No abstract

Drawing on recent theoretical developments in postcolonial research, we examine the effect of the colonial encounter on the canonization of management and organization studies (MOS) as well as the field’s epistemological boundaries. In contrast to Orientalism, which is founded on a neat, binary, division between West and East, we offer (following Latour) a hybrid epistemology, which recognizes that the history of management and organizations should include the fusion between the colonizer and the colonized and their mutual effects on each other. Thus, while we discern the Orientalist assumptions embedded in the writing of management scholars, we also show that certain texts and practices that emerged during the colonial, as well as neo-colonial, encounter were excluded from the field, resulting in a ‘purified canon’. We conclude by arguing that hybridization between the metropole and colonies, and between western and non-western organizational entities, needs to be acknowledged by students of cultural diversity, and of critical management.

This study explores the relations between organizational spatiality, gender, and class. It examines the work performed by managers and architects on the one hand, and by various groups of female employees on the other, in constructing, reproducing, and challenging gender-class identities through space-related means. Three types of gender-class spatial work are identified-discursive, material, and interpretive-emotional-to highlight the role of space in constructing and reconstructing inequality regimes within organizations. Applying insights from Lefebvre's spatial theory, we analyze the case of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs' new headquarters, demonstrating how the spatial work of various actors is both gendered and gendering. We also show how space is enacted by women from different social groups in accordance with their habitus and with the aim of distinguishing themselves from others.

A pplying insights from Lefebvre's spatial theory [Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Blackwell, Oxford, UK] to an analysis of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs-recently relocated to its new award-winning buildingthe present study seeks to offer a more comprehensive model of the role of organizational aesthetics (OA) in identity regulation and culture jamming. Our contribution is threefold. (1) At the empirical/methodological level, this study attempts to simultaneously analyze the three Lefebvrian spaces in a single organization, demonstrating negotiations and struggles over interpretations of OA. (2) We analyze aesthetic jamming as a form of intentional and unintentional efforts at collective resistance that not only reveals the aesthetic mechanisms of regulation, but actually uses them as a method of counterregulation. (3) Whereas most studies in this emerging body of literature focus on the regulation of organization-based identities (bureaucratic and professional), we show how the translation of extraorganizational hierarchies of identities (national, ethnic, and gendered) into the organizational control system is also mediated by OA.

The paper brings together insights from the neo-institutional approach and that of ‘translation’ to analyse the politics of management glocalization. Based on the cases of the translation of two management models—Scientific Management (SM) and Human Relations (HR) in Israel—the paper argues that the state-level institutional power structures that participated in the importing of the SM and HR models as an answer to their political needs also took part in the negotiations and struggles that formed their social meanings, the way in which they changed during the move from one context to another, the way in which they are justified in the new social context, and the fundamental social assumptions that become institutionalized as part of the process of the models’ institutionalization.