The Desire to Rethink Power AND Performativity AND Process

In this paper, we examine the relationship between space and entrepreneurship, understood as organization-creation, by drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s spatial theorizing. Building on an ethnographic study of the Nordic Start-Up Incubator, we focus on the ongoing material, discursive, and affective reconfiguration of space to promote entrepreneurial ‘buzz’. We show how emancipatory promises (smoothings) are entangled with a logic of enterprise (striations), and how this ambiguity is enacted (folds) as organization-creation emerges spatially. This allows us to problematize the distinction often made between entrepreneurial spaces of emancipation and managerial spaces of control and to consider how they may co-constitute each other through subtle twists and turns. We conclude by discussing this multiplicity and ambiguity with regard to the politics of entrepreneurial spaces.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: D+g and Processual Studies Of Organizational Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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From Dust to Buzz: Reconfiguring space for organization-creation

Kuismin,

Wickström,

Hietanen

et al. 2024

“…What is a good life for residents at nursing homes?’), also beyond the residents at this nursing home. Both forms of inquiry serve to negotiate and renew ethical responsibilities with agency (or will) not as stable states, but as an ongoing responsiveness emerging from people’s activities of inquiring, a desiring inquiry (Painter-Morland, 2011; Välikangas & Carlsen, 2020) growing in power by a multiplicity of selves in-the-making (Fouweather & Bosma, 2021). As noted by Lorino (2018), the process is recursive.…”

Section: Discussion: Lightness Of Power and Desire In Inquirymentioning

confidence: 99%

Home Alone and All Together: Lightness of agency in social inquiry

Carlsen

Kvalnes

2023

Research has provided limited knowledge of how people in organizations experience growth of agency during circumstances that seem hopeless and stuck, and how such growth emerges. Drawing from the study of the turnaround processes at a nursing home and the Pragmatism of Dewey and Mead, we contribute with a theory of how agency is produced in social inquiry. We suggest that the puzzling accounts of lightness in the experiences of people at this nursing home help explain how a field of social inquiry may be charged with creative and agentic force. We show how agency emerged through a series of action sequences related to inviting people into inquiry through the opening of a troublesome situation, the resulting voicing of needs and ideas for improvement, as well as the subsequent experimenting and surfacing of tales of meaningful progress from such actions. Furthermore, our empirical observations suggest that the emergence of collective desire to meet the needs of the Generalized Other is a central, yet understated, part of agency produced through social inquiry. Lightness of agency may be accentuated, paradoxically, by the weight of a more generalized situation—in this case that of institutionalized care for elderly—that the local inquiry exemplifies and in which it resonates.

“…In particular, in line with Butler (1997) who pinpoints the possibilities of those who are denied justice and equality to discursively renegotiate the space, we believe such possibilities are now more real than ever with the rise of multimodal social media such as Instagram and Tiktok, where local communities (and other CSR beneficiaries) can add to the identity constituting and norm-infested discourse with their CSR communication. In this way, language itself can be used to push the limits of speakability (Fouweather & Bosma, 2021) and communication can eventually be seized by the marginalized to 'recover' CSR (Gond & Nyberg, 2017).…”

Section: Conclusion: Recovering Csr Through Alternative Multimodal Cs...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Who is the Responsible Corporation? A multimodal analysis of power in CSR videos of multinational companies

Shao

Janssens

2021

Drawing on Judith Butler’s understanding of performativity, this study aims to explore how power embeds in CSR videos of multinational companies. It adopts a critical semiotics multimodal analysis to show how a particular kind of responsible corporation is constituted by the language, both verbal and visual, that those CSR videos speak. Our findings show in-depth the multimodal construction of three subjects of a responsible corporation: hero, missionary, and architect. We advance the constitutive turn in CSR communication by conceptualizing CSR communication as a political project which 1) subjectifies the corporation through the articulation of a relationship that subordinates CSR beneficiaries and the audience and 2) iterates the business ideology. We discuss how multimodality contributes to masking power, and conclude with guidelines for alternative multimodal CSR communication.