to management, can be seen as valid and important. The article aims at launching the process of filling this gap by presenting the genesis and proposing characteristics and the main leading principles of humanistic management.
This chapter is based on a study carried out as a narrative collage – a research method aimed at the collection of fictive narratives from a chosen group of social actors concerned with a certain idea or phenomenon (Kostera 2006). The researcher asks respondents to compose a story on a given topic or beginning with a given sentence. I have asked a number of different social actors with various organizational experiences, students, researchers, management practitioners, and artists, from different countries, to write short fictive stories beginning with the phrase: “The big banner by the entrance proclaimed: ‘Happy New Year 2021!’ A group of students entered campus and looked around. Adam spoke first: ‘Don’t know about you, but I…’.” The stories are to be between 1/2 and 3 pages A4, any genre, any plot or plots, wherever imagination takes their authors. They are welcome to invent further characters, add context, place and detail. I read and interpret the stories, looking into the ways in which the authors use or approach characters, plots and archetypes, and in particular the idea of the university as envisaged in the story. The complete process does not offer any general theories or even local models about how reality works; instead, if it is carried out well, it throws new light on a part of the cultural context of organizing located within domain of imagination. Imagination is also a reality, even if it is not material. It has its laws and its rules, and can be regarded as a mental space where innovative and creative thinking can take place, and thus where potential for change originates.
Narratives resonating with profound layers of culture have such a strong influence because they use archetypes. Archetypes, understood in the Jungian way, as constructs in the collective unconscious, ready to hold important cultural material, can shape the plot, characters, time and place of such tales. I analyzed the empirical material collected during a longitudinal ethnographic study of Polish and UK alternative organizations, such as cooperatives, value driven businesses, anarchist collectives and others, operating in the margins of the capitalist system, looking for underpinning archetypical tales, which referred to their general principle of organizing. I have found two such overarching motifs: the Adventurer (or the classic Campbellian hero) and the Lover. The narrative thrust of the archetypical tales seems to be directed in opposite ways. The hybrid they form may have an interesting potential for radical change.