Relational Encounters and Vital Materiality in the Practice of Craft Work

Abstract

Practice-based studies of organization have drawn attention to the importance of the body as a site of knowledge and knowing. However, relational encounters between bodies and objects, and the affects they generate, are less well understood in organization studies. This article uses new materialist theory to explore the role of affect in embodied practices of craft making. It suggests that craft work relies on affective organizational relations and intensities that flow between bodies, objects and places of making. This perspective enables a more affective, materially inclusive understanding of organizational practice, as encounters between human and nonhuman entities and forces. We draw on empirical data from a qualitative study of four UK organizations that make bicycles, shoes and hand decorated pottery. We track the embodied techniques that enable vital encounters with matter and the affective traces and spatial, aesthetic atmospheres that emerge from these encounters. We suggest that a concern with the vitality of objects is central to the meaning that is attributed to craft work practices and the ethical sensibilities that arise from these encounters. We conclude by proposing an affective ethics of mattering that constructs agency in ways that are not confined to humans and acknowledges the importance of orientations towards matter in generating possibilities for ethical generosity towards others.

Future and Organization Studies: On the rediscovery of a problematic temporal category in organizations

“…Partly under the label ‘future of work’ (Gratton, 2014), these forms of organizing position entrepreneurship and creativity at the heart of ‘the new normal [of] organizational life’ (Hjorth, Strati, Drakopoulou Dodd, & Weik, 2018, p. 165). Accordingly, new forms of organizing promise to apply less conventional and, perhaps, more artistic and artisan practices of producing and enacting the future, such as improvisation (Weick, 1998), craft work (Bell & Vachhani, 2019), play (Hjorth, 2005) and theatrical performances (Schreyögg & Höpfl, 2004), all of which deserve greater attention in organization studies. A focus on future-making practices, then, offers to deepen our understanding of the production and consumption of digital transformation through new forms of organizing.…”

The mark of the researcher’s hand: the imperfections of craft in the process of becoming a qualitative researcher

“…Within this dynamic, the clay is not passive and inert, but rather the material holds an 'active' energy that presses into the maker at the same time as the maker presses into the clay (Gherardi, 2017). This subtle, affective feeling of resistance highlights the 'vitality' of the material that guides the potter's bodily choreography, and is central to the meaning that craft work brings (Bell and Vachhani, 2020; see also Ingold, 2000Ingold, , 2013Marchand, 2010;O'Conner, 2017).…”

Affective atmospheres of sensemaking and learning: Workplace meetings as aesthetic and anaesthetic

“…Such affective bodies are understood heterogeneously to include all organized conglomerations of matter and energy; thus, not just human and non-human animals, but also artefacts, technologies, talk, ideas and technologies (Deleuze, 1988: 127). These treatments of affect thus offer an important challenge to the anthropocentric and logocentric orientation of scholarship on sensemaking (Introna, 2019) and learning (Bell and Vachhani, 2019; Gherardi, 2016, 2017).…”

“…In particular, we explore a less discussed relational affective phenomena – atmospheres. Engaging with scholarship across the social sciences (Anderson, 2009, 2014; Anderson and Ash, 2015; Edensor, 2012; Morris, 2018; Robinson, 2017) and organization studies (Bell and Vachhani, 2019; Gherardi, 2017; Julmi, 2017; Michels, 2015; Michels and Steyaert, 2017), we understand affective atmospheres (herein ‘atmospheres’) as relational affects that emanate from encounters between people, spaces and other bodies but also quasi-autonomously envelop and condition those encounters, spaces and bodies. We argue for atmospheric analyses of sensemaking and learning to elucidate an important, yet notably underexamined, category of relational affects that shapes meaning-making, sense and causalities (Anderson, 2009, 2014; Anderson and Ash, 2015; Edensor, 2012; Julmi, 2017; Morris, 2018; Robinson, 2017).…”