'A lot of things need to be repaired and a lot of relationships are in need of a knowledgeable mending. Can we start to talk/write about them?' This invitation - sent by one of the authors to the others - led us, as feminist women in academia, to join together in an experimental writing about the effects of COVID-19 on daily social practices and on potential (and innovative) ways for repairing work in different fields of social organization. By diffractively intertwining our embodied experiences of becoming together-with Others, we foreground a multiplicity of repair (care) practices COVID-19 is making visible. Echoing one another, we take a stand and say that we need to prevent the future from becoming the past. We are not going back to the past; our society has already changed and there is a need to cope with innovation and repairing practices that do not reproduce the past.
This article addresses the relationship between gender and management as intertwined discursive practices. Following a constructive controversial approach, we proposed to the students to complete a short story in which they have to give a feedback either to a fictitious female or to a male boss. The article has a dual aim since it offers a reflection on a teaching methodology suited to foster critical thinking in the classroom and analyzes the narratives so produced in search of what constitutes the students' idea of good management. In positioning men/women CEO within a narrative, students enact a moral order that evaluates management in society. Their narratives reveal how the economic crisis has undermined the positive image of the male manager, while femaleness is emphasized for its anti-managerial imaginary. Moreover, the idea of what constitutes good management is constructed around an idea of care for both male and female CEOs.
The article illustrates the Italian process of work precarisation and the collective resistance of precarious workers. It interprets them in terms of the birth of a collective identity that conducts a critique against precariousness while developing learning resources. Through discursive analysis of the Serpica Naro catwalk, organised in the area of Milan by the activists of the May Day Parade and the San Precario network, the article illustrates the process of construction of this collective identity that uses irony and playfulness to resist and denounce precarious working conditions. The purpose is to interpret the anti-precariousness movement as a process of critical urban learning that creates the viability of spaces for resistance in metropolitan contexts.
Purpose Affect is relevant for organization studies mainly for its potential to reveal the intensities and forces of everyday organizational experiences that may pass unnoticed or pass in silence because they have been discarded from the orthodoxy of doing research "as usual." The paper is constructed around two questions: what does affect "do" in a situated practice, and what does the study of affect contribute to practice-based studies. This paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The authors chose a situated practice - interviewing - focusing on the dynamic character of the intra-actions among its heterogeneous elements. What happens to us, as persons and researchers, when we put ourselves inside the practices we study? The authors tracked the sociomaterial traces left by affect in the transcript of the interviews, in the sounds of the voices, in the body of the interviewers, and in the collective memories, separating and mixing them like in a mixing console. Findings The reconstruction, in a non-representational text, of two episodes related to a work accident makes visible and communicable how affect circulates within a situated practice, and how it stiches all the practice elements together. The two episodes point to different aspects of the agency of affect: the first performs the resonance of boundaryless bodies, and the second performs the transformative power of affect in changing a situation. Originality/value The turn to affect and the turn to practice have in a common interest in the body, and together they contribute to re-opening the discussion on embodiment, embodied knowledge, and epistemic practices. Moreover, we suggest an inventive methodology for studying and writing affect in organization studies.