CALL FOR PAPERS: Affect in Organizational Renewal Workshop 17-18 June 2019 Aalto University School of Business, Finland

CALL FOR PAPERS: Affect in Organizational Renewal

Workshop 17-18 June 2019
Aalto University School of Business, Finland

Keynote speakers:

Professor Silvia Gherardi: Affective ethnography and organizational change Department of Sociology, University of Trento, Italy

Professor Kate Kenny: Speaking out, censorship and the regulation of affect J.E. Cairnes School of Business and Economics, NUI Galway, Ireland

Professor Alison Pullen: The politics and ethics of affect Department of Management, Macquerie University, Sydney Australia

Organizational renewal is usually seen as an outcome of deliberate rational practices such as employee training and work design. There is an important affective dimension to organizational renewal, however, which until recently has received relatively little attention among management and organization scholars. Affect refers to a body’s capacity to affect and be affected, and the intensities that emerge from these encounters (Massumi, 2002). It is a non- reflective bodily response, such as excitement or shame, that is created in relations between humans and materialities such as technology (Gherardi, 2017; Katila, Laine & Parkkari, 2017).

While affect is difficult to control and may diminish actors’ capacity to act, it can also enhance actors’ capacity to act collectively in new ways (Michels & Steyaert, 2017). For example, affective (organizational) experiences have the capacity to unite people: to turn private affective experiences into collective experiences with political potential (Pullen et al., 2017; Vachhani & Pullen, 2019). Depending on the nature of such affective experiences, the political potential may work towards or against organizational renewal initiatives. Affect can, thus, be seen as critical ingredient in any organizational renewal process, as it includes action-potential (Duff, 2010) while also playing a pivotal role in institutional identity work (Katila, Laine & Parkkari, 2017).

In this workshop, we focus on the emerging discussion on affect-based understandings of organizations in general (Fotaki, Kenny & Vachhani, 2017; Gherardi, 2017) and organizational renewal in particular. We explore how affective experiences emerge within organizational practices, what they do, and how they can be manipulated to support (or contest) organizational renewal. We also work toward new methodological approaches to “capture” and better understand affective experiences in organizations. The workshop will be organized around keynote presentations, paper presentations, roundtable discussions, and collaborative activities.

Abstract submission