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"François-Xavier de Vaujany"
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Control and Surveillance in Work Practice: Cultivating Paradox in ‘New’ Modes of Organizing
The new world of work is being characterized by the emergence of what are, apparently, increasingly autonomous ways of working and living. Mobile work, coworking, flex office, platform-based entrepreneurship, virtual collaborations, Do It Yourself (DIT), remote work, digital nomads, among other trends, epitomize ways of organizing work practice that purportedly align productivity with freedom. But most ethnographical research already reveals many paradoxical experiences associated with these new practices and processes. Indeed, it appears that with autonomy comes surveillance and control, to a point where, as Foucault observed way back, subjectivity and subject become synonyms, and the current pandemic both strengthens and makes visible this situation. In this introduction to the special issue we make a foray into this situation, using four open and related themes developed in the five papers we selected: managerial control and technology; surveillance and platform capitalism; time and space; and new organizational forms and autonomy. Paradoxical movements are identified for each of them, before we conclude by reflecting on a grounding paradox which appears at the centre of this special issue and the themes it covers.
Paper
The street and organization studies
Work and organization increasingly happen in transit. People meet in coffee shops and write emails from their phones while waiting for buses or sitting outdoors on benches. Business meetings are held in airports and projects are run from laptops during travel. We take the street as a place where organizing in transit accumulates. While the organization studies field has been catching up with various related phenomena, including co-working, digital nomadism, and mobile and online communities, we argue that it has overlooked what has historically been the most important site for organizational activity outside of organizations. The street has been both location and inspiration for organizing, whether political, social or governmental. It is a space of both planning and spontaneity, of silent co-existence and explicit conflict, and therefore offers abundant empirical and methodological opportunities. It is surprising that the street and the experiences it brings with it have remained largely outside the scope of organization studies. We suggest that organization scholars take to the street, and offer recommendations as to how to do so. Specifically, we explore the tensions that become apparent when organizing happens in and through the street.
Paper
Rules, Practices, and Information Technology: A Trifecta of Organizational Regulation
As information technology (IT)-based regulation has become critical and pervasive for contemporary organizing, information systems research turns mostly a deaf ear to the topic. Current explanations of IT-based regulation fit into received frameworks such as structuration theory, actor-network theory, or neoinstitutional analyses but fail to recognize the unique capacities IT and related IT-based regulatory practices offer as a powerful regulatory means. Any IT-based regulation system is made up of rules, practices, and IT artifacts and their relationships. We propose this trifecta as a promising lens to study IT-based regulation in that it sensitizes scholars into how IT artifacts mediate rules and constitute regulatory processes embracing rules, capacities of IT endowed by the artifact, and organizational practices. We review the concepts of rules and IT-based regulation and identify two gaps in the current research on organizational regulation: (1) the critical role of sensemaking as part of IT-based regulation, and (2) the challenge of temporally coupling rules and their enactment during IT-based regulation. To address these gaps we introduce the concept of regulatory episode as a unit of analysis for studying IT-based regulation. We also formulate a tentative research agenda for IT-based regulation that focuses on tensions triggered by the three key elements of the IT-based regulatory processes.
The online appendix is available at
https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2017.0771
.
Journal Article
When the God Ka acts for us: digital management as twinning our selves
The search for digital twins is an ancient practice among both digital and organizational designers. It is grounded into a very old modern philosophy: representationalism. Here, I propose to distinguish two different types of representationalism: cognitive and narrative representationalism. I detail their genealogy and how there are interwoven with the very reconfiguration of scientific management through digitality during and after WWII. I explain how the apocalyptic orientations of post-war management have been preventing employee and customer subjectivation and fosters multiple self-images about us in the world. To discuss the dangers of such managerial processes for our present and our future, I come back to a parallel drawn by Michel Serres: the unexpected proximity between Ka and our philosophies of digitality, particularly artificial intelligence (AI). Maybe our worst nightmare could become our most ordinary experience.
Journal Article
Mapping themes in the study of new work practices
Both shaping and shaped by technological, economic and social facets, the world of work has witnessed a wide array of changes. This review article sets out to provide a synthesis of some of the main directions and insights of existing research connected to the new world of work. In particular, we approached the topic of new work practices through four key dimensions: (1) Conceptual and methodological dimensions in the study of new work practices; (2) Spatial and temporal manifestations of new work practices in the collaborative economy; (3) Individuals, organizations and new work configurations; (4) Power and control. The review article critically discusses the future of work and argues that the ‘new' world of work simply repeats asymmetrical power relations and inequalities that characterise work activities, with the potential of exacerbating even further disparities, inequalities and precarity.
