Practice-based studies of organization have drawn attention to the importance of the body as a site of knowledge and knowing. However, relational encounters between bodies and objects, and the affects they generate, are less well understood in organization studies. This article uses new materialist theory to explore the role of affect in embodied practices of craft making. It suggests that craft work relies on affective organizational relations and intensities that flow between bodies, objects and places of making. This perspective enables a more affective, materially inclusive understanding of organizational practice, as encounters between human and nonhuman entities and forces. We draw on empirical data from a qualitative study of four UK organizations that make bicycles, shoes and hand-decorated pottery. We track the embodied techniques that enable vital encounters with matter and the affective traces and spatial, aesthetic atmospheres that emerge from these encounters. We suggest that a concern with the vitality of objects is central to the meaning that is attributed to craft work practices and the ethical sensibilities that arise from these encounters. We conclude by proposing an affective ethics of mattering that constructs agency in ways that are not confined to humans and acknowledges the importance of orientations towards matter in generating possibilities for ethical generosity towards others.
AdamsonG. (2013). The invention of craft. London: Bloomsbury.
2.
AhmedS. (2010a). Happy objects. In GreggM.SeigworthG. J. (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 29–51). London: Duke University Press.
3.
AhmedS. (2010b). Orientations matter. In CooleD.FrostS. (Eds.), New materialisms: Ontology, agency and politics (pp. 234–257). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
4.
AndersonB. (2009). Affective atmospheres. Emotion, Space and Society, 2, 77–81.
5.
AndersonB.AshJ. (2015). Atmospheric methods. In VanniniP. (Ed.), Non-representational methods: Re-envisioning research (pp. 34–51). London: Routledge.
6.
BaradK. (2003). Post humanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs, 28, 801–831.
7.
BaradK. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. London: Duke University Press.
8.
BaradK (2008). Queer causation and the ethics of mattering. In GiffneyN.HirdM. J. (Eds.), Queering the non/human (pp. 311–338). Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
9.
BarthesR. (2000). Camera lucida. London: Vintage Classics.
10.
BeyesT.SteyaertC. (2012). Spacing organization: Non-representational theory and performing organizational space. Organization, 19, 45–61.
11.
BennettJ. (2001). The enchantment of modern life: Attachments, crossings and ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
12.
BennettJ. (2004). The force of things: Steps toward an ecology of matter. Political Theory, 32, 347–372.
13.
BennettJ. (2010a). Vibrant matter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
14.
BennettJ. (2010b). A vitalist stopover on the way to a new materialism. In CooleD.FrostS. (Eds.), New materialisms: Ontology, agency and politics (pp. 47–69). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
15.
BerlantL. (2010). Cruel optimism. In GreggM.SeigworthG. J. (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 93–117). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
16.
BerlantL. (2011). Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
17.
BerlantL. (2012). Desire/love. Brooklyn. Dead Letter Office/Punctum Books.
18.
BojeD. M.JørgensenK. M. (2014). Friendship as a way of living: Deconstruction and quantum storytelling. Tamara, 12, 33–57.
19.
CloughP. T. (2007). Introduction. In CloughP. T.HalleyJ. (Eds.), The affective turn: Theorizing the social (pp. 1–33). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
20.
CloughP. T. (2010). The affective turn: Political economy, biomedia, and bodies. In GreggM.SeigworthM.SeigworthG. J. (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 206–225). London: Duke University Press.
21.
CookeS.YanowD. (1993). Culture and organizational learning. Journal of Management Inquiry, 2, 373–390.
22.
CooleD.FrostS. (2010). Introducing the new materialisms. In CooleD.FrostS. (Eds.), New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics (pp. 1–43). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
DaviesB. (2014). Reading anger in early childhood intra-actions: A diffractive analysis. Qualitative Inquiry, 20, 734–741.
25.
De LandaM. (1997). A thousand years of nonlinear history. New York: Swerve Editions.
26.
FanninM.JacksonM.CrangP.KatzC.LarsenS.Tolia-KellyD. P.StewartK. (2010). Author meets critics: A set of reviews and a response. Social & Cultural Geography, 11, 921–931.
27.
ForsterN. (1994). The analysis of company documentation. In CassellC.SymonG. (Eds.), Qualitative methods in organizational research. London: SAGE Publications.
28.
FotakiM.KennyK.VachhaniS. J. (2017). Thinking critically about affect in organization studies: Why it matters. Organization, 24, 3–17.
29.
FotakiM.MetcalfeB. D.HardingN. (2014). Writing materiality into management and organization studies through and with Luce Irigaray. Human Relations, 67, 1239–1263.
30.
FoxN. J.AlldredP. (2015). Inside the research-assemblage: New materialism and the micropolitics of social inquiry. Sociological Research Online, 20, 6http://www.socresonline.org.uk/20/2/6.html DOI: 10.5153/sro.3578
31.
