Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Textbook Reconstructing Organization The Loungification of Society 1St Edition Damian P Odoherty Auth Ebook All Chapter PDF
Textbook Reconstructing Organization The Loungification of Society 1St Edition Damian P Odoherty Auth Ebook All Chapter PDF
https://textbookfull.com/product/business-organization-rle-
organizations-1st-edition-john-o-shaughnessy/
https://textbookfull.com/product/reconstructing-our-orders-
artificial-intelligence-and-human-society-donghan-jin/
https://textbookfull.com/product/for-formal-organization-the-
past-in-the-present-and-future-of-organization-theory-1st-
edition-du-gay/
https://textbookfull.com/product/a-history-of-western-society-
eleventh-edition-value-edition-edition-john-p-mckay/
The Power of the Steel tipped Pen Reconstructing Native
Hawaiian Intellectual History Noenoe K. Silva
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-power-of-the-steel-tipped-
pen-reconstructing-native-hawaiian-intellectual-history-noenoe-k-
silva/
https://textbookfull.com/product/music-theory-analysis-and-
society-selected-essays-1st-edition-robert-p-morgan/
https://textbookfull.com/product/reconstructing-education-
through-mindful-attention-positioning-the-mind-at-the-center-of-
curriculum-and-pedagogy-1st-edition-oren-ergas-auth/
https://textbookfull.com/product/tarascon-pocket-
orthopaedica-4th-edition-damian-m-rispoli/
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-organization-of-information-
daniel-n-joudrey/
DAMIAN P. O’DOHERTY
RECONSTRUCTING
ORGANIZATION
The Loungification of Society
Reconstructing
Organization
The Loungification of Society
Damian P. O’Doherty
Alliance Manchester Business School
University of Manchester
Manchester, UK
xi
xii Contents
References 277
Index 315
List of Figures
xiii
1
An Introduction to Loungification
yet we must beware when stepping inside the airport. The airport is a
‘Bermuda triangle for concepts’ according to the architect Rem Koolhaas,
and a place where all manner of bombast and exaggeration finds inspira-
tion. Airports are at the centre of what is called today ‘global business’
and the much-lauded inter-connected network society of which Castells
(1996) has spoken. What some see as the coming age of the ‘aerotropolis’
(Kasarda and Lindsay 2011) is also being driven by new business focused
on these so called mega-project border cities (Taylor 2004) where the
boundaries of the nation state dissolve into the bounties of inter-national
or post-national commercial opportunity.
Not that the Business School has been of much help in this business
growth, the reasons for which are partly constitutive – in the way the
British schools have been set-up following the Franks report in 1963
(Wilson 1992), for example, but also in part institutional inertia. The old-
est and most respected schools are essentially publicly funded and under-
written by the state. They have become – as many have shown – old and
complacent institutions running outmoded teaching programs based on a
model of business that was probably not even relevant in the 1960s (Chia
1996; Engwall and Zamagni 1998; Pfeffer and Fong 2002; Mintzberg
2004; Bennis and O’Toole 2005; Knights 2008). Strictly speaking, nor
can Business Schools be seen to provide anything of competitive advan-
tage for its students and clients. Hence, they are ‘constitutively’ and prac-
tically useless – for some, the basis of their very charm, or danger.
1 An Introduction to Loungification 3
The business school would have certainly failed to provide the condi-
tions within which the major claims of this book could have been nur-
tured and developed. These claims require transgression, or a series of
transgressions, some of which include the very audacity of proposing to
take time out mid-career to return to primary fieldwork, and ethnographic
fieldwork at that. However, it was on the basis of what eventually became
2½ years full-time ethnographic fieldwork at Manchester Airports Group
in the UK, that this study was able to uncover the spread of this thing
called ‘loungification’.
Whilst ethnography remains an alien species to most in the main-
stream of the Business School, even fewer people will have heard of this
‘loungification’. In many ways loungification is a business akin to a vast
social experiment, but it remains at the time of writing only a ‘minor’
genre of social change in contrast to the rather more dramatic claims
made on behalf of ‘McDonaldisation’ (Ritzer 1993) or ‘Disneyization’
(Bryman 2004). The elements out of which loungification is being woven
fall below the radar of most business and management studies, and are to
be found in relations that are not visible to the dominant epistemological
and ontological assumptions and paradigms within which business and
management studies is conducted (Burrell and Morgan 1979; Bryman
and Bell 2015). Much of the burden of this book is devoted to an expla-
nation of how it is possible to trace this loungification and to take the
measure of its organizational implications. As yet though, we do not have
the linguistic and conceptual resources nor even the sensibility within
which to track the fleeting signs and nascent patterns of organization
through which loungification is being forged. Organization Studies per-
haps offers the best chance, however, a discipline noted for a greater toler-
ance and experimentation with ontological and epistemological practice
than is typical of subjects promoted by the business school (Hassard and
Parker 1993; Czarniawska 2012; Burrell 2013; Adler et al. 2014)
Organization Studies
To learn something of new business, or how innovation works, it seems
we have to step outside the curriculum and administration of the
Business Schools, and to re-think organization. Staffed by people who,
4 Reconstructing Organization
it will be said, do not have the stomach or presumably the talents for
the demands of the business world, these moribund institutions could
not be more irrelevant for the understanding of how business develops
nor how business might be developed in ways that will best sustain our
collective potentialities and possibilities. If there is an underlying logic
that informs ‘The Business School’ in toto, it would be one that always
looks to commodify and recycle last year’s trend, to schematise it, and to
reduce it into ready-made formulas and equations. In what is essentially
a parasitical exercise, the most ambitious schools want the big stories, the
blue-chip clients, the FTSE one hundred, and the patronage of the large
and prestigious world of corporate giants. This is all dead business, how-
ever, and its veneration amongst the mass market only serves to generate
graduates destined to become its call-centre clerks and administrators.