Paper
Organizational memorialization: spatial history and legitimation as chiasms
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to understand how historical materialities might play a contemporary role in legitimation processes through the memorialization of history and its reproduction in the here-and-now of organizations and organizing.Design/methodology/approachThe authors briefly review the existing management and organization studies (MOS) literature on legitimacy, space and history; engage with the work of Merleau-Ponty to explore how organizational legitimacy is managed in time and space; and use the case of two Parisian universities to illustrate the main arguments of the paper.FindingsThe paper develops a history-based phenomenological perspective on legitimation processes constitutive of four possibilities identified by means of chiasms: heterotopic spatial legacy, thin spatial legacy, institutionalized spatial legacy and organizational spatial legacy.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors discuss the implications of this research for the neo-institutional literature on organizational legitimacy, research on organizational space and the field of management history.Originality/valueThis paper takes inspiration from the work of Merleau-Ponty on chiasms to conceptualize how the temporal layers of space and place that organizations inhabit and inherit (which we call “spatial legacies”), in the process of legitimation, evoke a sensible tenor.
Journal Article
Towards a Political Philosophy of Management: Performativity & Visibility in Management Practices
Phenomenological, process-based and post-Marxist approaches have stressed the immanent nature of the ontogenesis of our world. The concept of performativity epitomizes these temporal, spatial and material views. Reality is always in movement itself: it is constantly materially and socially ‘performed’. Other views lead to a pre-defined world that would be mostly revealed through sensations (i.e. ‘representational perspectives’). These transcendental stances assume that a subject, although pre-existing experience, is the absolute condition of possibility of it. In this paper, we develop another view of performativity (either complementary or interrelated to an immanent stance), one that re-introduces transcendence in the analysis but sees in it something dialogical to the process itself. We draw from the notions of visibility-invisibility and continuity-discontinuity (Merleau-Ponty
1945
/2013,
1964
) in order to show how everyday activity both performs and makes visible the world. From that perspective, modes of visibility appear as conditions of possibility of performativity itself. We draw some implications for the conceptualization of management practices.
Journal Article
If These Walls Could Talk: The Mutual Construction of Organizational Space and Legitimacy
Organizational spaces project claims of organizational legitimacy while also constituting physical environments where work happens. This research questions how organizational space and legitimacy are mutually constituted over time as organizations experience shifts in work and institutional demands.
Building on a qualitative case study of Paris Dauphine University, a French university founded in the late 1960s that has, since its inception, occupied the former North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters, we theorize the dynamic intersection of organizational space and legitimacy over time. The case study demonstrates how spatial practices of appropriation, reappropriation, and disappropriation intersect with and inform what we call “spatial legacies” that function to establish or repair an alignment between organizational space and legitimacy. Spatial practices of appropriation and reappropriation build and manipulate spatial legacies, whereas spatial practices of disappropriation attempt to break away from such legacies. Appropriation and reappropriation involve managing spatial legacies to maintain the alignment between organizational space and legitimacy claims. Disappropriation involves trying to erase or alter these legacies to realign the space to changing legitimacy claims. This research adds to the literature on sociomateriality by adopting a longitudinal perspective that highlights legacies as nondeterministic outcomes of past imbrications of the social and the material, to research on legitimacy by conceptualizing it as a sociomaterial construction, and to research on organizational spaces by revealing the institutional underpinnings of spatial transformations. This research also holds practical implications by highlighting the relationships between space as it is designed and used and an organization’s legitimacy claims and by showing how claiming the immutability or flexibility of a space can be legitimizing for an organization.
Journal Article
Pour un management paradoxal de nos pratiques de recherche
En séparant élaboration et communication des connaissances, enseignement et recherche, événements A et B, le monde académique en gestion a produit des ruptures profondes. L’auteur relie ce problème à deux logiques scientifiques actionnées de façon contradictoire, sans durée et sans simultanéité : l’hétéronomie (avec les plateformes du « nouveau » monde) et l’isonomie (avec les communautés de l’ « ancien » monde). Les écrits de Merleau-Ponty permettent d’identifier des voies de réconciliation paradoxales illustrées par les expérimentations d’un collectif d’académiques (RGCS). The academic world of management has recently produced a great divide between knowledge design and its diffusion, research and teaching, scientific events A and B. The author grounds this issue into two scientific logics followed in a contradictory, non-simultaneous way and without any duration: heteronomy (with the platforms of the ‘new’ world) and isonomy (with the communities of the ‘old’ world). Merleau-Ponty's writings makes it possible to identify two paradoxical possibilities for a reconciliation illustrated by the experimentations of a group of academics (RGCS).
Journal Article