Confessions of an organizational space writer

Writing from a place and with a purpose

I write these lines from a very comfortable place. I will not pretend the opposite. I am in a quiet, empty, open-plan office, the buzz of air conditioning in the background and large windows providing bright midday light, as July draws to an end. I work in a grand, 1930s Art Deco building, which Citroën claimed to be the largest service garage in the world. They repaired cars in a big way here, a proper Fordist productive space, running to Chaplin’s Modern Times work rhythms. And now here I am, slowly typing at a spacious desk, in a business school occupying one of the landmark premises of a very beautiful city. I cannot complain; I enjoyed holidays in June, then went to the EGOS conference in Copenhagen, and I am now working on papers, presentations, and projects just ahead of the AOM annual meeting in Atlanta. ¹ I’ve never been to Atlanta, but I am sure to meet friendly colleagues there, and see some quirky architecture that will provoke my emotions and thoughts on organizational space. Yes, that’s right: I write about space. I’ve been working for some time (more than I can believe) on a paper that explains how space hides time relations, or the other way around, I still can’t make my mind up about it …

STOP! Get real! What are you trying to do with this kind of writing? You know deep down that talking about your organizational space and experiences is not only ‘not on’ but also of no use to any imaginable reader. And although I concede you have a most fervid imagination, I can’t conjure up a person who would in real life want, never mind need, to read the stuff you write. It would have to be other academics, narrowly interested in practically irrelevant intellectual games of text production, decipherable only after years of similar readings and jargon gymnastics. Academics are, after all, often ‘writers writing for other writers in their sub-tribe’ (Alvesson, 2013: 80). But even so, why does academic writing have to be so … dry? Why do journal reviewers and editors so often flatten out all gentle irony, suggestive humor and evocative hesitancy, so that texts get ‘asphalted’ by conventional standardization, even when accepting unusual articles, as Charles Perrow (1986) puts it? Perrow (1986) describes the dismay caused by the review process in a colorful account of how he ‘inadvertently’ published with ASQ. Some readers might protest: ‘Now wait a minute, surely there is worse than having one’s ideas ASQ-asphalted …’. Vivid accounts by engaged scholars can sometimes retain traces in their writing of the personal emotions that motivate them; these can make a difference, gaining more readers, and perhaps moving them. So what I am trying to do here, with this unconventional, conversational tone, is to move a group of people, who share an intellectual and organizational interest in writing about space, to act up, even if just in the spatial problems we choose to address, or in the style of address. Naturally, I expect such people to be, for the most part, organizational scholars. I address this to them/us, not to seek absolution, but hoping there may be resonance and response to doubts, feelings and ‘less-than-certain’ suggestions. If this sounds too vague and indeterminate, I find comfort in the fact that, historically, now-eminent authorities and role models in the field, such as Karl Weick, have produced a doubt-rich, essayistic prose, where style becomes theory (Van Maanen, 1995) and simple structures are not necessarily preferred to the complex, meandering and digressive ones that convey so more persuasively (yet clearly and agreeably) the messiness of organizing.

This methodological territory has been traveled already. For instance, why can there not be a sub-tribe of scholars who attempt to write differently (Grey and Sinclair, 2006)? What if writing about ourselves, our spaces, and our emotions provided a methodological strategy for grasping critically (Fotaki et al., 2017) and aesthetically the Dr Jekylls and Mr Hydes hiding within us (Learmonth and Humphreys, 2012)? Consider the brilliantly written stories of fear, loathing, and gender oppression some colleagues have experienced in academic spaces such as conferences (Ford and Harding, 2008, 2010). In an admirable, recent instance of daring feminine activism via unconventional writing, Alison Pullen (2017) explains that ‘for writing to touch, we need to establish an affective sociality between readers and writers’ (p. 123). Emotion has a complex cultural politics (Ahmed, 2013), which great feminist literature has traced in writing, seen as a human embodiment, likened to the inability to sleep (Rose, 2010), a ‘costly possession’, thicker than water and more intimate, like blood.