This is a diagnosis towards which many in the mainstream of business
and management studies have slowly been moving and there is now a
small industry in jeremiads and journal publication bemoaning the state
of the business and management studies curriculum (Pfeffer and Fong
2002, 2004; Bennis and O’Toole 2005; Mintzberg 2004; Khurana 2007;
Pfeffer 2009; Rubin and Dierdorff 2009).
Ironically, under the patronage of the business school – or despite this
patronage – Organization Studies as a discipline and practice has prolifer-
ated and diversified in recent years (Parker 2000a; Knudsen 2003; Burrell
2003, 2013; March 2007; cf. Pfeffer 1993). And if there is a subject area
in the business school that has promoted ethnography it is Organization
Studies (Ybema et al. 2008; Czarniawska 2012; Garsten and Nyqvist
2013). Indeed, there is a case to be made that the very foundations of
this discipline are rooted in anthropological methods given the impor-
tance of ethnographic research conducted at Hawthorne and reported in
Roethlisberger and Dickson (1939). In addition, major breakthroughs
and promising paradigmatic challenges to the understanding of organi-
zation are usually accompanied and supported by ethnographic research
(e.g. Mayo 1945; Dalton 1959; Burawoy 1979; Latour and Woolgar
1979; Kondo 1990; Rosen 2000; de Rond 2008). What happens first in
Organization Studies, we might say, soon happens for the rest of business
and management studies. The recent Oxford Handbook of Management
Theorists (Witzel and Warner 2013), for example, offers some indication
1 An Introduction to Loungification 5
1
A sign of weakness for some i.e. Pfeffer (1993), who would rather have Organization Studies rep-
licate the methods of economics so that power can be acquired around the institutionalization of a
consensus program.
6 Reconstructing Organization
lounges branded ‘Escape’ that have been opening up within the terminals
of an expanding Manchester Airports Group. However, beyond the air-
port, lounges have rapidly been taking over our high streets and even our
universities. We are on the cusp, it seems, of ‘lounge life’. Yet, at the time
of its construction, the Escape Lounge might have appeared to be the
most unremarkable of projects. With a modest budget of £1.7 million
project spend against an estimated yearly profit of some £500,000 over
a 10-year life cycle, it was not the most exciting or audacious b usiness
project to have been conceived. Composed of tried and tested business
planning scenarios, in which much of the design was based on a deriva-
tive concept inspired by the earlier construction of the Heathrow Airport
‘Virgin clubhouse lounge’, the lounge would not have attracted much
interest – and certainly not from those working in the business school.
In many ways, ethnographic preoccupations with the physical site of the
lounge and what might happen in and around the immediacy of its locality
would typically produce a classic micro-study of its local business, manage-
ment and construction. However, such an approach risks myopia, particu-
larly as this particular Escape Lounge in terminal 1 at Manchester Airport
is only one specific instantiation of what we have been able to discover of
‘loungification’. How to explicitly diagnose this loungification phenome-
non remains the central burden of this thesis. At this stage one might liken
it to a process of enculturation that takes place between and beyond any
one formal organization that simultaneously changes the scales in which
we normally attribute organizational phenomena: i.e. macro and micro,
structure and agent. To detect it requires sensitivity to the peculiar onto-
logical status of loungification, which like some Borgesian conceit refuses
to admit, for example, customary distinctions between fact and fiction.
To make headway in this peculiar ontology this study reports on the
development of loungification as an experimental concept. With this con-
cept the ethnography sought to learn from the field so that it could replace
and re-situate any preoccupation with the specifics of local particular site
within a more extended network of materials, relations and practices.
