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What if I Don’t Fit? How Fat Employees Become the Organizational Other through Clothing and Seating.
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Author: Noortje Van Amsterdam, Utrecht U.
Author: Katrine Meldgaard Kjær, Aarhus U.
Author: Dide Van Eck, Radboud U.
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This paper offers a new materialist perspective on processes of inclusion and exclusion in the professional lives of women who identify as fat. Contemporary ideas about health, size and productivity have resulted in a dominant assumption that a legitimate corporate body needs to be slender - or at least not fat. However, how fat employees are included and excluded in their everyday work context remains understudied. Adopting a new materialist analytical lens, we argue that the fat body is given meaning within organizations via negotiations of the extent to which it literally ‘fits in’ to everyday objects such as chairs and clothes. We show that fat employees’ stories reveal that their basic needs with respect to suitable clothing and adequate seating are made un- or extraordinary by both colleagues and organizational structures, and that this puts them at a disadvantage in the context of their employment. We use the works of Karen Barad and Sarah Ahmed to unpack the intra-actions between material objects, discourses about size and our participants’ large bodies, and the role affect plays in these. The article thus contributes to Critical Management Studies’ (CMS) recent turn toward examining the intersection between materiality and power relations within organizations.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Against Time Management
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Author: Brad Aeon, John Molson School of Business, Concordia U.
Author: Alexandra Joelle Panaccio, Concordia U.
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Is time management always beneficial? This question has rarely been posed, as the attitude toward time management is either neutral or overwhelmingly positive. We argue that, in its practiced form, time management is neither neutral nor beneficial. In so doing, we draw on Baudrillard’s work to frame time management as a simulation that puts people out of touch with real, physical temporalities. Specifically, we argue that the simulation of time management rests on two myths—prime individuals and non-temporal time. The former reflects a tendency in time management to discount social forces; the latter reflects a tendency to discount any temporality that is not clock time. We conclude this critique of time management by discussing how it relates to inclusion, gender equality, the instrumentalization of leisure, agency, the meaning of work, and various other management topics.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Performative Power Flows through Overflows: Hearing to Be Seen, Speak, and Act
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Author: Neva Bojovic, Grenoble Ecole de Management
Author: Raghu Garud, Pennsylvania State U.
Author: Dejan Zec, Grenoble Ecole de Management
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Power and performativity have been critically approached as relational and productive. However, how their temporal facets play out together has not been theorized. This is needed, as performativity produces overflows which may impact how power is constituted or transformed over time. We explore in this paper the relational-temporal unfolding of power when a group in subject position aims to empower a marginalized group through a material device. With a historical study placed in a context of introduction, production and provision of hearing aids by the UK Government from 1943 to 1978, we outline the role of overflows and materiality in the transformation of power and provide a model of performative power flows.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Mindfulness in Practice: Alternative Mindsets in the French Financial Sector
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Author: Gazi Islam, Grenoble Ecole de Management
Author: Marie Holm, La Rochelle Business School - Excelia Group
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Contemporary studies of work have noted a resurgence of humanistic approaches, emphasizing values of authenticity, aesthetics, and self-expression. Scholars have questioned the relation of such approaches to managerial control and economic motives of productivity, focusing on aspects of worker experiences and work practices, yet often overlook the parallel resurgence of spiritual practices and movements within the workplace. The most notable of these is the ‘mindfulness’ movement, which promotes managerial practices designed to enhance well-being through an approach that is ambiguously Buddhist-inspired yet secular, transcendental yet performance-oriented. Positive organizational scholarship assesses mindfulness’ effects on worker well-being and effectiveness, yet little research examines the processes by which notions of meditation and mindful awareness inform managerial practice, including struggles of meaning, as corporate cultures encounter practices which may seem counter-intuitive to prevailing workplace norms. The current paper explores how mindfulness programs become sites for negotiation over what constitutes mindfulness, how it is enacted, and what are its effects. In an empirical analysis of a mindfulness program within the risk department of a multinational bank, we track how mindfulness is prepared for ‘engagement’ with corporate stakeholders, and how it is implemented among employees. We discuss the processes by which mindfulness encapsulates and moderates various ambiguities that are worked out in organizational practice, including the relation between personal and professional, and between individual and collective change.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Care for the Self, Overcompensation and Bodily Crafting: The Work- Life Balance of Disabled People
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Author: Eline Jammaers, UCLouvain
Author: Jannine Williams, Queensland U. of Technology
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This paper argues that studies on work-life balance have neglected the impact of self-care needs of men and women with disabilities in managing their health in and outside the workplace. Taking a social constructionist approach, we outline how the heteronormative discourse of work-life balance is not only gendered, but also ableist in that it assumes an individual who is able-bodied. Through the narratives of 66 male and female employees with a broad range of impairments, this paper investigates how they experience work-life balance issues and the strategies they develop for reducing such tensions. Through a lens of embodied subjectivity, we discover the techniques and practices disabled people use, termed bodily crafting, in order to retain some balance between work and non-work time. We reflect on how these issues are specific for people with disabilities as compared to people without disabilities, and for women with disabilities compared to men with disabilities.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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