Back to the (invisible) Académie? The organization of poetry as a “pure” art form

Using the case of French contemporary poetry, this article investigates the organization of “pure” art forms. These are highly legitimate art forms which, instead of being profit-oriented, comprise actors who strive primarily for esthetic recognition. The organizational life of such arts is based on a new academy system which is in some regards comparable to that of the 17th century—leading me to call the current system a “return to the academy.” I define an academy system as an assemblage of artistic institutions coupled with public funding for artists and artistic organizations. This two-pronged system organizes the arts along four dimensions: strategic, administrative, ideological, and professional. Its strategic mission is to support artistic creation, spread cultural democracy, and guarantee the construction and transmission of literary heritage. Paradoxically, the State cannot make these choices directly, firstly because of the widely accepted autonomy of art, and secondly because, in a democracy, the State can no longer select artists according to an explicit ideology. The academy is thereby “invisible.” Second paradox, its organization has led to the marketization of pure arts, and the transformation of artists into independent workers providing goods and services. Finally, I discuss how this system fits a new consumerist definition of culture, based on “traces” that have to be recorded and managed as heritage. These findings question the typical narrative that the arts were emancipated from the patronage system thanks to the market, as this does not apply to most artists.

Managing Sick Leave in the University: Bureaucracy and Discretion

This study examined the challenges for supervisors and managers of managing sick leave within a New Zealand university. We used a qualitative research design, interviewing 20 university staff across the academic and service divisions who had managerial roles. We applied Habermas’ distinctions of technical instrumental, practical relational, and emancipatory critical transformative interests, and his twofold distinction of system and lifeworld to our analysis. The primary findings suggest that while the technical instrumental discourses were dominant within the university bureaucracy, managers (particularly front line managers) drew upon practical relational and emancipatory critical transformative discourses to justify the considerable discretion they exercised in managing sick leave. Far from being incidental, these humanistic elements are as much a part of the bureaucracy as the rational elements and are fundamental to the system’s equilibrium.

Automating to control: The unexpected consequences of modern automated work delivery in practice

This paper explores how automation efforts with the intent to control work in modern work places can unfold. Building on a longitudinal study of a governmental agency’s efforts to implement automated work delivery technology to enforce work guidelines, I show how aspects of work might become more automated but the rationale of automation might fail to manifest as originally intended. Technology and the formal structure inscribed into it to control work might conflict with the demands of work practice. Moreover, the findings show how automated control can be resisted by workers through subversive organizing in teams to reacquire work discretion. Through an analysis of automated control in practice, this paper contributes to discussions of technologies of control and how pragmatic resistance can emerge to counteract such technology.

Dealing with disgust: Street-level bureaucrats as agents of Kafkaesque bureaucracy

Bureaucracy is deeply implicated in the biopolitical regimes that create and render invisible social waste—individuals classified as abnormal, deviant, or useless—in contemporary societies. According to previous theorists, bureaucracy is able to carry out this critical task through moral distance and reliance on technical efficiency. By specifically focusing on street-level bureaucrats, a unique tier of bureaucracy which is often afforded neither moral distance nor clear directions, this article explains the microprocesses of classification, managing and recycling through which social waste management is carried out in contemporary society. In doing so, this article highlights that in addition to official policies, informal factors like social, organizational, and group norms are critical determinants of bureaucratic behavior in front-line organizations and problematize some of the key assumptions of Weberian bureaucracy. Unlike functional interpretations, we argue that, in some instances, the informal factors influencing street-level bureaucrats are more regressive than official public policies and help explain some of the dystopian features of contemporary bureaucracy and its impact on social inequity.

Novel Thought: Towards a Literary Study of Organization

Novels espouse an epistemological freedom that is beyond even experimental forms of scholarly research and writing. Precisely this freedom makes novels so conducive to thought. Their enduring presence in organization studies demonstrates literary fiction’s power of conveying how things are, might be, or can be thought of; of inventing new ways of seeing; of enabling different vocabularies as well as staging and transmitting specific affects. In this paper, we trace the mutual ‘contamination’ between the novel and organization studies as well as discuss different modes of engaging prose fiction, drawing on Rancière’s ethical, representative and aesthetic regimes of art. With a special nod to Kafka’s novels and stories and also McCarthy’s Satin Island, we outline the contours of a literary study of organization and introduce the special themed section on ‘The Novel and Organization Studies’.

Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’: The participation of the subject in its subjectification

This paper presents a close encounter between the literary works of Franz Kafka and a core topic in organizational theories of power, namely the participation of subjects in their own subjectification. In discussing ‘In the Cathedral’, the penultimate chapter of The Trial by Franz Kafka, the paper develops three central aspects of Kafka’s text: reflexivity as a form of entanglement with power, self-slander complementing formal involvement, and humour as a form of freedom. These aspects are mirrored against the example of performance evaluation to complement and enrich the theoretical debate about subjectification more generally. The paper and its contributions serve as a corrective to approaches that overemphasize either the possibilities of resistance, for example through reflexivity, or the impotence of the subject in the face of power.

