Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Something happened
T2 - spectres of organization/disorganization at the airport
AU - Knox, Hannah
AU - O'Doherty, Damian
AU - Vurdubakis, Theodore
AU - Westrup, Chris
PY - 2015/6
Y1 - 2015/6
N2 - The article explores the practical accomplishment of organization at an international airport during the course of a number of ‘security alerts’ that disrupted routine ‘modes of ordering’ (Law, 1994). Airports, we suggest, invite us to re-think ‘organization’ as the partial, contingent and always-incomplete outcome of complex order(ing)s and disorder(ing)s played out across various spaces, agencies and materials. When ‘something happens’ we begin to see how spaces, agents and materials are subject to unexpected becomings: objects appear treacherous, spaces mutable, agencies ineffectual and informants unreliable. Following the work of Weick we might say that in such moments of uncertainty we are forced to reconsider our customary ways of thinking about objects, subjects and systems. We argue this thinking requires a relational understanding of organization so that we can better grasp how organizations are continuously being made and un-made through an on-going co-creation and dispersal of parts.
AB - The article explores the practical accomplishment of organization at an international airport during the course of a number of ‘security alerts’ that disrupted routine ‘modes of ordering’ (Law, 1994). Airports, we suggest, invite us to re-think ‘organization’ as the partial, contingent and always-incomplete outcome of complex order(ing)s and disorder(ing)s played out across various spaces, agencies and materials. When ‘something happens’ we begin to see how spaces, agents and materials are subject to unexpected becomings: objects appear treacherous, spaces mutable, agencies ineffectual and informants unreliable. Following the work of Weick we might say that in such moments of uncertainty we are forced to reconsider our customary ways of thinking about objects, subjects and systems. We argue this thinking requires a relational understanding of organization so that we can better grasp how organizations are continuously being made and un-made through an on-going co-creation and dispersal of parts.
KW - airports
KW - order/disorder
KW - process theory
KW - relationality
KW - sense-making
KW - spectrality
U2 - 10.1177/0018726714550257
DO - 10.1177/0018726714550257
M3 - Journal article
VL - 68
SP - 1001
EP - 1020
JO - Human Relations
JF - Human Relations
SN - 0018-7267
IS - 6
ER -