NOMP Research Seminars Spring 2023

Municipal hunters and wildlife managers are entrusted with the task of keeping the urban fauna in balance through preemptive measures, and by culling animals. This task is in focus of the Formas funded project ‘License to Cull.’ Together with Erica von Essen (Stockholm University), David Redmalm conducts interviews and participant observations with hunters, municipal officials, and wildlife rescuers in ten municipalities in Sweden to study the dilemmas of wildlife management and the organized killing of animals ‘out of place.’ The seminar presentation will offer insights into municipal wildlife management and the ethics, aesthetics, and biopolitics of animal culling.

David Redmalm is associate professor (docent) in sociology at the Division of Sociology, School of Health, Care and Social Welfare. Human-animal relationships are in focus of his research, and he has written about how people discipline, love, mourn, kill, represent, simulate, organize, and anthropomorphize other animals. Redmalm has published work in journals such as The Sociological Review, Organization, and Society and Business Review.

Located at the intersection of performativity, temporality and communication-centered perspectives, this study focuses on one specific organizational activity: reporting. Reporting may seem to deal solely with the past; yet, as we suggest, while reporting is resolutely about the past, it is also tied with the future––in ways that shape the present. In reporting, the past (what has been achieved) must be presented and written up to be evaluated in the present, leading to possible futures being described and decisions being made about them. Our study focuses specifically on small non-profit organizations with social and/or cultural mission, which we consider as precarious organizations. Such organizations live in the constant spectre of their possible demise. For these organizations, “the future” may both cover, with similar intensity, the actualization of their mission and the risk of having to cease their activities. The organizations we study rely significantly on public subsidies and private foundation grants. They face demands from their funders to demonstrate the value of what they do in the process of getting access to these funds. Reporting on their activities and results is hence a central activity for them. We develop a performative and communicative understanding of reporting, which moves it from an exercise of “simply” testifying of what has been done with which results, to an activity that has to be accomplished and hence may generate tensions or complications. We investigate what happens in reporting, as people engage in this activity and attempt to meet their funders’ expectations, and how in doing so they weave together temporalities that constrain or open up possible courses of future action for their organization. The presentation of our research will include insights from our ongoing study of reporting based on interviews with members of these organizations, as well as with consultants who provide them with assistance and representatives of funding agencies in charge of reporting. Generally speaking, our study addresses how actors from non-profit organizations engage in reporting, and do so in ways that performatively materialize different temporalities and constitute their future––a perspective that we suggest can be relevant for all organizations, given the current importance of this activity.

This presentation is part of a research work conducted by Viviane Sergi with Nicolas Bencherki (TELUQ, Canada) and Joëlle Basque (TELUQ, Canada).

Viviane Sergi is Professor in Management in the Department of management at ESG UQAM in Montréal, Canada. Her research interests include process thinking, performativity, leadership, project organizing and the transformation of work. Her recent studies have explored how communication is, in various settings, constitutive of organizational phenomena. She also has a keen interest for methodological issues related to qualitative research. Her work has been published in journals such as Academy of Management Annals, Human Relations, Organization Studies, Strategic Organization, Long Range Planning and in M@n@gement.

In Sweden, public administration is increasingly seen as a potential site for automation. Data-driven process automation is believed to alleviate administrative drudgery and support a goal-driven, efficient public sector. Drawing on ethnographic research with stakeholders from approximately ten Swedish municipalities, this talk explores two central and interrelated ideas: firstly, that the future will necessitate automation to prevent the public sector from collapsing, as it is perceived as dysfunctional and in need of repair; and secondly, that we must prepare for an automated future by transforming today's work forms and routines to be compatible with machine communication when needed. As I will demonstrate, the interaction between these two lines of thought reveals that the preparations involve constant repair work, yet these efforts are seldom deemed satisfactory. It appears to involve temporary, makeshift solutions, which continually defer the anticipated future. In this sense, repair becomes a form of future-making where the future is persistently delayed, making it a perpetually moving target.

Martin Berg is a Professor of Media Technology and an Associate Professor of Sociology at Malmö University, Sweden. His research interests include digital sociology and critical studies of emerging technologies and automation processes at work, with a methodological interest in digital ethnographies. His latest publications include "Everyday automation: Experiencing and anticipating emerging technologies” (Routledge, co-edited with Sarah Pink, Deborah Lupton and Minna Ruckenstein) and "Digital Technography: A Methodology for Interrogating Emerging Digital Technologies and Their Futures” in Qualitative Inquiry 28.7 (2022): 827-836.

Once, the mine, and its activities, and Kiruna town hold together in; a reciprocal relationship. But what happens when the mining company becomes less dependent on the Kiruna citizens? When the company turns to fly-in-fly-out work arrangements. When fixed employment is replaced with contractors. When are fever hands needed to the ore up and out?

Tommy Jensen holds a PhD (2004, Umeå University) and is professor in management and organization theory at Stockholm Business School. Jensen teach in organization theory, ethics, and sustainable development and method. Currently he works on two projects: "Capitalism, inequality and nature", and "Racism and the labour market". His recent project was "Organizing Rocks".