Organizational death

Bell, Emma; Tienari, Janne; Hansson, Magnus

doi:10.1080/14759551.2014.866779

Cited by 13 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…The research on death and organizations that treats death as a metaphor (Reedy & Learmonth, 2011) includes studies of ‘organizational death’ (Barton Cunningham, 1997; Bell, 2012; Bell & Taylor, 2011; Bell, Tienari, & Hansson, 2014; Cullen, 2014; Kelly & Riach, 2014; Sutton, 1987), analyses of organizational identification as a struggle for immortality (Sievers, 1990, 1993), and descriptions of alienation as a form of symbolic death (Cederström & Fleming, 2012; Fleming, 2014). However, Reedy and Learmonth (2011, p. 119) argue that thinking of death as a metaphor ‘distances us from its brute materiality and … its capacity to make us face fundamental ethical questions about how we live our lives’.…”

Section: Power Over Life and The Organization Of Deathmentioning

confidence: 99%

Governing Death: Organizing End-of-life Situations

Theule

Lambert

Moralès

2018

Organization Studies

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This paper examines the organization of death. Through an ethnographic study, we examine how a geriatrics department guides the end of life. Drawing on Agamben, we show that organizations that are dedicated to life, but regularly confronted with death, develop dispositifs (mechanisms, technologies, practices and relationships) to turn biopolitics (power over life) into thanatopolitics (a regime of death). We also show how the inherently political meaning of life disrupts such government of death. The inclusion of political life in a regime of death disrupts organizational practices that find themselves facing fundamental questions of what makes a life worth living, who can decide not to prolong life, and based on which criteria.

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Section: Power Over Life and The Organization Of Deathmentioning

confidence: 99%

Governing Death: Organizing End-of-life Situations

Theule

Lambert

Moralès

2018

Organization Studies

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“…As noted above, practices and artefacts of remembering are rarely the focus of critical reflection or inquiry within organization studies (Bell et al, 2014). This is possibly because commemoration is such a widespread, seemingly benign aspect of the material culture of our organizational settings that we remain largely insensitive to it.…”

Section: Making Memory: Organizational Memory Commemoration and Portmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Nor do we pause to reflect on the various normative ideals they perpetuate. This being the case, it seems that a critique of commemoration remains something of a ‘void in the cultural study of organizations’ (Bell, Tienari, & Hansson, 2014, p. 4).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Remembering as Forgetting’: Organizational commemoration as a politics of recognition

Cutcher

Dale

Tyler

2017

Organization Studies

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This paper considers the politics of how organizations remember their past through commemorative settings and artefacts. Although these may be seen as 'merely' a backdrop to organizational activity, they form part of the lived experience of organizational spaces that its members enact on a daily basis as part of their routes and routines. The main concern of the paper is with how commemoration is bound up in the reflection and reproduction of hierarchies of organizational recognition. Illustrated with reference to two commemorative settings, the paper explores how organizations might perpetuate a narrow set of symbolic ideals attributing value to particular forms of organizational membership while appearing to devalue others. In doing so, they may communicate values that undermine attempts to achieve equality and inclusion. Developing a recognition-based critique of this process, the discussion emphasizes how commemorative settings and practices work to reproduce established patterns of exclusion and marginalization. To this end, traditional forms of commemorative portraiture that tend to close off difference are contrasted with a memorial garden, in order to explore the potential for an alternative, recognition-based ethics of organizational commemoration that is more open to the Other.

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“…is highly political in the ways in which it is embedded within, and reproduces, organisational power relations (Bell et al, 2014;Rowlinson et al, 2010;Sørensen, 2014). Yet with a few notable exceptions (e.g.…”

Section: Editorial2015mentioning

confidence: 99%

Spaces and places of remembering and commemoration

et al. 2015

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Organisations engage in remembering and commemorative practices, often to produce effects of stability and continuity and to create shared meanings and culture, yet commemoration has been a relatively neglected theme in the study of organisations. The articles in this Special Issue range across diverse examples to provide a rich understanding of the dynamic and complex processes involved in the organisation of commemoration. In particular, they illustrate the importance of paying attention to materialities, spatiality and embodiment in the lived experience of practices of remembering.

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Organizational death

Cited by 13 publications

References 22 publications

Governing Death: Organizing End-of-life Situations

Governing Death: Organizing End-of-life Situations

‘Remembering as Forgetting’: Organizational commemoration as a politics of recognition

Spaces and places of remembering and commemoration

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