Making Space for Garbage Cans: How emergent groups organize social media spaces to orchestrate widescale helping in a crisis

This study explores how heterogeneous actors produce solidarities to address institutionalized infrastructural inequalities. We trace fifteen years over which diverse actors constructed community palliative care infrastructure in Kerala, India. We analyze how actors engaged in solidarity processes of recognizing interdependences, reconfiguring spaces, and re-imagining accountability to challenge exclusionary institutions and construct inclusive infrastructure at different scales. We foreground solidarity-making as an indispensable yet under-theorized aspect of institutional research on inequalities. We inform solidarity studies by illustrating how solidarity-making pulsates infrastructures with diverse webs of relations and spatial configurations. Overall, we advance a generative engagement with heterogeneity in institutional analyses and discuss the implications of solidarity-making to address infrastructural inequalities.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strangers at the Bedside: Solidarity-making to address institutionalized infrastructural inequalities

Vijay

Monin

Kulkarni

2023

“…This paper advances the critical potential of the uncanny for theorizing crisis and for understanding organizational responses to crisis. It adds to work in organization studies which engages with the pandemic (Burke, Omidivar, Spanellis, & Pyrko, 2023; Riad, 2023; Rouleau, 2023). It also constitutes one response to the invitation in this journal to provide ‘new problematizations in the crisis management literature’ (Kornberger, Leixnering, & Meyer, 2019, p. 261).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Uncanny Organization and the Immanence of Crisis: The public sector, neoliberalism and Covid-19

Orr

2023

This paper uses the psychoanalytic concept of the uncanny to develop a new perspective on crisis, one that challenges its association with turning points and opportunities. It highlights the immanence of crisis in organizational life. Crises under consideration include the historic Covid-19 global pandemic, and examples of crisis in public sector organizations shaped by neoliberalism. Engaging with the work of Julia Kristeva, the uncanny is explored as an integral part of our subjectivities, one which disrupts our social stabilities and patterns of organizing. A montage of autoethnographic vignettes is assembled to illustrate the eruption of the uncanny unconscious, a dynamic that unsettles our routine impositions of order and control. Examining crisis through the lens of the uncanny brings to the fore the elusive and affective aspects of socio-political and organizational life. This perspective draws us away from an understanding of crisis as a passing phenomenon or as an opening that can be instrumentalized for cunning managerial purposes. Instead, it suggests the more radical insight that crisis is a condition of organizing.

“…The global travesty generated from the arrival of a new coronavirus compels us to ask what the virus means for organization studies (e.g. Burke, Omidvar, Spanellis, & Pyrko, 2022; Simpson, Harding, Fleming, Sergi, & Hussenot, 2021). The essay contributes to this imperative by scrutinizing the dynamics of a changing episteme.…”

Section: Afterword: Framing a Research Agendamentioning

confidence: 99%

The Virus and Organization Studies: A changing episteme

Riad

2023

As scholars on organization, we have been confronting the challenges of a changing episteme. The arrival of a new coronavirus and its devastating pandemic compel us to ask what the virus means for organization studies. The essay contributes to this endeavor by attending to the implication of the virus in the (re)organization of meaning and by explicating the ways in which metaphor and metonymy enable one to trace challenges in this (re)organization. In doing so, it takes inspiration from, and contributes to, the theme of (in)visibility that is central to X & Organization Studies. The multifaceted approach is rendered through “spectrographies”, texts that craft haunting experiences of epistemic fragmentation into organizational knowledge. The essay unfolds through four sessions that engage with meaning across analogy, ontology, epistemology, and relationality. Each session offers a double reading of its respective dynamics. The first reading outlines challenges in the (re)organization of meaning by (re)engaging with the virus metaphor and its relevance to organization studies. The second reading approaches the virus through metonymy, a trope that is often overlooked. It contributes to organization by tracing objects and subjects through metonymies of materialization and identification. It shows how humans not only wrestle with a pathogen, but also with the self and with other people. Together, the four sessions illustrate how metaphor and metonymy alert us to epistemic disruptions and instabilities associated with the virus. Altogether, the essay contributes to organization studies by turning the interest in meaning and organization to the organization of meaning. It also extends knowledge on tropes in organization by showing how the virus is rendered more powerful through metonymy than it ever was as metaphor. For organization studies to attend to the virus effectively, it must contend with its inherent undecidability. In closing, the essay frames an agenda for organizational scholarship.