Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-07T20:05:23.431Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Between Abandon and Inquiry

On the Way to Emancipatory Temporalities in Organizing

from Part II - Re-orienting Critique in Organization Studies? Exploring Jointly Time and Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2023

François-Xavier de Vaujany
Affiliation:
Universite Paris Dauphine-PSL
Robin Holt
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School
Albane Grandazzi
Affiliation:
Grenoble Ecole de Management
Get access

Summary

The bulk of management and organization studies draw on cybernetics and control-oriented views of time. Management is expected to follow a goal-oriented temporality, and activities keep correcting or adjusting both goals and patterns of organizing. In this chapter, the authors defend a more paradoxical view of temporality. By means of a detour towards the works of Guy Debord and John Dewey, both dérive and flânerie on the one hand, and inquiry and determination on the other hand, are jointly conceptualized as key organizing processes. From that perspective, collective activity and its politics appear as the productive differences in-between an infinitude of events oriented either towards activity or passivity, horizontality or verticality.

Type
Chapter
Information
Organization as Time
Technology, Power and Politics
, pp. 116 - 135
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aroles, J. & Küpers, W. (2022). Flânerie as a methodological practice for explorative re-search in digital worlds. Culture and Organization, DOI: 10.1080/14759551.2022.2042538.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aroles, J., Mitev, N. & de Vaujany, F-X. (2019). Mapping themes in the study of new work practices. New Technology, Work and Employment, 34(3), 285–99.Google Scholar
Bachelard, G. (1936, 2022). La dialectique de la durée: Édition établie par Élie During. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.Google Scholar
Bachelard, G. (1948). La terre et les rêveries du repos (p. 86). Paris: J. Corti.Google Scholar
Bachelard, G. (1969). The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Bachelard, G. (1988). Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement. Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications.Google Scholar
Bailey, C. & Madden, A. (2017). Time reclaimed: temporality and the experience of meaningful work. Work, Employment and Society, 31(1), 318.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bergson, H. (1896). Matière et mémoire. Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit. Paris: Félix Alcan.Google Scholar
Beyes, T. & Steyaert, C. (2021). Unsettling bodies of knowledge: Walking as a pedagogy of affect. Management Learning, 52(2), 224–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, J. (1995). Subjection, Resistance, Resignification. In Rajchman, J. (ed.), The Identity in Question (pp. 229–50). New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Chia, R. (2002). Essai: Time, duration and simultaneity: Rethinking process and change in organizational analysis. Organization Studies, 23(6), 863–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chia, R. (2010). Shifting Paradigms through “Letting Go”. In Wankel, C. & DeFillippi, B. (eds), Being and Becoming a Management Education Scholar (pp. 1142). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing Inc.Google Scholar
Costas, J. & Grey, C. (2014). The temporality of power and the power of temporality: Imaginary future selves in professional service firms. Organization Studies, 35(6), 909–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dale, K. (2005). Building a social materiality: Spatial and embodied politics in organizational control. Organization, 12(5), 649–78.Google Scholar
Dale, K. & Burrell, G. (2008). The Spaces of Organisation and the Organisation of Space: Power, Identity and Materiality at Work. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Dawson, P. & Sykes, C. (2018). Concepts of Time and Temporality in the Storytelling and Sensemaking Literatures: A Review and Critique. International Journal of Management, 21(1), 97114.Google Scholar
de Vaujany, F-X. (2022a). Apocalypse managériale. Paris: Éditions Les Belles Lettres.Google Scholar
de Vaujany, F-X. (2022b). The Process of Depth: Temporality as Organization in Cinematographic Experience. In de Vaujany, F-X, Aroles, J. & Pérezts, M. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenologies and Organization Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
de Vaujany, F-X. & Vitaud, L. (2017, July). Re-inventing management research with learning expeditions. LSE Business Review. Available at: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2017/07/04/re-inventing-management-research-with-learning-expeditions/.Google Scholar
Debord, G. (1956, 1958). Theory of the Dérive. Internationale situationniste, 2(20.05), 2015. Available at: https://larevuedesressources.org/theorie-de-la-dérive,038.html).Google Scholar
Debord, G. (1967). La société du spectacle. Paris: Les Éditions Gallimard.Google Scholar
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1980, 2004). A Thousand Plateaus. London: A&C Black.Google Scholar
Deroy, X. & Clegg, S. (2011). When events interact with business ethics. Organization, 18(5), 637–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dewey, J. (1938, 2018). Logic - The Theory of Inquiry. New York: Read Books Ltd.Google Scholar
Fabbri, J., Mukherjee, A. & de Vaujany, F-X. (2016). Management and the Practice of Walking: An Exploration of Organizations and Organizing with Legs. In Academy of Management Proceedings, 2016(1), 17741. Briarcliff Manor, NY: Academy of Management.Google Scholar
