Biomateriality and Organizing: Towards an Organizational Perspective on Food

Abstract

In this introduction to the special issue, we first provide an illustrative overview of how food has been approached in organization studies. We focus on the organizing of food, that is the organizational efforts that leverage, shape, and transform food. Against this backdrop, we distinguish the agency of organizations and the agency of food and explore their intersection. We argue that the “biomateriality” of food, i.e., its bio-material qualities, plays a distinctive role in shaping and affecting organizing and organizations. To do so, we present a conceptual framework for analyzing food organizing, which highlights the biomateriality of food and its agentic effects on organizational efforts. Thus, we provide researchers with an analytical toolkit to disentangle the different agents (people, organizations, food itself) and the associated processes and mechanisms that play a role in food organizing. We use this analytical toolkit to introduce the different articles in the special issue and put forward some lines of future research.

Entrepreneurial imagining: How a small team of arts entrepreneurs created the world’s largest traveling carillon

“…First, our insights into entrepreneurial imagining add to organization studies, spotlighting how empirical interest in entrepreneurship can shed light on new ways of organizing (Hjorth et al, 2015). Specifically, entrepreneurial imagining can inform burgeoning efforts to explore non-discursive modalities in organization studies (Boxenbaum et al, 2018;Moser, Reinecke, den Hond, Svejenova, & Croidieu, 2021). By being open to seeing, touching, tasting, and moving in organizational phenomena (Louisgrand & Islam, 2021), researchers can theorize about various ways in which material, visual, and sensory stimuli inform organizational life.…”

Development as freedom? Insights from a farmer-led sustainable agriculture non-governmental organisation in the Philippines

“…Davies and Riach (2019) apply Haraway’s work in their multispecies ethnography of bee-work, showing empirically how ‘all beings, or “critters” [Haraway’s phrase] have agential potential, even in unequal power relations’ and how such agency ‘is often expressed or springs forth in unexpected ways, undermining any sense of human exceptionalism, mastery, and autonomy’ (Davies and Riach, 2019: 252). The relational thinking that is required to unpack the concept of the labour of agential becoming can be enhanced with greater attention to such forms of ‘biomaterial agency’ (Moser et al, 2021). The particular organising context of our study – that of food production, sustainability and climate change – adds specific empirical dimensions to our theoretical problematisation of Sen’s pluralistic freedoms.…”

Sustainability in times of disruption: engaging with near and distant futures in practices of food entrepreneurship

“…Hernes et al (2020) argue, similarly to Welch et al (2020) and Mische (2009), the need to understand the difference between teleological and imaginary forms of future engagement. Their ‘material temporality’ concept attunes future engagement to the specificities of food entrepreneurship (Moser et al, 2021; Hernes et al, 2020). In their study, they specifically examine a large beer and dairy company and show that there are different ways in which matter ‘does’ time, for example, how it determines how human actors perceive, and engage with, time.…”