The aim of our article is to reflect upon intervention as a threshold where art and action research meet. For this, we will relate calls to apply the capacity of the performing arts to the social sciences to examples of neo-avant-garde art practices which show a renewed interest in (intervening into) the everyday production of public space. We recount and analyze two vignettes of artistic interventions to illustrate the politico-aesthetic power of art to interfere with how the social is assembled and to provoke new constellations of what is visible and sayable. Such experimental forms of engaging with the public raise the issue of a minoritarian politics of participation. Rather than being just another tool in the researcher's toolkit, taking into account these practices can illustrate and inform certain dimensions of what could be called performative action research.
This paper focuses on the aesthetics of the uncanny to inquire into and perform affective sites of organizing that are imbued with feelings of uncertainty and uneasiness. We argue that the uncanny forms an ‘unconcept' that allows us to think and apprehend ‘white spaces' of organization not as new or other spaces but through a process of relating intensively with the conventional places, streets and squares that form the backdrop to everyday life. We also make use of the notion of ‘unsiting' to show how organizational research is able to enhance our appreciation of the aesthetic dimension of organization in ways that expose and undermine that which has become familiar and taken-for-granted. Based on an artistic intervention by the theatre collective Rimini Protokoll, we encounter and analyse such processes of unsiting through the affective and spatial doublings at work in the organization of urban space. Theorizing the organizational uncanny opens up new sites/sights in organization by forging an interconnection of the recent affective, spatial and aesthetic ‘turns' in organizational theory. To do this demands what we call scholarly performances that involve the witnessing and enacting of everyday sites of organizing.
This article connects to and extends the attempts to bring space back into critical organizational theory, which, we argue, has mainly been based on the socio-spatial perspective as pioneered by Henri Lefebvre. Taking issue with the various ways in which Lefebvre's work can be interpreted, we develop an alternative route. Adopting a mode of non-representational theorizing as outlined in human geography, we propose the concept of ‘spacing', which orients the understanding of organizational space towards its material, embodied, affective and minor configurations. In discussing the consequences of such a performative approach to space for the practice and craft of organizational scholarship, we argue that our conceptual opening entails a move from representational strategies of extracting representations of the (organizational) world from the world to embodied apprehensions of the everyday performing of organizational space. What can be termed the enactment of organizational geographies in slow motion is inspired and illustrated by the video ‘The Raft' conceived by the artist Bill Viola.
This article responds to recent calls for rethinking management education and fostering a spatial understanding of educational practices. We propose to introduce Foucault's notion of heterotopic space and the spatial thought of Lefebvre into the debate about the current and future state of business schools. In particular, we conceptually and empirically discuss the potential for understanding space in a way that addresses its productive force, its multiplicity and its inherent contradictions. Using the example of an experimental teaching project dedicated to the conception and physical design of a city of the future, we reflect upon the possibility of the emergence of ‘other', heterotopic spaces within an institution of management learning. Our findings suggest that spatial interventions facilitate critically affirmative engagement with the business school by offering an imaginative approach to management education.
Mit Hilfe eines Eyetrackers wurde in der vorliegenden Studie versucht, eine Antwort auf die Frage zu geben, wie Lichtwerbeanlagen geschaffen sein müssen, um werbewirksam, operationalisiert als die grösstmögliche visuelle Aufmerksamkeit und eine hohe Erinnerungsleistung, zu sein. Hierzu wurde das Blickverhalten von 60 Probanden, aufgeteilt in Kontroll- und Experimentalbedingung, erfasst. Dabei rezipierten die Probanden Fotos der Düsseldorfer Fussgängerzone, die jeweils unterschiedlich gestaltete Lichtwerbeanlagen enthielten. Die experimentelle Variation des Stimulusmaterials bestand darin, dass die gezeigten Lichtwerbeanlagen hinsichtlich ihrer Grösse und ihrer Beleuchtung manipuliert wurden. Ferner wurde der Einfluss des Involvements und der Stimmung auf die visuelle Aufmerksamkeit und die Erinnerungsleistung kontrolliert. Es zeigte sich, dass grosse und beleuchtete Lichtwerbeanlagen signifikant länger betrachtet wurden, als Lichtwerbeanlagen, die diesen Gestal-tungsmerkmalen nicht genügten und dieses unabhängig von der Stimmung und dem Involvement.