Fleming, P. & Spicer, A. (2004). “You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave”: spatial boundaries in a high commitment organization. Human Relations, 57(1), 7594.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flood, R.L. & Jackson, M.C. (1988). Cybernetics and organization theory: a critical review. Cybernetics and Systems: An International Journal, 19(1), 1333.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Foucault, M. (1982). The Subject and Power. In Dreyfus, H.L. & Rabinow, P. (eds), Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, (pp. 208–26). Chicago: University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Foucault, M (1985). The Use of Pleasure. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the Self. In Martin, L.H., Gutman, H. & Hutton, P.H. (eds), Technologies of the Self: a Seminar with Michel Foucault (pp. 16–49). Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press.Google Scholar
Hall, R. (1996). Representation as shared activity: Situated cognition and Dewey’s cartography of experience. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 5(3), 209–38.Google Scholar
Helin, J. (2020). Temporality lost: A feminist invitation to vertical writing that shakes the ground. Organization, 1350508420956322.Google Scholar
Helin, J., Dahl, M. & Guillet De Monthoux, P. (2020). Caravan poetry: An inquiry on four wheels. Qualitative Inquiry, 26(6), 633–8.Google Scholar
Helin, J., Hernes, T., Hjorth, D. & Holt, R. (eds.) (2014). The Oxford Handbook of Process Philosophy and Organization Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hernes, T. (2014). A Process Theory of Organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hernes, T., Simpson, B. & Söderlund, J. (2013). Managing and temporality. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 29(1), 16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holt, R. & Johnsen, R. (2019). Time and Organization Studies. Organization Studies, 40(10), 1557–72.Google Scholar
Ingold, T. & Vergunst, J.L. (eds) (2008). Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot. London: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.Google Scholar
Jarzabkowski, P., Mohrman, S.A. & Scherer, A.G. (2010). Organization studies as applied science: The generation and use of academic knowledge about organizations. Organization Studies, 31(09/10), 1189–207.Google Scholar
Juhlin, C. & Holt, R. (2022). The sensory imperative. Management Learning, 53(4), 640–51.Google Scholar
Lee, H. & Liebenau, J. (1999). Time in organizational studies: Towards a new research direction. Organization Studies, 20(6), 1035–58.Google Scholar
Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lilja, M. (2018). The politics of time and temporality in Foucault’s theorisation of resistance: ruptures, time-lags and decelerations. Journal of Political Power, 11(3), 419–32.Google Scholar
Lorino, P. (2018). Pragmatism and Organization Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Macpherson, H. (2016). Walking methods in landscape research: moving bodies, spaces of disclosure and rapport. Landscape Research, 41(4), 425–32.Google Scholar
Mead, G.H. & Schubert, C. (1934). Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Nash, L. (2018a). Gendered places: Place, performativity and flânerie in the City of London. Gender, Work & Organization, 25(6), 601–20.Google Scholar
Nash, L. (2018b). City Rhythms: Walking and Sensing Place through Rhythmanalysis. In Dale, K., Kingma, S.F. Wasserman, V. (eds), Organizational Space and Beyond (pp. 161–88). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Orlikowski, W.J. & Yates, J. (2002). It’s about time: Temporal structuring in organizations. Organization Science, 13(6), 684700.Google Scholar
Otley, D.T. (1983). Concepts of Control: The Contribution of Cybernetics and Systems Theory to Management Control. In Lowe, T. & Machin, J.L.J. (eds), New Perspectives in Management Control (pp. 5987). London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Pelurson, G. (2019). Flânerie in the dark woods: Shattering innocence and queering time in The Path. Convergence, 25(5–6), 918–36.Google Scholar
Pierce, J. & Lawhon, M. (2015). Walking as method: Toward methodological forthrightness and comparability in urban geographical research. The Professional Geographer, 67(4), 655–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Portschy, J. (2020). Times of power, knowledge and critique in the work of Foucault. Time & Society, 29(2), 392419.Google Scholar
Reed, G., Dagli, W. & Hambly Odame, H. (2020). Co-production of knowledge for sustainability: an application of reflective practice in doctoral studies. Reflective Practice, 21(2), 222–36.Google Scholar
Reinecke, J., Suddaby, R., Tsoukas, H. & Langley, A. (eds) (2021). Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Revel, J. (2015). Foucault avec Merleau-Ponty: ontologie politique, présentisme et histoire. Paris: Vrin.Google Scholar
Rosa, H. (2013). Accélération. Une critique sociale du temps. Trans. Didier Renault. Paris: La Découverte.Google Scholar
Singh, P.K. (2020). The Quest for Verticality: An Inquiry into the Infinite Nature of Self-Perfection. Philosophy of Management, 19, 387408.Google Scholar
Stiegler, B. (2021). Nietzsche et la vie. Paris: Gallimard.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stratford, E., Waitt, G. & Harada, T. (2020). Walking city streets: Spatial qualities, spatial justice, and democratising impulses. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 45(1), 123–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, S. & Spicer, A. (2007). Time for space: A narrative review of research on organizational spaces. International Journal of Management Reviews 9(4), 325–46.Google Scholar
Tsoukas, H. & Chia, R. (2002). On organizational becoming: Rethinking organizational change. Organization Science, 13(5), 567–82.Google Scholar
Yi’En, C. (2014). Telling stories of the city: Walking ethnography, affective materialities, and mobile encounters. Space and Culture, 17(3), 211–23.Google Scholar
Zask, J. (2015). Introduction à John Dewey. Paris: La Découverte.Google Scholar
Zerubavel, E. (1985). Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life. Berkeley and London: University of California Press.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×