Veranstaltungsprogramm der VHB Jahrestagung

This study focuses on organizational temporality through a performative understanding of rhythms as patterns of time. It develops a rhythmanalytical approach that illuminates rhythms as material, embodied, and discursive practices constituting business-as-usual in the Anthropocene. The main research interest is understanding how some rhythms develop an authority over others and how organizations remain locked-in repetition or establish moments of change.

Empirically, the paper builds on an ethnographic study of the winter tourism industry. The findings show how both linear and cyclical rhythms strongly affect work pace and tempo in the winter tourism industry. Through multimodal vignettes, the findings highlight how organizations aim to dominate cyclical rhythms in order to stay within a monorhythmic business-as-usual linearity while everyday practices and processes remain entangled in those rhythms. The findings detail two rhythmic configurations with differing authorities: As long as the linear rhythm of the tourism season remains undisturbed by the natural cyclical rhythms, organizational practices, instruments, and discourses align in a state of eurhythmia. When linear work activities and routines are strongly affected by (changing) cyclical rhythms of the natural environment (e.g. changes in weather patterns, global warming, pandemics) a state of arrhythmia emerges. In this arrhythmic configuration, the cyclical rhythms become authoritative over the linear rhythms of the organizational practices and processes, allowing for a shift away from business as usual.

This study contributes to our understanding of how authoritative rhythms shape and are performed by everyday work practices and materialities and points to the consequences of uncoupling and locking in business-as-usual rhythms for organizing change in the Anthropocene. The study discusses the potential of arrhythmia for interrogating authoritative politics of time and attuning to alternative, more-than-human temporalities. The paper concludes by highlighting the possibilities of socio-material approaches to authority and temporality.

Scholars in the field of institutional theory have enabled us to understand the complex phenomenon of institutional work to a considerable extent. However, what has not been explored in detail is embodied institutional work and the mechanisms that elicit change in it. In this qualitative inductive study based on participant observation, interview, and social media data, we shed light on embodied institutional work and the role of nonhuman animals in it. Our empirical setting is the field of vegan animal sanctuaries in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. We find that three core mechanisms provoke institutional change in embodied institutional work: embodied prefiguration, embodied empathizing, and embodied de-anonymizing category exemplars. We contribute to the literatures on institutional work, and animal organization studies.