Abstract
The book reminds me of Frank Gehry’s architecture: each surface is different and the building looks different from each point of view and, at the same time, it has a cogent unity. Similarly, Timothy Kuhn, Karen Lee Ashcraft, and Francois Cooren re-interpret linearity within a sense of unity. Let’s see how the book achieves this effect!
The authors chose a guiding question, and it is this: What have work and organization become under contemporary capitalism, and how should organization studies approach them? At the end of the book, we find their answers, but in-between they insert suspense in the story line. As a reader, at this point, I raise an eyebrow thinking, ‘who can tell what “contemporary capitalism” is?’ And soon after, I am told that this annoying monolithic concept is the effect of a multitude of plotlines. In fact, in chapter 1, we are taken to follow the story of the New Economy in studies of work and organization along the versions of ‘neoliberalism’, and ‘post-Fordism’. Later, we can hear how the spirit of capitalism produce ‘the project’ as its icon and how project-based capitalism is self-sustaining in its ability to marshal a set of connections that bring particular objects and subjects into existence. Associated with the move to project-based work is the rise of what is known as the ‘knowledge economy’, in which embodied communication practices become key to working, and organizations are increasingly aestheticized. Moreover, communication, as a form of knowledge and knowing, is increasingly understood as a key site of value production (e.g. ‘crowdsourcing’). Contemporary capitalism takes this valorization of knowledge further in ‘financialization’ and how it is practiced with the aid of algorithms. The rise of both the knowledge economy and financialization suggest a shift toward the story of ‘branding’ and how intangibles—such as images, symbols, and esthetic associations are used by a company to cultivate affective relations with consumers, employees, and other stakeholders. The last story in chapter 1 about the changes in contemporary capitalisms (in the plural now) concerns the transformation of work and workers’ culture in the form of ‘venture labor’ (the explicit expression of entrepreneurial values by non-entrepreneurs) and ‘precarity’.
As readers in work, organization, and management, we have witnessed the surge of all these interpretations, their claim to truth, and their ongoing negotiation and struggle over meanings. The authors’ storytelling does not enter in issues of truthness or multiple interpretations, rather assume an alternative approach and propose to inquire into how working and organizing are ‘done’. By foregrounding communicative practice in relational ontologies, the authors envisage the possibility of framing routinized action as the ongoing, continually reconstructed product of an array of forces that gain status as elements, as agencies, only through their connections with other elements in the carrying off of the activity in question. (p. 27)
Relational ontologies and communicative relationality thus become the main plotline of the book in the quest for novelty in investigation.
In chapter 2, the authors introduce relationality in great detail and this chapter of the book could be useful for those readers who look for a compass in navigating the sea of post-positivist ontologies, epistemologies, or onto-epistemologies. The authors present how relationality has emerged in the last couple of decades in four streams of social theory sensitivities. Some of them have in common a version of performativity. In the case of performativity, grounded in Derrida and Butler, it starts from the position that language and communication are productive, generative, and active processes, neither epiphenomena nor inert. Another version of performativity and sociomateriality is to be found in the economic performativity of Michel Callon and his associates, a view investigating how economic theories and models are not merely representations of an external world; rather, they create the very phenomena, such as markets, they describe. A specific understanding of post-humanist performativity can be found in the appropriation within organization studies of the work of Karen Barad and her vocabulary of entanglement, intra-action, or agential cut. Relationality has been formulated differently within affect theory. The authors use the term in the singular, even if in their effort to present the elusive definition of it, they describe a palette of affect theories. In few words, to say that affect is an energetic stream is to insist on a force in motion even while speaking of ‘it’ as a noun. As a verb, affect moves in a few ways. What should be stressed is the novelty that the turn to affect may bring to organization studies, if and when, it brings a difference with respect to emotion.
Once the readers reach chapter 3, and if they are already familiar with the authors and their formulation on communication as constitutive of social realities, they already expect that ‘communicative relationality’ is not a single thing. In fact, in chapter 3, they find three versions which have the task of illustrating how communication theory can extend the reach of relationality. In reading the book, it may be useful to know in advance that the following three chapters (4–6) are meant to introduce three empirical exemplar case study, each based on a single version of communicative relationality that may inform research on working and organizing in contemporary capitalism.
The first conception is named ‘Communication as Relating/Linking/Connecting’ and it proposes to go beyond the classical opposition between the transmission view (endemic in media, management, and information theorists) and the dialogical view of communication, advocated by interpretivists, conversation analysts, and social constructionists. Communication thus refers to ‘any phenomenon by which a first entity gets related/linked/connected to a second entity through a third entity that will produce, perform and “materialize” this relation/link/connection’ (p. 70). Materialization represents here the key word and exhibit its familiarity with the work by Barad and its translation in the sociomateriality of Orlikowski and Scott: what materializes itself in each interaction always is what relates various beings to each other. Communicative relationality, therefore, is conceived as a relational practice, that is, a practice by which various beings relate to each other through other beings that or who act as their intermediaries/voices/media/ representatives.
