Tracking the sociomaterial traces of affect at the crossroads of affect and practice theories

Abstract

Purpose Affect is relevant for organization studies mainly for its potential to reveal the intensities and forces of everyday organizational experiences that may pass unnoticed or pass in silence because they have been discarded from the orthodoxy of doing research “as usual.” The paper is constructed around two questions: what does affect “do” in a situated practice, and what does the study of affect contribute to practice-based studies. This paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The authors chose a situated practice – interviewing – focusing on the dynamic character of the intra-actions among its heterogeneous elements. What happens to us, as persons and researchers, when we put ourselves inside the practices we study? The authors tracked the sociomaterial traces left by affect in the transcript of the interviews, in the sounds of the voices, in the body of the interviewers, and in the collective memories, separating and mixing them like in a mixing console. Findings The reconstruction, in a non-representational text, of two episodes related to a work accident makes visible and communicable how affect circulates within a situated practice, and how it stiches all the practice elements together. The two episodes point to different aspects of the agency of affect: the first performs the resonance of boundaryless bodies, and the second performs the transformative power of affect in changing a situation. Originality/value The turn to affect and the turn to practice have in a common interest in the body, and together they contribute to re-opening the discussion on embodiment, embodied knowledge, and epistemic practices. Moreover, we suggest an inventive methodology for studying and writing affect in organization studies.

Flesh-and-blood knowing

“…This was a question that a group of five researchers, engaged in the analysis of the notes and interviews from their fieldwork, posed to themselves and that now the second author of the present article wishes to exemplify in order to theorize embodiment knowing. From now on the plural "we" refer to story of those five researchers (Gherardi et al, 2018). Our story is located in this intercorporeal involvement with data.…”

“…Our third challenge wasusing Knudsen and Stage's (2015, p. 7) wordshow "to approach material in ways that are sensible to the affective processes leading to, traced or motivated by the empirical material". Our strategy here has been to experiment with writing and textualities, using the material where we pinpointed the traces of affect and elaborating a more-than-representational text around two episodes (Gherardi et al, 2018).…”

Human-Centred Design as the Way Forward for Organization Design and Enterprise Engineering

“…The other type of trace -narrative -operates on the basis of the internal and external coherence of a narrative with the listener's existing knowledge. One of the possible types of narrative trace is affectual trace, investigated by Gherardi [10]. Rather than studying affect as a content, the authors investigate affectual traces in communication, through "the choice of words, the pitch of the voices, the crescendo in the verbal interactions, the mimicking of other (absent) voices, the broken language and the rhetorical figures of speech" (Ibid, p. NA), as well as the traces kept in the researchers's own memories, as well as in annotations made in logbooks.…”

Book review

“…A researcher's reflexivity paves the way for a flesh-and-blood knowing investigation posture (Bispo and Gherardi, 2019). Gherardi's contribution to qualitative research may be easily traced through her articles published in the journal Qualitative Research in Organization and Management , where one can read about the confluence of the turn to practice and the turn to affect (Gherardi et al , 2018), about shadow organizing as a metaphor for studying organizing as the effect of multiple intra-acting elements and as the locus to ponder over what researchers do to “not-yet data”, that is, when they are not (yet) black-boxed as data, and, at the same time, to ponder on what “not-yet data” do to researchers (Benozzo and Gherardi, 2019). Her interest in post-qualitative research methods can be seen both in the book and in her most recent articles as well.…”