NOMP Research Seminars Autumn 2022

The PhD research project proposes to explore the practices through which science, technology, and society aim to address the challenges posed by demographic and individual ageing during the pandemic period in Italy, whose national health system combined with policy strategies to mitigate infections reflected the impossibility of a social researcher to access health organizations. Therefore what stands as an obstacle to what was supposed to be an ethnographic field-work becomes the possibility to rethink the new spaces of care created by technological innovation in a process of co-constitution of aging and technology (Peine & Neven 2021) driven by the integration of technologies such as apps, platforms, wearable devices to traditional healthcare services. Hence the decision to propose my research process reflects the problems encountered as a social researcher because of the (not) accessibility of the field, or rather a changing field, namely the organizations of the Italian healthcare model, whose intention to achieve a digital breakthrough dating back to about ten years ago accelerated strongly during the pandemic period, a strategy that can be interpreted as a symptom of the need to limit, in addition to infections, the economic and social costs linked to the ageing of the population.

Lucia Landolfi is a Ph.D. student in Social Theory, Digital Innovation and Public Policies at the Department of Political and Social Studies of the University of Salerno. Sociologist with a bachelor’s degree in Sociology, a master's degree in Sociology and Policy-making from a Territorial Perspective and a master's Degree in Social Informatics gained at the University of Ljubljana in September 2020 thanks to the agreement between the Department of Political and Social Studies of the University of Salerno and the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Ljubljana. Member of the Inter-university Research Centre for Healthy and Active Ageing (C.R.I.S.A. ), Research local unit- University of Salerno Research interests include sociology of health, gender and generation studies an science and technology studies, qualitative research methods.

Publications:

Cersosimo G., Landolfi L., Marra P.(forthcoming) “Behaviours and emotions in Children during the COVID-19. A case study of Southern Italy Cersosimo

G., Landolfi L. and Marra P. (2022) “Socialità e benessere nell’universo dei bambini. Frammenti di vita quotidiana al tempo del Covid19” [Sociality and well-being in the children’s world. Fragments of daily life in the time of Covid19]. Ledizioni, Milano

Cersosimo G. & Landolfi L. (2021), “How social media maintained sociality in the pandemic”

Social Sciences, Law, 14(63) 1: 99-112 External link.

Csesznek C., Cersosimo G., Landolfi L. (2020) “New challenges for the elderly. A note on socialization to ICT’s as an opportunity in the time of the COVID-19.”

REVISTA ROMÂNĂ DE SOCIOLOGIE. XXXI, (1-2): 49-5 External link.8

This presentation is focused on my last book 'Apocalypse managériale' recently published in French. I will discuss a core idea: management as a set of incompleting events. In the material, temporal, visual, textual, corporeal, technical process of unveiling the world to open spaces likely to be commodified, management keeps incompleting our experience. It builds finite flows opening the ways to new one. It fills our world of problems solved or problems that need to be solved. The encounter between management and digitality (from the 40s) is a powerful driver of this process of eternal novelty.

François-Xavier de Vaujany is a full professor of Organization Studies at Université Paris Dauphine-PSL (DRM). His work is focused on the relationship between (new) ways of organizing and the societal transformations of our societies. By means of in-depth ethnographical and historical work, he is particularly interested in the pervading presence of digitality as both a new semiotics, narrative and set of images at stake in management and organizing. He is co-editor in chief of the Journal of Openness, Commons & Organizing (JOCO) and associate editor for Management Learning. His last books are Apocalypse managériale (Editions Les Belles Lettres, 2022), Oxford Handbook of Phenomenologies and Organization Studies (OUP, 2022) and "Time as Organization" (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

The thesis explores the question of what it means to be a temporary academic worker in the business studies discipline in Sweden. It presents how academics’ temporariness translates into insecurity and how they respond to it. The research is conducted using an open design, reflexive framework, and an abductive approach. It offers a narrative presentation of the lived experiences of temporariness and a critical interpretation of the multiplicity of the translation of those experiences into insecurity, as well as the responses to it. The rich empirical narrative offers a glimpse into the variety of lived experiences of the temporary academic workers and the multitude of opportunities for social action. It advances an understanding of the relationship of different individual, collective, organisational, and professional aspects with the lived experience of temporariness and temporariness as insecurity and as precarious work. It is argued that temporary academic work can be experienced as job field insecurity – the concern of involuntary exit from the professional field that is fuelled by challenges to professional identity, membership, and organisational citizenship; epistemic uncertainty; social and financial uncertainty, lack of alternatives; and the permeating imperatives for individual responsibility, self-improvement, and forward-living. The work discusses different ways in which the subjectivities of insecurity are navigated. It is argued that temporary academic work can be experienced as precarious work in certain circumstances, but also that some elements of the profession can be invoked in order to challenge precarious subjectivities.

Petya Burneva is a researcher at the Department of Business Studies, Uppsala University, and a project coordinator and teacher for the Swedish Institute Academy for Young Professionals’ module at Södertörn University. She will present her PhD thesis which she defended earlier this year. Petya is a member of the Organisation and HERO (Higher Education as Research Object) groups at the Department of Business Studies in Uppsala.

This paper reflects on the process and social relations of breathing drawing on insights from Judith Butler and Achillle Mbembe's writing, in order to explore how our desire for recognition comes to be organized in ways that oppress us, but which also open up scope for rethinking how we live and work together. It focuses on some of the challenges associated with finding the space to breathe within the context of an increasingly digitized world as we emerge from a respiratory pandemic. It begins by setting out some starting premises for what we might broadly call a phenomenology of respiration: first, that ethics and politics stem from the way in which we are fundamentally interdependent; second, we are driven by the desire for recognition of ourselves as socially viable beings worthy of rights, responsibilities, and resources and finally, this desire for recognition is what drives our need for organization – it renders us mutually, inescapably vulnerable in an existential and embodied sense, a scenario that we do not somehow ‘grow out of’. Thinking about breathing in this way, as a physical, political and philosophical process, reminds us of just how mutually inter-dependent we are. Yet as Butler and Mbembe's work has also shown us, our social positioning is such that if we are all vulnerable, we are by no means equally so – ‘exposure is a socially organized relation’ (Butler, 2020: 199). Respiratory poverty has a long history starting with at least the early stages of industrialization and remains a significant cause of preventable death in many parts of the world, accentuated by climate change and intersections of precarity and exposure to pollution that make access to clean air the preserve of the privileged few. This paper explores some of the ways in which a phenemenology of respiration, informed by critical social theory, feminist thinking and postcolonial thought, helps us to understand what this means, and how and why it matters.

Melissa Tyler is a Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the University of Essex. She is codirector of the Essex-based Centre for Work, Organization and Society, and of the Future of Creative Work research cluster. Melissa is an Associate Editor of Gender, Work and Organization. Her recent books include 'Soho at Work: Pleasure and Place in Contemporary London', and 'Judith Butler and Organization Theory'. Melissa is currently working on a book on 'Organizing Recognition'.