TY - CHAP

T1 - Tuning into Things

T2 - Sensing the Role of Place in an Emerging Alternative Urban Community

AU - Cnossen, Boukje

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © Oxford University Press 2023. All rights reserved.

PY - 2023/1/26

Y1 - 2023/1/26

N2 - This chapter introduces a specific phenomenological approach in a suggestion to sense organizing as a productive encounter between a place and its potential futures. In particular, it draws on the work of the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart to propose a ‘sensing’ approach to tune in to the role of place in the emergence of an alternative urban community of entrepreneurs and activists. While the field of management and organization studies (MOS) has been experiencing a very vibrant spatial turn, so far scholarship in this area has been focusing mostly on the ‘here and now’ of spaces and places. This has a lot to do with the specific epistemological commitments of MOS, including a realist focus in the field of organizational ethnography. This chapter suggests that a focus on what can be seen only goes so far, and that research on new or emergent organizations needs tools in order to sense the not-yet-there, and that this requires an affective attention that moves beyond the visual. The case presented, based on a field visit to an alternative urban community in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, offers insights into how such early-stage organizing can be seen sensed through an attention to things in a certain place, and how they are named and cared for.

AB - This chapter introduces a specific phenomenological approach in a suggestion to sense organizing as a productive encounter between a place and its potential futures. In particular, it draws on the work of the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart to propose a ‘sensing’ approach to tune in to the role of place in the emergence of an alternative urban community of entrepreneurs and activists. While the field of management and organization studies (MOS) has been experiencing a very vibrant spatial turn, so far scholarship in this area has been focusing mostly on the ‘here and now’ of spaces and places. This has a lot to do with the specific epistemological commitments of MOS, including a realist focus in the field of organizational ethnography. This chapter suggests that a focus on what can be seen only goes so far, and that research on new or emergent organizations needs tools in order to sense the not-yet-there, and that this requires an affective attention that moves beyond the visual. The case presented, based on a field visit to an alternative urban community in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, offers insights into how such early-stage organizing can be seen sensed through an attention to things in a certain place, and how they are named and cared for.

KW - affect

KW - anthropology

KW - arts

KW - entrepreneurship

KW - ethnography

KW - fieldwork

KW - place

KW - post-phenomenology

KW - sensing

KW - Stewart

KW - Management studies

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85153645848&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192865755.013.27

DO - 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192865755.013.27

M3 - Chapter

AN - SCOPUS:85153645848

SN - 9780192865755

SP - 508

EP - 521

BT - The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenologies and Organization Studies

A2 - de Vaujany, François-Xavier

A2 - Aroles, Jeremy

A2 - Pérezts, Mar

PB - Oxford University Press

CY - Oxford

ER -