Call for Papers—Special Issue for Organization: The Critical Journal of Organization,Theory and Society

‘Thinking critically about affect in organization studies’

Deadline 28 February 2015

Guest Editors:

Marianna Fotaki, University of Warwick, UK

Kate Kenny, Queen’s University Belfast, UK

Sheena Vachhani, University of Bristol, UK

Affect is what hits us when we walk into a room and inexplicably sense an atmosphere, an ineffable aura, tone, or spirit that elicits particular sensations. It is what is evoked by bodily experiences as they pass from person to person, in a way that is contagious but remains unspoken. A yawn or a smile can travel between subjects, often increasing in its intensity as it does so (Tomkins, 1963). Hence, affect is a force that places people in a co-subjective circuit of feeling and sensation, rather than standing alone and independent; affect highlights our interdependencies (Brennan, 2004). Affect is therefore what occurs when bodies encounter each other, and before the resulting intensities have been categorized and named as emotions.

The concepts of emotion and affect are often used loosely and interchangeably, but for the purpose of this call, we distinguish between the two. Due to an inherent tendency to categorize states of being, scholarly work on emotion can freeze affective experience and destroy its import (Deleuze, 2005; Massumi, 2002). There is an aspect of bodily experience that eludes interpretation by language, escaping its logic and refusing to conform to its expectations (Deleuze, 1997). Affect attempts to evoke these states of being, rather than to analyze their later discursive representation as emotions. For this reason, the distinction between the two is important, and while acknowledging the relevance of ongoing work on emotions for organization studies (Barsade and Gibson, 2007; Elfenbein, 2008; Fineman, 2003, 2010; Loseke, 2009; Stearns and Stearns, 1985; Wright and Nyberg, 2012), we invite contributions that instead emphasize affect more broadly in the terms we conceptualize it here. That is to say, affect as an excess, an experience that escapes discursive capture and naming and as the promise of a new state of becoming that can destabilize and unsettle us into potentially new states of being (Massumi, 1996). In other words, affect allows us to see, anew, the ‘texture’ of the world, as it is lived and experienced. Thus, we also invite submissions that tackle how affect is mobilized or encountered in pre-reflexive bodily encounters and in group situations, for example, the ways in which muscles are set in motion in the rhythm of physical labor in order to achieve coordinated collaborative action (Cyphert, 2001). We may also think of the affective connections experienced at sporting events, music concerts, protest marches, or the implicit esprit de corps of the military as other examples.

Overall, the Call is set out to generate exciting new avenues for the study of organization, promising theoretical directions, methodological approaches, and radical potential for critical investigation. Indeed, it has influenced other fields of social science in this way over the past 15 years (Ahmed, 2004; Berlant, 2011; Butler, 1997; Clough, 2006; Massumi, 1996; Sedgwick, 2003). It is these potentialities that our Special Issue seeks to explore, and we invite papers that speak to the ideas therein. The aim is to engage with theoretical perspectives and critiques of affect, develop methodological approaches evoked by the concept, and interrogate the potential of affect for the critical investigation of how organizations work. In what follows, we outline potential avenues for exploration of these themes.

Invitation to authors

This call is unique in its request for contributions that develop concepts of affect from a variety of perspectives to critically analyze organizations and organizing, providing fresh and even controversial insights. In so doing, we build upon a small but burgeoning body of work in which authors have engaged with these ideas in order to better understand organizational life (Beyes and Steyaert, 2013; Borch, 2010; Fotaki et al., 2012; Iedema et al., 2006; Kenny, 2012; Vachhani, 2013). Analyses of organizations and affect is nascent, but we now witness a growing interest as evidenced by the large number of international as well as empirically and theoretically diverse submissions to a recent conference subtheme ‘Affect at Work: Bringing the Psychosocial to Organizations and Organizing’ (European Group of Organizational Studies (EGOS), 2013), organized by some of the co-editors of this Call.

Building on a recent Special Issue in Organization on ‘Ethics, Embodiment and Organizations’ (Pullen et al., 2013) and the expanding interest in corporeal ethics and affective relations (Iedema et al., 2006; Pullen and Rhodes, 2013), our Special Issue makes space for specific focus on new critical, ethical, and political perspectives on affect, organizations, and organizing. We seek to build on this scholarship in the organizational field and to explore whether and how affect can provide new and fruitful lenses for the analysis of organizational life, in areas such as organizational ethics, identity, culture, power, and resistance, and also in approaches to organizational research and writing. We encourage engagements with these areas of scholarship, but not exclusively. We invite contributions that consider aspects including but not limited to

• The political and social implications of affect in organizations and organizing;

• Affect and organizational ethics;

• The relation between affect, identification, and culture in organizations;

• Historical and cross-cultural interpretations of affect;

• The inter-corporeal transmission of affect in organizations;

• The ‘darker side’ of affect within organizations;

• The concept of emotion alongside that of affect: what disjunctures and commensurabilities, if any, exist between the two?;

• Affect as practice, in relation to how we represent and write organizations in scholarly work;

• Methodological questions around studying affect in empirical settings, in addition to studies that focus on the abstract, theoretical tenets of affect;

• Questioning dominant assumptions within existing theories of affect, and the implicit ‘barriers’ between different schools of thought.

These themes are not finite, and we welcome other creative, interesting, and innovative approaches that address the issues presented here.