Organising through compassion: The introduction of meta-virtue management in the NHS

This paper investigates the comprehensive compassionate care reform programme within the National Health Service (NHS) in England. Through a synoptic reading of policy documents, we show how 'compassion' is introduced as an overarching meta-virtue designed to govern relationships and formal positions in health care. Invoking an 'ethics of office' perspective, mainly drawing on the thinking of Max Weber, we evaluate the promotion of compassion as a managerial technology and argue how seemingly humanistic and value-based approaches to healthcare management might have unintended consequences for the quality of care and the conduct of health professionals that in some ways resemble and in some ways exceed those of the more traditional New Public Management measures, which the new compassion paradigm is expected to outdo. In the paper's final sections, we turn to the original work of the nursing icon Florence Nightingale to argue that compassion and other virtues should continuously be formulated and re-formulated in relation to the role-specific skills and duties of particular offices in the healthcare sector.

The ethnographer as accomplice—Edifying qualms of bureaucratic fieldwork in Kafka’s penal colony

This article explores the ethnographer’s equivocal role as an accomplice of bureaucratic power through a reading of Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony.” The researcher’s position when enrolled and affined in the bureaucratic field, which Kafka so uncannily animates, is illustrated via four ethically charged fieldwork experiences in Ugandan, Indian, and Myanmar prisons. I argue that these experiences were telling situations of “edifying qualms,” which were both morally ambiguous and analytically generative. The article concludes by suggesting that methodological attention to these edifying qualms enables ethnographers to use their deep-set complicity with bureaucratic violence as an antenna for picking up the impure pragmatics of doing “less harm,” and for imagining a better world altogether.

Monstrous rebirth: Re-instating the ethos of bureaucracy in public organization

This article explores the complexities encountered in attempts to strengthen the ethos of bureaucracy in public organization. It does so by stressing the ethical and organizational conflicts generated in the aspiration to revive this ethos. Empirically, this exploration is done by examining a code introduced in the Danish state-bureaucracy in the aftermath of a number of political-administrative scandals. We show how the ethos of bureaucracy on the one hand has been repressed and displaced and, on the other hand, in light of the scandals, now reappears as something indispensable. At the same time, the article exposes how the revitalization attempt encounters considerable obstacles. By situating the code in relation to changing bureaucratic structures, semantic ideals, and civil servants’ reflections, we show how the revived ethos takes on monstrous proportions. Despite this transfiguration, we argue that the failed attempt at revitalization is no cause to dispense with the ethos of bureaucracy. The article is distinctive in how it bridges hitherto uncoupled streams of literature that are mobilized in the investigation of a critical case. In so doing, it adds to these literatures and seeks to revive critical organizational theorizing in light of current neo-liberal and populist sources of power.

Into the Labyrinth: Tales of Organizational Nomadism

Labyrinths and mazes have constituted significant spaces for tales of transformation, from prehistoric designs through the myth of the Minotaur and the pilgrimage design in Chartres cathedral to contemporary novels and pictorial representations. Labyrinths and labyrinthine designs can also commonly be found in present-day organizations. This text, based on an ethnographic study as well as on an analysis of academic discourse, explores their significance as symbol and as physical structure. Drawing upon the notion of transitional space, it presents labyrinths as an indelible part of human experience, an archetype, and a sensemaking tool for understanding and explaining organizational complexity. The unavoidable presence of labyrinthine structures is presented as a counterpoise to the reductionist tendency towards simplification, streamlining and staying on-message, allowing or demanding space for reflection, doubt and uncertainty.

With(out) pleasure: Desexualization, gender and sexuality at work

This article explores desexualization in massage therapy as a complex interaction between therapists and clients wherein sexual subjectivities are co-constructed, reified and in one case revised to highlight how workers can create a professional sexual identity in the spaces between desexualization and re-eroticization. Findings suggest that organizational mandates for desexualization as well as therapists’ own framing maintains gendered subjectivities that paint men as aggressors and women as victims. It also offers, through the philosophy of one female therapist, an alternative to desexualization that seeks to encourage sexuality based on professionalism, respect and choice. A key implication of this study is that a more holistic and context-dependent view of work and workers is necessary for scholars and practitioners to understand the promise and perils of organizational desexualization.

The Tyranny of Distance: Kafka and the problem of distance in bureaucratic organizations

Inspired by the insights of Franz Kafka, this article explores the problem of ‘distance’ in a UK bank, particularly by focusing on one of its back-office processing centres. Distance refers to a way of not seeing those below us in the hierarchy; this might mean that we act in ways that display little thought or concern for the experiences of others. It is argued that the ‘distance’ created between human beings through bureaucratic ways of organizing is potentially debilitating. Academic accounts often strive for objectivity and, in doing so, they tend to stand at a distance from the suffering of those they seek to represent. By contrast, fiction elucidates distance in a more emotional, passionate and, therefore, engaged and engaging way. This article draws on Kafka because his work is subversive and it highlights the need to create ways of organizing and being that promote empathy with ‘others’. Nevertheless, this is not to suggest that distance can be eliminated because it is fundamental to how we develop our sense of self and it is ingrained within processes of rationalization. The article is distinctive because although numerous accounts have used fiction to theoretically analyse organizations few have sought to use fiction to analyse empirical material.