Yet the obligation to publish sometimes leads me to write about my own particular spaces more from the head than from the heart. My heart is not in such written spaces of mine, which lack the critical bite I’d like them to have. Addressing similar issues, some turn to a ‘methodology of the heart’ (Pelias, 2004) to produce heartbreaking stories, seeking critical consideration for analysis of academic audit cultures that push scholars to publish quickly and recurrently, no matter whether they have anything worth sharing (Sparkes, 2007; cf. Alvesson, 2013). Other scholars have likewise suggested that personal experiences and autoethnographic accounts need to be heartful (Ellis, 1999), and that writing itself becomes a method of inquiry (Richardson, 1994). The confession I am trying to articulate here is about space, and how personal ways of writing about it matter to me, as they raise concerns on how critical theorizing on space could make a difference. However, affective narrative approaches do not have to be restricted to personal stories and I contend that sympathy, reflexive humor, and irony may help to pave the long and winding road stretching from theory to a better world (Prichard and Benschop, 2018).

So I give voice to a story that may help to grasp how junior scholars can misread unconventional academic efforts as irrelevant. Mine is not just a personal account, although the personal counts and supports my argument. Avoiding narcissistic, fruitless references to intimate experiences that matter only to me, I seek consideration for untold stories on junior academics’ thirst for relevance. Confessing my sins and perplexities about how I study space, I suggest a reflexive activism that includes practices of writing, reading, and talking differently about the spaces we try to understand better, and change for the better. Here is my story.

How does space fit into this?

Space opens up powerful ways to grasp the emotional, aesthetic and political layers of everyday life, whether these refer to academic or other organizational spaces. The specific subject of space connects conceptually back to writing differently in respect to practice-based representational and non-representational (or more-than-representational) theoretical issues. ² A non-representational, performative approach to organizational space suggests ‘experimenting with the aesthetics and embodiment of research itself’ (Beyes and Steyaert, 2012, p. 54). Alongside, we also recognize that affect matters greatly for reflecting critically in organization studies (Fotaki et al., 2017; Kenny and Fotaki, 2014). On one hand, this reframes space as spacing: ‘exchanging a vocabulary of stasis, representation, reification and closure with one of intensities, capacities and forces; rhythms, cycles, encounters, events, movements and flows; instincts, affects, atmospheres and auras’ (Beyes and Steyaert, 2012: 47; cf. Lorimer, 2005; McCormack, 2008). On the other hand, it explores the inhabitations, demands, and limitations of all critical practices, realizing that if power is effective only when affectively inhabited, then ‘ordinary’ affect is the only arena for an inhabited criticism (Ashcraft, 2017).

More specifically, planned and unintended doings and everyday feelings assume a political and organizational meaning in the affective atmospheres of spaces and architectures (Borch, 2010; Michels and Steyaert, 2017). How we act, react, engage, or disengage emotionally in particular spaces is an important part of who we are and what we care for. The notion of spatiality as care has been offered to appreciate the theoretical and practical significance of organizational change in sociomaterial practices (Lamprou, 2017) … but see how easy it is to sinfully digress from action to theory-driven talk. My core claim here is straightforward: written reflections about space might need to strike an affective chord if they wish to impact behavior, starting from an engaged and enlarged base of readers and practitioners, including academics as practitioners.

Now, academics are part of the real world of practice and lead real lives … let me at least take this for granted, though I appreciate it as no small concession. Yet, it is fair to admit that organization and management professors and researchers sometimes go on about incomprehensible stuff, and with such elaborated, frankly boring and impenetrable writings, that the purpose and sense of what we do for a living utterly escapes understanding by the ‘normal’ workaday world. As a junior researcher in organizational space, I confess I sometimes feel a little irrelevant, in ways the following story helps to consider.