FoxN. J.AlldredP. (2017). Sociology and the new materialism: Theory, research, action. London: SAGE Publications.
32.
GherardiS. (2017). One turn . . . and now another one: Do the turn to practice and the turn to affect have something in common?Management Learning, 48, 345–358.
33.
GherardiS.PerrottaM. (2014). Between the hand and the head: How things get done, and how in doing the ways of doing are discovered. Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal, 9, 134–150.
34.
GibsonC. (2016). Material inheritances: How place, materiality, and the labour process underpin the path-dependent evolution of contemporary craft production. Economic Geography, 92, 61–86.
GreggM.SeigworthG. J. (2010). An inventory of shimmers. In GreggM.SeigworthG. J. (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 1–25). London: Duke University Press.
37.
GrossbergL. (2010). Affect’s future. In GreggM.SeigworthG. J. (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 309–338). London: Duke University Press.
38.
GroszE. (2010). Feminism, materialism, and freedom. In CooleD.FrostS. (Eds.), New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics (pp. 139–157). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
39.
HardingN.FordJ.LeeH. (2017). Towards a performative theory of resistance: Senior managers and revolting subject(ivitie)s. Organization Studies, 38, 1209–1231.
40.
HenriquesJ. (2010). The vibrations of affect and their propagation on a night out on Kingston’s dancehall scene. Body and Society, 16, 57–89.
41.
HindmarshJ.PilnickA. (2007). Knowing bodies at work: Embodiment and ephemeral teamwork in anaesthesia. Organization Studies, 28, 1395–1416.
42.
HoedemaekersC. (2017). Creative work and affect: Social, political and fantasmatic dynamics in the labour of musicians. Human Relations, OnLine First, DOI:10.1177/0018726717741355
43.
HoltR.PoppA. (2016). Josiah Wedgwood, manufacturing and craft. Journal of Design History, 29, 99–119.
44.
IngoldT. (2007). Lines: A brief history. London: Routledge.
45.
IngoldT. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
46.
KennyK.FotakiM. (Eds.) (2014). The psychosocial and organization studies: Affect at work. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
47.
KnudsenB. T.StageC. (2015). Introduction: Affective methodologies. In KnudsenB. T.StageC. (Eds.), Affective methodologies (pp. 1–22). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
48.
KornP. (2013). Why we make things and why it matters: The education of a craftsman. London: Vintage.
49.
Koro-LjungbergM.MazzeiL. A. (2012). Problematizing methodological simplicity in qualitative research: Editors’ introduction. Qualitative Inquiry, 18, 728–731.
50.
LawJ.HassardJ. (Eds.) (1999). Actor network theory and after. Oxford: Blackwell.
51.
LȇJ.SpeeP. (2015). The role of materiality in the practice of strategy. In GolsorkhiD.RouleauL.SeidlD.VaaraE. (Eds.), Cambridge handbook of strategy as practice (pp. 582–597). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
52.
LuckmanS. (2015). Craft and the creative economy. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
53.
MassumiB. (1995). The autonomy of affect. Cultural Critique, 31, The politics of systems and environments, part II, 83–109.
54.
McCoyK. (2012). Toward a methodology of encounters: Opening to complexity in qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 18, 762–772.
55.
MichelsC.SteyaertC. (2017). By accident and by design: Composing affective atmospheres in an urban art intervention. Organization, 24, 79–104.
56.
O’ConnorE. (2017). Touching tacit knowledge: Handwork as ethnographic method in a glassblowing studio. Qualitative Research, 17, 217–230.
57.
OrlikowskiW. (2002). Knowing in practice: Enacting a collective capability in distributed organizing. Organization Science, 13, 249–273.
PinkS. (2011). Multimodality, multisensoriality and ethnographic knowing: Social semiotics and the phenomenology of perception. Qualitative Research, 11, 261–276.
60.
SpencerS. (2011). Visual research methods in the social sciences. London: Routledge.
61.
St. PierreE. A.JacksonA. Y. (2014). Qualitative data analysis after coding. Qualitative Inquiry, 20, 715–719.
62.
St. PierreE. A.JacksonA. Y.MazzeiL. A. (2016). New empiricisms and new materialisms: Conditions for new inquiry. Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies, 16, 99–110.
63.
SpatzB. (2014). What a body can do: Technique as knowledge, practice as research. London: Routledge.
64.
StewartK. (2005). Cultural poesis: The generativity of emergent things. In DenzinN.LincolnY. (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research, 3rd edition (pp. 1015–1030). London: SAGE Publications.
65.
StewartK. (2007). Ordinary affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
66.
StollerP. (1997). Sensuous scholarship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
