The Novel as Affective Site: Uncertain work as impasse in Wait Until Spring, Bandini

Abstract

In this paper we propose that reading and writing with novels contributes to the emerging field of researching affect in organization studies. Situating our argument in current research on work-related uncertainty, we take John Fante’s novel Wait Until Spring, Bandini as a ‘sensuous site’ of research to engage with the experience of feeling stuck – addressed as impasse, limbo or permanent temporariness – as a condition of contemporary work lives. While affect theoretical approaches often emphasize precognitive intensities and their transformative potential, the novel foregrounds how affective intensities stay and stick as they are entangled with powerful socio-political conventions, such as investments in the American Dream or the idea of stable employment. Such affective attachments take shape in antithetic dynamics of the not-so-static state of feeling stuck.

When Time Falls Apart: Re-centring human time in organisations through the lived experience of waiting

“…Although this was particularly the case for the office workers and, to a somewhat lesser extent the hairdressers, the ceramic artists were not immune to the demands of the intensified-organisational macro-structure either, since craft is pursued within the artisan economy of small-scale businesses (Luckman & Andrew, 2020). Such experiences drove waiting actors to become intensively focused on waiting as an anomalous experience and to seek to control or manipulate the source of their wait, often ineffectually, in an effort to achieve something – as Otto and Strauss (2019) note, being stuck is ‘hard work’.…”

“…Waiting can also be caused by the deliberate actions of others when they choose to withhold information or required resources, possibly as an exercise of power, status or control over another (Bourdieu, 2000). Actors may also wait simply due to the length of time it takes for something to happen – an experiment, a natural process or production schedule (Hernes, Feddersen, & Schultz, 2021; Otto & Strauss, 2019). Whatever the cause, the subjective experience of waiting typically arises from ‘chains of events running asynchronously’ (Bergmann, 1992, p. 110).…”

“…The first is: what do social actors do while waiting? On the one hand, the literature has treated waiting as an empty ‘non-time’ during which other activities are impossible (Minnegal, 2009; Otto & Strauss, 2019; Tang, 2012). Thus, waiting may be conceived as an ‘interstitial time par excellence’ (Gasparini, 1995, p. 29).…”

‘He Pours Love and You Eat It’: A Psychoanalytic Study of Human Contact and Love in Affective Labour

“…Organizational scholars of affect similarly argue against an ontological separation of affect and emotion, or body and mind (e.g. Ashcraft, 2017; McCarthy & Glozer, 2022; Otto & Strauß, 2019; Pors, 2019; Pullen, Rhodes, & Thanem, 2017). However, these theorizations do not consider the role of psychic desire, which is a centrepiece of Lacanian ontology of the subject, on which we draw to explain the production of affect in the neoliberal late-capitalist workplace.…”

Novel Thought: Towards a Literary Study of Organization

“…Such aesthetic encounters thus have the potential to expand the imaginary of organization studies. They can bring to light the ‘organizational gothic’ (Parker, 2005), the affective intensities and entanglements in uncertain work lives (Otto & Strauss, this issue) as well as the miracles of organization as imagined by Kafka (Caygill, this issue). Indeed, thinking with the stories and novels of Kafka encapsulates the aesthetic mode of encounter (Ortmann & Schuller, 2019), to which we return shortly.…”