Ethnography is typically critiqued for this preoccupation with the ‘local’ at
the expense of the ‘global’, the ‘micro’ and not the ‘macro’ (Burawoy 1985;
Buraway et al. 2000). One way of reconnecting the local and global is to
recognise how the aesthetic design of the Escape Lounge is only one com-
8 Reconstructing Organization
2
See also Baldry (1999), Case (1999), Beyes and Steyaert (2012), Burrell and Dale (2008), Calori
(2002), Carr and Hancock (2008), Clegg and Kornberger (2006), Czarniawska (2004a, b), Dale
and Burrell (2008), Halford and Leonard (2006), Kornberger and Clegg (2004), Knox et al.
(2008), van Marrewijk and Yanow (2010), O’Doherty (2008), O’Doherty et al. (2013), Taylor and
Spicer (2007), Tyler and Cohen (2010).
3
Society was a discursive invention of the modern period, either sociological in origin as in many
popular accounts (Bauman 1989), or bourgeois, deployed as a way of delimiting the wealth and the
otherwise ‘divine’ jurisdiction of the ‘ancien regime’ and its sovereignty (see Foucault 2003).
4
‘Expose’ belies a simple representational and realist discourse at odds with the ‘activist’ politics of
Foucault’s histories.
1 An Introduction to Loungification 9
is, however, often missed by Laclau and Mouffe and their followers, who
operate with an intricate and coherent anterior theoretical apparatus (or
machine) formed on the basis of underlying transcendental moral and
political commitments. Once ‘applied’ this apparatus can quickly enrol
and re-inscribe practices and events into utopian and totalising social
blueprints. In other words, it misses what is event-like in organization,
which simultaneously changes and reinvents our conception of what is
political and what is possible politically (cf. Bohm 2006). A question then,
and one of perhaps more radical intent, is how one might extend and ani-
mate ‘the political’ – or how one might seize a politicisation latent in new
objects and problematics. ‘Distributed’ across a range of heterogeneous
and apparently disconnected practices and materials these objects and
problematics might form ‘parts’ of an hitherto unforeseen and emerging
discourse-practice of political change.
Such immanence poses a considerable challenge to Organization Studies.
One promising route towards a grasp of this immanence might be advanced
by way of an ethnographically informed – or an ethnographically trans-
formed – Organization Studies capable of grasping what some have called
the ‘happening’ of organization, or what Schatzki (2006) calls ‘organiza-
tions as they happen’ (see also Knox et al. 2015). The political implications
of engaging with this dimension of organization still remain muted, yet
from process theory to practice theory7 the efforts to engage and study orga-
nization as (variously) verb, becoming, crisis, uncertainty, event, or happen-
ing, are myriad and have attracted some of the most significant theorists of
organization.8 How to forge a distinctively organization analysis has, how-
ever, proved more difficult. Typically, the most insightful analysis of process
and becoming draw heavily, almost derivatively, on concepts devised for
more abstracted and philosophical purposes. So, in these contributions we
learn a lot about Bergson, or Bateson, Deleuze, Serres, and Whitehead, for
example, but what difference organization makes is not often so clear.
7
Both deserve generous referencing and a veritable library now exist of studies that exemplify and
extend this approach, but authoritative reviews can be found in Feldman and Orlikowski (2011),
Nicolini (2012), and Sandelands and Tsoukas (2016).
8
It is noteworthy that some of the most established and possibly conservative of North American
organizational analysts responsible for the positivist and functionalist foundations of the discipline
have sought revision in the light of recent interest in contingency, improvisation and the limits of
rationality (see March, 2007).
1 An Introduction to Loungification 11
The widely respected practice-based ‘turn’ does have the merit of focus-
ing on the minutia of habits, rituals, and practices in work o rganization,
as they are constituted through socio-technical materials. Of most signifi-
cance is the possibility that the practice-based turn attends to a multitude of
human and non-human ‘agencies’ in ways that allow us to study a complex
distribution of action – what Hutchins (1995) sought to specify in terms of a
‘distributed cognition’. Such complexity and distribution means that socio-
technical relations observe no teleology or ‘higher’ logic and can only ever
be partially orchestrated to form something that might appear as coherent
organization (Law 2004). This offers significant advance in both method
and theoretical conception, and yet despite these gains there is still signifi-
cant myopia in focus carried by an intellectual problematic marred by a
restrictive realism. Most research in this genre remains confined to discrete
bureaucratic and managerial practices that are understood to take place
within a highly conventionalised ‘formal’ bounded organization. In addi-
tion, as some have pointed out, the practice-based turn does not fully grasp
the intricacies of reflexivity intrinsic to the ambitions of the turn to practice
and to which it only pays lip service (Gad and Jensen 2014).