Attack against ‘ridiculous beauty’ in a strange academic place

During a recent EGOS conference, a bold group of charming academics managed to turn their passion for the great Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño into a strategy for thinking differently about space. More surprisingly, but to their credit and with no intended sarcasm, such passion had actually turned into an entire stream of the conference! That is, a space created to present papers only on the relevance of fiction and novels for organization studies, with a particular focus on the Chilean writer’s novel 2666 (Bolaño, [2009] 2004). It is perhaps less surprising that these scholars organized, aside from their stream, an off-site event with readings of Bolaño’s excerpts and poetic reflections upon space and organizations at an art gallery in Copenhagen, filled with booze, appetizers, and large windows overlooking Christianshavn’s canals. Needless to say, as a fan of Bolano’s work, I couldn’t miss it! At 9:00 p.m., dusk was only just starting to creep across the beautifully clear, Danish summer sky, when the event, which had kicked off around 7:30 p.m., started taking its toll … intense poetic prose was read aloud in a virtuoso performance of celebration and analysis of Bolaño’s many virtues. I confess I struggled to follow. I wondered about participants who had never read the novelist’s work … what were they getting out of this? Eventually, the art gallery fell silent. At this point, a young PhD student with stereotypical Viking looks, and a past work experience in the nasty oil industry of the North Sea, took the floor and filled the stupefied silence with a critical sentiment that prompted me to write this article. He said, ‘This is beautiful, but just so ridiculously beautiful!’ By which he meant, as he elaborated, not that he was enthusiastically thrilled by the event’s beauty. Rather, he was bemused by how ridiculously useless he found all that beauty.

To open a short but telling digression: beside readings, drinks, and the usual banter, the event included also (a) the interesting though unrelated testimony of a young, local singer-songwriter, who had done inspirational ethnographic research on the Danish army and (b) a collective game, played during a pause as we walked around the gallery, where organizers selected some participants as ‘killers’, with the task of fictionally murdering other participants ‘with the blink of an eye’, leading to false screams, to victims writing their last intentions on scraps of paper, which were then collected, and (luckily?) never read … you get the picture. Without indulging the rash inferences of an inexperienced PhD student, I think many people perceived elements of the ridiculous that evening, along with the event’s beauty. Although I disagreed with the PhD student’s vibrant protest, I confess I saw his point. He darted meaningful glances across the art gallery, as if to embrace all the drunk and sober crowd of academics present into one pathetic loop of privileged and unaware dreamers (or perhaps he was just fishing for someone to echo his concern). I could have hugged the guy, apparently so lost and puzzled by the illusive life of intellectual delight. I felt like telling him: ‘I know, I know, it’s not a dirty job, but someone has to do it …’. Little was made of his affective reaction. I want to turn his doubt into a springboard for reflecting critically on organizational space and writing. So, below are two views on the practical relevance of organization theory that embody useful conversation starters on the PhD’s thirst for relevance.

Taking poetry and no bullshit: Poetic and prosaic defenses of academic dignity

There are documented historical cases in which excellent organization scholars, clear of doubt as to the relevance of their work, intentionally avoided answering questions from professionals, and even theorized on the need of separating the rhetoric and the reality of management. James March (2006) has argued that poetry, as a clear expression of mixed feelings, is a voice of incoherent truth that represents a natural means for expressing and contemplating doubt, paradox, and contradiction, all of which (not without reason) are excluded from managerial simplified talk. In his own terms, ‘although the rhetoric of management is exquisitely disconnected from managerial reality, that disconnection itself is part of the panoply of paradoxes that protects the beauty of human existence’ (March, 2006: 72). Prof. March is not only concerned with management practice; he is also a particularly eloquent defender of the management researcher and teacher, whom he sees as a generous Dox Quixote, acting more out of self-respect than self-interest or practical relevance. He puts it nicely:

university education and scholarship […] only become truly worthy of their names when they are embraced as arbitrary matters of faith, not as matters of usefulness. Higher education is a vision, not a calculation. It is a commitment, not a choice. Students are not customers; they are acolytes. Teaching is not a job; it is a sacrament. Research is not an investment; it is a testament. (March, 2003: 206)

This view well expresses a resisting idealism, a romantic and still inspiring view of academia. But what about the audit culture of the neoliberal university (Ashcraft, 2017)? What about management cultures measuring and manipulating academia just as they do any other entertainment service provider? The personal experiences of other organization scholars will next illustrate alternative ways to confront issues of practical relevance, to open up spaces for affective thought and to refuse engagement with staged performances that diminish academic dignity.

