Through a study of the so-called GamerGate controversy, this article argues that a new dynamic of affective intensification is currently instating itself in the digital organization of not only highly collaborative industries, such as that of gaming, but of society as such. This dynamic may best be understood and conceptualized through reconsiderations of the notions of affective economies and affective labour. The affective constitution of digital organization is a process of affective intensification that not only works like an economy but is directly productive of economic value, and not only involves human emotionality but technological affectivity as well. Guided by the notions of assemblage, affordance and agency, the article offers a conceptual framework for studying affective intensification in and as socio-technical processes of value production.
In this article we argue that although there has been an intensified exploration of how organizations strategize within the field of strategic communication, there seems to be a key component missing, namely questioning who these organizations are and become in the process of strategizing. Strategic communication implicitly, perhaps even unintentionally, continues to rely on a classical understanding of organizations as "social units (or human groupings) deliberately constructed and reconstructed to seek specific goals" (Etzioni, 1964, p. 3). Assuming rather than exploring who the organization is, we argue, hinders a full explanation of how strategic communication works. Aiming to tackle this issue, we first present three ways in which the classical understanding of organizations is being theoretically challenged by organization studies and empirically challenged by new media, arguing that organizations are networked, sociomaterial, and contingent processes of meaning formation. Then we examine how the reconceptualization of the organization influences the concept of strategic communication, advocating that strategies should be seen as collaborative and networked flows (the how) of shared decision making by both human and nonhuman actors (the who). Finally, we discuss how this affects the notion of strategic action, and hence, strategic communication, asking what strategic action is and who performs it.
Taking higher education to be an arena in which professional and social interaction has a special propensity to overlap, this paper investigates university students’ experiences and perceptions of sexual harassment. Based on survey data, we find varying responses according to their gender and nationality, indicating that men and Danish students are least likely to experience and perceive situations as sexual harassment. Further, we find a wide-spread normalization of certain potentially offensive acts and behaviours. In addition, students report varying degrees of acceptability of certain acts, depending on context. On this basis, we argue that normalization hinders individual students’ ability to recognize and denounce sexual harassment. The influence of social norms on individual experiences and perceptions, we assert, means sexual harassment is neither an objective category nor an individual responsibility. In consequence, issues of sexual harassment can only be dealt with if and when universities assume responsibility for the norms that prevail within their spheres of influence.
This paper proposes that being alternative is not a question of adhering to certain principles or applying certain practices, but rather a question of freedom. It does so by exploring three empirical cases of alternative organizing, namely the sustainable fin-tech start-up SusPens, teachers of mindfulness meditation and the UK minor party Independents for Frome. The paper first identifies a common trajectory, in which alternative organizing usually begins with a rejection of the dominant socioeconomic order. However, in seeking to increase its impact on the world, alternatives are often appropriated by the very order they were meant to depart from. On that basis, we explore how freedom can be articulated and enacted as emergent tactics that depart from this common trajectory and constitute alternativity as the ‘other’ within the existing order; in the cracks and crevasses that evade (discursive) regulation and where liberties can be taken. More specifically, we identify three emergent tactics of endurance, germination and reiteration and discuss what they may teach us about organizing for freedom in the 21st century.
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