Co-Emergence in Recruitment: How New Possibilities are Nurtured and Arise from Mainstream Organizational Practices

The current debates concerning the (anti-)performative stance of Critical Management Studies (CMS) and the possible turn to alternative organizations invites to a reconsideration of what is meant by “critical”. This presentation outlines and unfolds perspectives on critical performativity (CP) that may help overcome counterproductive dichotomies in CMS, such as “critical or constructive” or “off-/mainstream”.
First, we establish the theoretical core of CP drawing on dialectics, affirmative critique, and the concept of rearticulations as part of what can broadly be called an epistemology of practice. If knowledge is performative, it becomes essential to study how objectivity is performed in practices, continuously brought into being, sustained, sanctioned and transformed. CP builds upon a broader performative tradition, where critique and social change become possible exactly through participation and affirmation. Second, we expand the framework through concepts such as heterotopia, concrete utopia, liminality and microemancipation, to engage with how to find or constitute, nurture and develop singular activities, spaces or collectives that may be claimed as prototypical of tendencies that we normatively propose as progressive.
In particular, we explore how “alternative” acts of organizing may emerge within “mainstream” organization, referring to data from Sørensen’s ongoing field study of recruitment processes. These are modeled as processes of individuation, as the co-emergence of singular subjects and their socio-material networks of collaboration, care and support. Such models are prototypical, at once models of and for practices and epistemological bids for a form of knowledge beyond the separation of the given from the possible.