Gibson Burrell is a scholar whose work with Karen Dale has undisputable importance for thinking about organizational space (Burrell and Dale, 2003, 2014; Dale and Burrell, 2008) and more broadly for critically introducing modern and postmodern sociological paradigms to organization studies (Burrell, 1988; Burrell and Morgan, [1979] 2017; Cooper and Burrell, 1988). Burrell’s work is important here for more than one reason. First of all, he has published a funny story about recently deceased colleague Robert (Bob) Cooper (Parker and Burrell, 2016), who used to refuse wasting his time explaining issues of relevance. Once invited to deliver a speech at a workshop for practitioners in Amsterdam, the story goes that

Bob performed very well and refused to explain to a business audience how his world and theirs might interact. He did not wish their modern grappling irons to hook into his postmodern ship and successfully evaded answering direct questions on the direct organizational relevance of his position. It was a master class in that skill. (Parker and Burrell, 2016: 7)

At the end of the workshop, a photograph was about to be taken when someone handed Bob Cooper and Gibson Burrell two bowler hats and umbrellas, to immortalize the two scholars as stereotypical British gentlemen, if you please. Well, the farce did not please Bob in the least. He clarified he was not there to play any silly role the conference organizers wished, and unequivocally articulated, in five words, his denial through a strong identity assertion, which demanded dignity and respect: ‘WE … ARE … FUCKING … SERIOUS … ACADEMICS’ (Parker and Burrell, 2016: 8).

Perhaps this is not the perfect example of how an affectively stirred scholar should put practitioners in their place, refusing to be their puppet, but if the story makes you only half smile, then I win. An affective, critical attitude toward the hardships of workplaces and life should never forget to produce and cherish memorable humor and irony that help us to cope (see the critical comic genius of Grey and Sinclair, 2006). I suspect Prof. Burrell remembered the episode paradoxically not to take things (Bob’s death) too seriously, bringing a friend back to life, at his kicking best. Irony and humor are scarce resources to be treasured and reproduced, especially since our work spaces and places (in academia and elsewhere) bring already too many unpleasant experiences.

This ‘Burrell affective approach’ works also to reflect affectively upon and fight back against unpleasant pasts. In fact, Gibson Burrell was also present at the ‘Bolaño and space’ EGOS event in Copenhagen. This is how he articulated his uneasy experience as a reader of 2666: ‘I can’t wait to finish it so I can put the bloody book down and never open it again’ (Burrell, public very personal communication). Such heated comment, perhaps not a warm invitation to read the novel, was possibly the highest praise of Bolaño’s fiction made that evening, an embodied tribute to its disturbing power. Gibson Burrell movingly explained that the tiresome horror and violence permeating the novel painfully reminded him of his childhood. Macho values of a rough northern England would encourage to punch ‘inferior people’ on the nose, until they ‘either sniffed it up’ (i.e. the blood dripping from their noses, a metaphor for resilient endurance), or just got more. This kind of affect may help space researchers to avoid an accusation of irrelevance, because their emotions can be an important part of what, how, and why they write and reflect about certain topics. Prof. Burrell related Bolaño’s fictional space to his own troubled experience of brutality.

So who can argue against affect, emotions, and feelings? When they are authentic, and expressed from the heart (Pelias, 2004), they become empirical truths to deal with (Ashcraft, 2017; Pullen, 2017; Sparkes, 2007). Burrell (1993) has also written about his personal feelings of AOM, a place where ‘we and our relationships are all commodified. It is a three-day market in which we are all likely to be bought and sold unless we are very, very careful’ (p. 76). So writing about one’s places is OK, but raises some methodological problems. In fact, Learmonth and Humphreys (2012) remark that autoethnography runs the risk of being ‘evocative’ at the expense of being more abstractly analytical, and vice versa, when ‘explained stories’ lose their narrative power (cf. Anderson, 2006; Ellis and Bochner, 2006). Another problem is that evocative autoethnographic accounts relate almost exclusively to ‘emotionally wrenching experiences, such as illness, death, victimization, and divorce’ (Anderson, 2006: 377), often without being sufficiently analytical about them, embodying very broad critiques of institutions and society. I would suggest that our autoethnographies should also be about joy, laughter, professional and personal realization, and propose that a confessional genre can also nurture productive self-critical feelings: we are not forced to hate and blame our workplaces and societies in order to write critically about space (or other topics). My confession here suggests that organizational (auto)ethnographies on spaces and places can be at the same time more engagingly affective (in tone and writing style) and more serious (in choosing topics that matter, including reflexive ones), even while exploring humor and irony along with life’s tragedies. Critical thought should not necessarily have an external target for its critique: for sure, many things are wrong with our institutions, reward systems and audit cultures (see Ashcraft, 2017; Prasad, 2013). But sometimes I wonder about what is actually right about them (i.e. the many employers who generously fly us all over the world), and what might be wrong about us (i.e. the permanently employed research academics flown all over, whether tenured or not), independently of what they think we do wrongly.

