Now showing 1 - 10 of 12
  • Publication
    Multiplicity and reflexivity in organizational research : Towards a performative approach to the visual
    (Emerald Group Publishing Ltd., 2012-07) ; ;
    Purpose - The purpose of this paper is, first, to assess the potential of the visual to enact multiplicity and reflexivity in organizational research, and second, to develop a performative approach to the visual, which offers aesthetic strategies for creating future research accounts in organization and management studies. Design/methodology/approach - The paper reviews existing visual research in organization and management studies and presents an in-depth analysis of two early, almost classical, and yet very different endeavors to create visual accounts based on ethnography: the multi-media enactments by Bruno Latour, Emilie Hermant, Susanna Shannon, and Patricia Reed, and the filmic and written work by Trinh T. Minh-ha and her collaborators. Findings - The authors' analysis of how the visual is performed in both cases identifies a repertoire of three distinct and paradoxical aesthetic strategies: de/synchronizing, de/centralizing, and dis/covering. Originality/value - The authors analyze two rarely acknowledged but ground-breaking research presentations, identify aesthetic strategies to perform multiplicity and reflexivity in research accounts, and question the ways that research accounts are written and published in organization and management studies by acknowledging the consequences of a performative approach to the visual.
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    Scopus© Citations 4
  • Publication
    Alternative enterprises, rhythms and (post)capitalism: Mapping spatio-temporal practices of reproduction, escape and intervention
    ( 2016-07-07) ; ;
    Teasdale, Simon
    ;
    Seanor, Pam
    The growing discomfort about contemporary capitalism has rekindled interest in alternative forms of entrepreneurship. Broadly conceived as pre-eminent social change agents, alternative enterprises – variously referred to as public, social, sustainable, eco- or transformative enterprises – are increasingly seen as holding the promise of a type of commercial endeavor capable of transcending the blatant excesses of capitalism. This debate, albeit important, lacks theoretical depth and critical grounding. To address this situation, we draw on Henri Lefebvre’s work on capitalism, rhythms and everyday life to develop a conceptual vocabulary attentive to the controversial and shifting relationship between alternative enterprises and capitalism. Specifically, based on Lefebvre’s tripartite framework of rhythms (isorhythmia, eurhythmia and arrhythmia), we offer a conceptual reading that aspires to map how three alternative enterprises (work integration social enterprises, urban recovery enterprises and entrepreneurial squats) variously reproduce, escape or intervene in the regular unfolding of the rhythms of capitalism. Pinpointing that the relationship between alternative enterprises and capitalism is more controversial than both celebratory and alarmist studies would suggest, the main contribution this article makes is to raise awareness that alternative enterprises intermingle reactionary and disruptive tendencies in often-unexpected ways. We conclude by calling for prospective research using rhythmanalysis as a corporeal mode of analysis that sets out to sense moments of reproduction and breakthrough which alternative enterprises’ enactment of different rhythms entail.
  • Publication
    Play-time and multi-temporality
    Sub-Theme: The Temporal Experience of Organizing
  • Publication
    Rethinking ‘Civil Society' via the Sociology of Flows : Crowdfunding as Spaces of Alternative Ordering?
    (International Society for Third-Sector Research ISTR, 2012-07-11) ;
    Available conceptualizations of ‘civil society' tend to depict the subject matter as a ‘thing', often either credited with the potential to solve today's most pressing social problems (the progressive view) or, conversely, seen as perpetuating prevailing orders of power (the conservative view). To venture beyond these essentialist imageries which envision ‘civil society' as a static configuration which is always already there, we employ the metaphor of zooming in to argue that the social is radically open, that is, neither progressive or conservative a priori but becoming progressive or conservative in the way it is enacted through heterogeneous elements. With this as a backdrop, we introduce Actor-Network Theory and After to flesh out a post-foundational understanding of the social, and use the case of crowdfunding to reflect on how technology-mediated ordering practices might bring about alternative forms of sociality. The paper concludes that Actor-Network Theory and After - despite claims to the contrary - bears critical potential in the way it pinpoints, based on empirical insights, favorable ordering practices.
  • Publication
    Studying crowdfunding through extreme cases: Cursory reflections on the social value creation process of a potato salad project
    (Routledge, 2016-07-07) ; ;
    Lehner, Othmar
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Crowdfunding is a fairly novel phenomenon, both in taxonomic as well as in technological terms. Whilst at first mainly used to finance projects in the arts and the broader field of the creative industries (Bradford, 2012), political campaigns (Belleflamme, Lambert, & Schwienbacher, 2010) as well as entrepreneurial start-ups and SMEs (de Buysere, Gajda, Kleverlaan, & Marom, 2012), crowdfunding has meanwhile increasingly been employed as a vehicle for financing social and sustainable ventures or projects (Lehner, 2013; Thorpe, 2012)—which forms the focal attention of this chapter. In general, so-called social purpose crowdfunding forms an alternative means of financing the overall operation of social ventures, or isolated projects or programs (Lehner, 2013, 2014; Lehner & Nicholls, 2014; Lehner, Grabmann, & Ennsgraber, 2014). The main assumption is thereby that social purpose crowdfunding offers project initiators or Social Entrepreneurs a financial remedy under conditions of increasing restrictions on traditional means of funding (Meyskens & Bird, 2015). Simultaneously, social purpose crowdfunding offers attractive invest- ment opportunities to those investors who are more interested in promoting social value than in earning a profit (Meyskens & Bird, 2015). The basic contention the present chapter makes is that despite the almost univocally accepted promise of crowdfunding as an innovative tool for social value creation, relatively little is know about how this emergent technology works, and what kind of contingent effects it produces. This chapter argues that substantially new insights about crowdfunding in general and its rela- tionship to social value creation more specifically can be derived from the investigation of queer cases—a particular type of extreme cases which do not simply deviate from but largely upset and potentially change the very essence of the phenomena under consideration. To attain this goal, we will follow a potato salad crowdfunding campaign, which started as a fairly modest initiative before turning into one of the most prominent crowdfunding projects in the US. The project in question, which was perceived by many as a blatant hoax, challenges the linear “cause and effect” model underlying many conceptualizations of crowdfunding. It also makes us aware that social value creation is not necessarily attributable to the ingenuity of the project initiator or located in the proclaimed goal of a campaign; instead, social value in the case of the analyzed project forms a contingent effect emerging from the specific relations between an initial idea, the distinct agency of the crowdfunding platform, and the backers’ staging of an event. The chapter proceeds as follows. First, we offer an overview of crowdfunding research, with an emphasis on how the crowdfunding process is framed in normative terms. Second, we introduce the concept of queer cases and draw on speech act theory to develop a provisional framework to analyze the infelicitous usages of crowdfunding. Third, we empirically analyze a Kickstarter project by Zack Brown aimed at raising $10 to produce a potato salad. Fourth, Brown’s potato salad project is analyzed in terms of how it breaches existing conditions of felicity. Fifth, we reflect on a more general level on how attentiveness to ostensible misfires and abuses of crowdfunding through queer cases creates an opportunity to experiment with new perspectives on the subject matter. The chapter concludes by calling for prospective research on queer crowdfunding projects which uproots convictions about how and where social value is created.
  • Publication
    Actor-Network Theory in Design Research
    (Et al. Edizioni, 2009)
    Scheuermann, Arne
    ;
    Mareis, Claudia
    ;
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    Bertram, Polly