In fact, in chapter 4, the readers can follow the becoming of an idea and its materialization in an event called Museomix. Moreover, this event is the representative of how capitalism has often been associated with creativity. In the rendering of this research process, we can thus literally follow it and see all the relations and materializations that contribute to its trajectories. Far from being a disembodied phenomenon, creativity thus materializes through the multiple ways an idea resists to objections, produces various forms of alignment, as well as through its capacity to reconfigure situations. It is convincing how the authors argue that communication is a lot more than people simply talking to each other; it is also the way by which matters of concerns, expectations, or interests will or will not manage to materialize and relate to each other.
The second version outlined in chapter 3 is called ‘Communication as Writing the Trajectory of Practice’ and is based on an articulated conception of economic performativity. Here, the main concept is agencement, that is, the site from and through which conjunctions of elements become configured into what is considered to be an agent and achieve agency. There are no ontologically prior structures directing practice, since elements do not pre-exist the relational complex but are constituted through it. The authors also sketch the methodological moves for following the trajectory: the first step is to understand the array of agencies, or elements, comprising the agencement; the second step is to examine a particular practice that can be observed in situ; and the third step is to describe the logic of practice that guides the trajectory of the agencement, without forgetting to attend to the struggles regarding control over the trajectory of the practice.
In chapter 5, we find an empirical illustration of communicative relationality as stitching these elements together. The setting for this case study is AmpVille, a startup accelerator geared toward digital technology startups. In this context, the authors inquire into how the ‘product’ (and its value) is articulated and materialized, and they start from the how question. How valuation, as a situated practice, is accomplished? They identify three agencies (or nodal points): team’s skill, ferreting out a business model, and technological innovation. Each is articulated by, and with, an array of additional elements made meaningful (in-made to matter) through other agencies operating in the agencement. The end of this story is that ‘communication stitches these elements together, however contingently and temporarily, to produce meanings that guide and direct the trajectory of practice’ (p. 153).
The third version of communicative relationality in chapter 3 is called ‘Communication as Constitutive Transmission’. It engages affect as relational intensities that evade articulation and representation, and it aims to the how of affective transfer and its sociomaterial transmission. The authors argue that a novel vision of communication begins to emerge through affect theory. Communication, as the transmission of affect, is a constitutive process—the interactive production of meanings with tangible consequences—and it is transmissive as signs, symbols, and meanings are felt, and they pass through and connect bodies of all kinds, skipping from one scene of encounter to the next. In fact, the transmission of affect is deeply physical in its effects, and the authors stresses how ‘the time has come to contribute to the development of a post-human conception of communication in which neither human discourse nor human bodies enjoy a monopoly on the term’ (p. 93).
At this point, readers might be asking how research can be done according to these principles. Chapter 6 engages with this challenge and the setting this time is branding work in affective economy. The focus is on occupational identities branding as a consequential contemporary practice. Here, the authors try to employ the three versions of communicative relationality by shifting the question from what makes sense to what sticks, that is, what signs and figures become bundled and intensified through circulation, and how are human and nonhuman participants affected. This chapter is quite demanding, but worth of the attention devoted to its complex methodology. Nonetheless, I am highly sympathetic with the authors’ efforts, since affective methodologies are quite hard to get accepted and legitimized in organization studies, since they ask for a switch in the way of approaching research.
Finally, in the last chapter—chapter 7—the authors answer their initial question. They argue that communicative relationality holds the potential to reframe some foundational assumptions in current conceptions of working and organizing. First, it can be a resource to make visible the many agencies involved in working and organizing practices, and their invisible work involved in carrying out practices of organizing. Second, investigations of work guided by communicative relationality would insist that understanding working requires an understanding of an assortment of nonhuman agencies. Third, communicative relationality is a mode of interrogating value, since it is a multifaceted concept, bound up with, and thus not external from, valuing practices and communicative labor. In all chapters, we read about value as a site of both production and struggle, and not a simply discursive resource that participates in the manifestation of other agencies in a practice.
I highly recommend this book to those who are looking for a fresh view on what is going on in communication studies and how it connects to similar lines of thought in practice-based studies or in affect studies. And, as my final comment as a passionate reviewer, I have to say that at the end of the book, I was surprised by what is not in the book. While reading, I encountered some references to authors such as Mazzei, MacLure, and St. Pierre; therefore, I was eager to see how the authors were going to engage not only with post-humanist epistemologies but also with post-qualitative methodologies. I was surprised that the discourse on methodology was not further developed and was not directed to ‘what next’ once we engage in performativity and relationality. Is this going to be the topic of a future book?