Core confessions: Cardinal sins and possible roads for atonement

Organizational space scholars could make more of a difference if they tackled affectively societal problems that fall in their domain. My plea is to turn whatever intellectual energy comes from embracing scholarship and research as ‘arbitrary matters of faith’ (March, 2003: 206) into affective and effective strategies for tackling societal problems, including but not limited to academic experiences. When people try to impose their paradigms (Van Maanen, 1995), I’d love to react as Bob Cooper did, but I confess I just try to cope. It isn’t easy and a neoliberal audit culture (Ashcraft, 2017) has already measured me as unworthy of mention, merely based on starred publications in a single year (!), but I cannot put my heart into complaining about such bullshit. I’d rather acknowledge the limitations I recognize I have in telling good, heartfelt, analytically clear, and insightful stories on broader space problems. These are the sins that really prevent my writing (as one important expression of my professional identity) from having more impact. As I re-read this manuscript for the umpteenth time, the Morandi bridge in my beloved Genoa has just collapsed. I guess no organizational space scholar will have much to write about it and I feel guilty for not finding some way in which to understand and help. That doesn’t seem quite right.

The PhD student’s unease at EGOS risked mocking the serious work of colleagues on fascinating themes, like the relevance of (Bolaño’s) fiction for organization and space issues. It warns, however, that there is a fine line between unconventional research and epicurean self-indulgence. That boundary runs along how many people understand and appreciate the value of what we do. I repent of the times I anesthetized readers with obscure vocabulary and commit to finding better ways of seriously making a difference in my world.

I am not here suggesting that space scholars should drop their styles and topics, ignore their duty to publish conventional research and embrace unlikely writing careers as ‘sit-down’ comedians, or unsuccessfully copy the breathtaking prose of Celine (though being inspired by his enthusiasm, not his content, might not harm). ³ I argue that passion and form can count as much as content and method, as they are intrinsically related and could be particularly effective in critical academic writing about space. I confess my main purpose lately has been to publish, and I realize that to be read is quite a different matter. Affective writing is a way to resist domestication (Bristow, 2012). Writing is ‘an embodied space’, suspended between pain and pleasure, body and mind, self and other, but ‘by writing in a genre suitable for academic publication we inevitably find ourselves participating (both reluctantly and inadvertently) in the very forms of writing that we seek to contest’ (Phillips et al., 2014: 315, 325; cf. Derrida, 1976, 2001). Yet, affect and form may disrupt the conventional consumption of writing. Bolaño intentionally wrote repetitive, monotonous stories of realistic horror to drill into his readers precisely the feeling of how, through habit, we grow indifferent to violence, sexual abuse, murder, and inequality. The continuous flow of boring bad news anonymizes the victims of tragic events, rendering them more vulnerable. Bolaño’s message can go places, perhaps more easily if affectively translated into purposes beyond literary analysis (e.g. the critical remembering of Burrell’s childhood, the PhD student’s affecting oil industry experience).

This matters to me because, if I write from a comfortable armchair, I don’t forget that my grandfather was a refugee from the former Yugoslavia, a bricklayer by profession. This background makes me feel more irrelevant as a space scholar. I confess the sin of not engaging with historically relevant problems that happened in the past and continue to happen today. It will not have escaped any informed reader that migration is a key social and economic dynamic in this world, politically manipulated and culturally influential. Immigration policies played important roles in the vote for Brexit, the election of Trump, and in Italy’s recent elections. I want to act up, turning whatever thought and affective writing resources organizational space scholars or other activists may muster toward the understanding of migration and other spatially relevant phenomena, such as ‘smart’ urbanization, the digital transformation of agriculture, and the impact of technology on digital illiterate labor and workplaces.

How may I as an organizational space scholar better understand (and help) asylum seekers? How can they be welcomed better? How can we manage the continuous humanitarian crisis of illegal human trafficking across space? A recent average death-toll in the Mediterranean Sea alone tells us that every day 14 people die attempting to reach Europe (Quinn, 2016). These deaths look a lot like the anonymous murdered women of Santa Teresa, the pseudonym used by 2666 (Bolaño, [2009] 2004) to refer to the Mexican city of Juarez, on another border central to current political debates. Organizational research on space is not tackling these problems. For sure, writing is not the only means for activism available to academics, but affective writings on these topics could break new ground in critical research on space and gain more readers outside academia.

