Dear COR colleagues,
Please join us for a colloquium with Professor Kathrin Sele (Aalto University School of Business in Helsinki, Finland)
“When the Food you Order Ends Up Ordering You: A Rhythmanalysis Perspective on Temporal Order(ing)”
February 22, 2019
12:00-1:15pm
SBSG 1321
RSVP by February 15, 2019 to cor@uci.edu
Lunch will be provided
Abstract: Organizing is a matter of time, but could we see it as a matter of rhythms? Building on the biological notion of entrainment, existing research suggests that rhythms should be accounted for when studying how organizations synchronize their activities and (re)produce order. However, rhythms tend to be portrayed as something that organizations, industries, or the economic environment at large just have. Accordingly, they are conceptualized as entities or relatively stable organizational features. Following a larger turn toward temporal aspects and the subjective nature of time in organization and management studies, we advocate to study rhythms as a relative rather than an absolute concept and as something that organizations “do”. We build on Henri Lefebvre (1999; 2004) who defines rhythms as “movement and differences within repetition” to capture their role in the continuous enactment and reproduction of social order. This rhythmanalysis perspective enables us to study rhythms as “lived” and to approach the temporal unfolding of practices as rhythmic performances. To understand how rhythms “order” practices and thus become a source of social order empirically, we draw on an ethnographic study of household food collectives in Finland. The results of our study suggest that the everyday performance of the different practices that make up these food collectives are characterized by the flow, beat, and regularity of rhythms that overlap, exist in parallel, and at times, collide. We show how biological, material and idealistic aspects embedded in human action nurture and influence the rhythms at play leading to enhancement (eurythmia) and/or disruption (arrhythmia). Finally, we elucidate how food collectives deal with this polyrhythmicity by introducing what we call embodied qualities of rhythmic engagement that are necessary for continuous social order and, hence, the everyday ordering of practices.
Bio: Kathrin Sele is an Assistant Professor in Organization and Management at Aalto University School of Business in Helsinki, Finland. Her research focuses on organizational routines and their role in innovation and strategy making with a particular focus on sociomaterial and temporal aspects as well as on discursive practices and rhetorical strategies and their role in emergence and legitimation processes of new technologies, research paradigms, and strategies. For her PhD, she conducted a 3-year ethnographic study at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the University of Zurich based on which she recently published a study that elucidates the generative nature of routine interactions. After completing her PhD at St. Gallen University in 2012, Kathrin was an assistant professor at the Toulouse School of Management in France. During her stay at UCI, Kathrin will be working with Professor Martha Feldman at the School of Ecology.