Is it possible to study the mundane, everyday ‘practices’ in ways that do
not lose sight of what is traditionally called the ‘bigger picture’ – whether
we understand this bigger picture as politics or ontology – or in ways that
can situate organization as a multitude of partially orchestrated socio-
technical agencies complicit in the making of ways of being or becoming
in the world? Weick (1985, 1993), for example, has established a mana-
gerially relevant and practical mode of studying organization in which
organization is understood as a generalised collective ‘existential’ condi-
tion, constituted by the periodic interruption of what he calls ‘cosmol-
ogy episodes’. The imaginative scope of this conception is compelling,
despite the restrictive humanism latent in this work. Recent develop-
ments in what has been called the ‘ontological turn’ seem more promising
in helping us position the apparently mundane matters of management
and work organization within a more expansive attention to ontological
or for Stengers (2010, 2011) ‘cosmopolitical’ matters.9 And in airports,
9
The concept of a ‘cosmopolitical’ is patiently derived by Stengers (2010, 2011) in two volumes of
detailed exegesis and critique of modern scientific knowledge. In brief, the cosmopolitical is distin-
12 Reconstructing Organization
Ontological Politics
The ontological turn is most popularly associated in Organization Studies
with the ‘ontological politics’ of Annemarie Mol (1999, 2002), and it is
also used extensively albeit often implicitly in the work of John Law (Law
2004; Law and Benschop 1997), but it now embraces a vast and multi-
farious range of approaches, sparking controversy and heated debate (see
the debates in Holbraad et al. 2014).10 Sometimes referred to as ‘empirical
philosophy’ by Mol (2002) – or ‘empirical metaphysics’ – the ontologi-
cal turn draws on conversation with recent advances in the social studies
of science and technology (Haraway 1989; Latour 1993) and a diverse
range of work in contemporary anthropology – including Viveiros de
Castro (1992), Helen Verran (2001), Marisol de la Cadena (2010, 2015),
Mario Blaser (2010) and Eduardo Kohn (2013), all of whom are variously
engaged in what is called ‘post-representational’ and ‘post-reflexive’ forms
of ethnography (Maurer 2005; Riles 2001; Strathern 1988, 1999).11 Of
guished from the more humanist cosmopolitan by virtue of a broadly constructivist (‘instaura-
tional’ would be more accurate, following Souriau (1943) – see Latour and Stengers 2016) and
post-foundational analytics. Both the ‘cosmos’ and the ‘political’ must be grasped as mutually con-
stitutive, neither has priority, there is no social construction, or astrophysical apriori real.
10
Alcadipani and Hassard (2010) have sought to recommend an ontological politics for
Organization Studies, but by virtue of being a meta-theoretical account largely fails to seize the
reflexive and constitutive properties associated with the kind of ‘enactment’ of organization pro-
duced by Mol (2002). The ‘politics’ in ontological politics compels one to reflect far more radically
on the analysts’ co-implication in the practical ‘enactment’ of organization. There is a latent realism
in Alcadipani and Hassard that obstructs the full fruit promised by the ontological turn in the
social sciences. Such considerations are entirely absent, however, in Whittle and Spicer’s (2008)
efforts to comprehend actor-network theory. Organization Studies carries on as business as usual in
both these papers and indeed with a very rudimentary form of representational realism and moral
transcendentalism.
11
Despite the recent flourishing of ethnographic study in management and organization, the most
popular and widely read ethnographies in business and management studies remains stuck in a
more basic ‘realist’ disposition (Van Maanen 1988). Notwithstanding gestures towards montage,
pastiche and multiple voices that briefly animated ethnographic interest in the wake of the fascina-
tion with all things ‘postmodern’ (Linstead et al. 1996), ethnography in business and management
1 An Introduction to Loungification 13
studies is still predominantly realist or – when more creative – Geertzian in its influence, and it is
still yet to really come to terms with Clifford and Marcus (1986), or the implications and responses
that followed in the wake of Writing Culture. These have been much more fully developed in
anthropology, in particular by those associated with the legacy of Strathern, and the more recent
‘ontological turn’.
12
The paradox here being that this introduction conveys this approach in an abstracted and theo-
retical way. However, this seems in part a condition of working in business and management stud-
ies where writing is expected to be rendered in recognisably transparent and clear ways, telling the
reader what you are doing, rather than just doing. Far less justification is required of the ethno-
graphic method in anthropology, for example, where practitioners just get on and do it, rather than
worry that they have to continually explain themselves at a meta-level. Leave that to our readers and
interlocutors, otherwise we end up doing nothing and only claiming to be doing something: ‘This
paper argues’, for example, ‘this paper has argued’, etc., with nothing in the middle!
14 Reconstructing Organization
Vaaka-puulle laitto
Afroditen lapsen;
Palmikosta hapsen,
Vasta-painoks', taitto;
Haapsi maahan sousi,
Amor ylös nousi.
»Lauloin v. 1815.
Painatti Sjögren
Mnemos v, 1820.»
(Kasku on katolilainen
Muinon Munkkien tekemä).
[Ennen painamaton.]