Research on organizational space does show how we live in ill-suited workspaces. University buildings have legacies, which do things (Gastelaars, 2010; De Vaujany and Vaast, 2013; Hancock and Spicer, 2011). But why do we look mostly at our own fancy new spaces and innovative practices? Why are we less moved toward less trendy, yet continuously problematic organizational spaces? Architectural projects come with spatial regulations and aesthetics that are interestingly resisted (Wasserman and Frenkel, 2011) or transformed (Berti et al., 2018), as space plays a crucial role in the emergence and endurance of organizing practices (Cnossen and Bencherki, 2018). IT-enabled homeworking produces hybrid spaces and work–life problems that need addressing (Halford, 2005). Yet I sense and confess a sin of omission. The protesting EGOS PhD student felt a ‘loathed enchantment’ toward ridiculous beauty. I sympathize with his discomfort at seeing so little of this ‘intellectual beauty’ having any bearing on society’s burning problems. We can try harder to make more of a difference, also by addressing dirty and risky topics, and via unconventional affectively charged writing. Management research can find more convincing explanations of its purpose in society, even at the (sustainable) cost of ruining dinners and polite conversations with friends and family (De Vaujany, 2016). I confess I wouldn’t be able to explain what I do to my refugee grandfather, and I think or dream that he should be able to read my work. My other grandfather was English and close to what at his time passed as an architect (he designed and organized buildings, military camps, and camping sites): I know that, if he could read my stuff, he would also think I was talking double Dutch, and I feel there’s something wrong in that.

In atonement for the sin of not having the potential critical impact I could as a space researcher, I suggest to myself an empirical research agenda focused on space-related practical problems that are poorly understood, and far less effectively managed. As a space scholar, asked what I do, I’d love to answer: ‘I study how refugee camps are planned, organized and managed’, or ‘I write about how immigration is illegally organized’; or perhaps even ‘I research the virtual spaces where terrorist organizations recruit potential candidates for suicide actions’, or ‘I look at what Smart Cities do for non-smart people’. Not long ago, I participated in the APROS/EGOS conference titled Spaces, Constraints, Creativities: Organization and Disorganization (Sydney, 2015) as presenter and co-convenor. Among the 30 streams and the many accepted papers in the program, not a single one hinted at topics like these. I am not being self-righteous here, I hope: I plead ‘guilty as charged’ by my own critique. This is a confession, remember. But as convenor and participant, I was disappointed that no scholar addressed spatial organizational phenomena such as terrorism and immigration. Of course, it is neither easier, nor perhaps less important to study digital nomads, co-working spaces and artistic collaborations in exciting cities. I confess, however, as I repent of it, that it is more self-pleasing than, for instance, studying how collaboration and resistance occur in refugee camps, wooden boats overwhelmed by migrants, or real nomad communities.

So organizational space researchers could engage more affectively and effectively with such ‘dirty fieldwork’; many of us have turned to Henri Lefebvre’s ([1974] 1991) work, a notable example of a critical thinker, activist, and unconventional writer. Lefebvre’s importance for organization studies goes beyond his work on space (Dale et al., 2018) and may guide organizational research toward the type of relevance the PhD student was looking for. Without reducing academic research to journalistic communication—although not necessarily disdaining to do so (see intellectual projects like The Conversation ⁴ )—perhaps there is writing to be done on variegated topics, in more palatable ways. An Italian idiom provides an evocative suggestion, to chew on with a pinch of salt: ‘Talk like you eat!’, ⁵ not as in ‘flatten your ideas’, but rather as in ‘keep it natural/comprehensible’ and, I add, don’t lose gusto. Our more or less comfortable Ivory Towers often sound like tedious Towers of Babel.

A final remark: our spaces and work are populated by jargon-littered, dead (uncited and/or unread) texts. If we wrote about different spaces and places in more lively and affective ways, this would not only help us to turn our writing into activism (Pullen, 2017), it might also stand a better chance of boring us less as readers. ⁶