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PublicationThe 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.Type:Journal:Volume:Issue:
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Publication'Presensing' the intensities of entrepreneuring: tracing relational affect in embodied research of art entrepreneurship( 2018-09-07)The role that the corporeal plays in organizing and moving social realities has become an increasingly hot topic in qualitative research over the past twenty years, informing theoretical and methodological debates in various fields such as human geography, cultural studies or feminist theory. Affect theory in particular is a stream of research that has been pushing to explore the visceral quality of social life. It has called for researchers to decenter the term “emotion” and instead investigate relational affect – how bodies are moved through the complex socio-material practices they are engaged in. In such a ‘more-than-representational’ research mode, ‘feeling the field’ obtains a new meaning. It requires the researcher to attune herself to various somatic forces shaping her research object and redirect her attention to how social action emerges within a field of bodily intensities. Many methodological challenges and questions are implied in such a form of affective research. While scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds have made important efforts to discuss these issues, there is still a lack of methodological approaches and empirical inquiries in the field of affect research. In my presentation, I contribute to this ongoing conversation by discussing how relational affect can be traced in ethnographic field material. Looking at field data/material which I have been collecting following the entrepreneurial project of two artists over the course of more than a year, I show that a researcher’s embodied attunement to the research object is crucial in order to sense, create, analyze and presence ‘intensive’ data. Furthermore, I illustrate how conceptual resources drawn from practice theory and ANT can help to trace and carve out the relational quality of those bodily intensities – uncovering how they are entangled in and at the same time shape the social field in which the artists’ entrepreneurial endeavor emerges and endures.
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PublicationThe triple space of the experimental: A conceptual contribution along and beyond H.-J. Rheinberger( 2017-07-07)While experimentation is an increasingly popular topic to explore organizational becoming, profound conceptualizations of experimentation are still missing. The paper explores experimentation by drawing up on different conceptual and empirical resources and suggests that experimentation occurs in a triple experimental space. Through reviewing literature on experimentation in Art Research and Science and Technology Studies as well as studying the work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, through the use of spatial theory and by analyzing the case of an art enterprise, the paper develops the framework of the triple experimental space and illustrates how the tight interplay between material, mental and affective dimensions is crucial for the experimental articulation of (organizational) novelty. The paper highlights some of the challenges involved in experimentally exploring and articulating difference and sensitizes for its intricate political quality as a subtle process of world-making.
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PublicationOnto-Politics in the Making: Exploring the Work of 'Atelier für Sonderaufgaben'(Cambridge Scholar, 2019)
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PublicationWorking beyond Neoliberalism: Organizing Alternativity through an Ethics of Care( 2024-07-05)
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PublicationTowards alternative ecologies of encounter: crafting a vital materialist perspective of cultural entrepreneurship(Universität St. Gallen, 2021-09-20)In the wake of an aesthetic capitalism, the cultural and creative industries (CCI) have become a growing and thriving sector of Western and other economies. Cultural entrepreneurial processes propel the CCI and their regime of aesthetic innovation and constitute constantly evolving art worlds. My dissertation focuses on the material-affective dimensions of these art worlds. It explores cultural entrepreneurial processes from a vital materialist perspective in order to understand the role of sociomaterial relations and affective capacities in the production and transformation of these art worlds as well as their critical-political underpinnings. To address these research concerns empirically, my thesis conceptualizes entrepreneurial processes as heterogeneous assemblages that articulate and challenge sociomaterial orders and create dynamic ecologies of encounter between different affective bodies. Empirically, it turns to the case of a Swiss art enterprise and adopts an affective ethnography for the data creation and analysis. In the first analysis, the dissertation focuses on the sociomaterial relations in the entrepreneurial process of the art enterprise and one of its key projects. It theorizes this process as one of experimentation and argues that the cultural entrepreneurial process moves and sustains by articulating a fragile and dynamic experimental system. The analysis then carves out the microdynamics of this process of entrepreneurial experimentation and emphasizes the capacity of experimentation to create new regional ontologies. The vital materialist model of entrepreneurial experimentation contributes to a more material understanding of how cultural entrepreneurial processes navigate agency and constraint and create institutional agency to innovate art worlds. By highlighting how cultural entrepreneurial experimentation re-matters reality and reconfigures the systems of self-others-things that organize our everyday experience, the analysis also points towards the onto-political capacity of cultural entrepreneurship. The second analysis focuses on the bodily encounters and affective capacities created by the art projects of the enterprise. It shows how the cultural entrepreneurial process articulates a different ecology of intensities by fostering ecological couplings that subvert dominant modes of ordering. The analysis further elaborates on how the entrepreneurial process draws upon an interplay of four affective tactics to move the affective capacities of bodies towards enacting and sustaining this alternative ecology of encounters. The analysis hence contributes to a more embodied understanding of the relational work which cultural entrepreneurs engage in to create momentum and support for their entrepreneurial initiatives and shift institutional boundaries. Ultimately, it argues that this ecology of encounter as an affective commons produces different collectively shared and fostered affective relations that point towards the ethico-political capacity of cultural entrepreneurship.
