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Organizing space and time through relational human-animal boundary work.pdf (138.46 kB)

Organizing space and time through relational human-animal boundary work: exclusion, invitation and disturbance

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-02-10, 14:12 authored by Dan SageDan Sage, Lise Justesen, Andrew Dainty, K. Trygesstad, Jan Mouritsen
In this paper we examine the role that animals play within human organizational boundary work. In so doing, we challenge the latent anthropocentricism in many, if not most, theories of organization that locate animal agencies outside the boundary work that is said to constitute organizing. In developing this argument we draw together diverse strands of work mobilizing Actor-Network Theory that engage the entanglement of human/nonhuman agencies. In bringing this work together we suggest humans may organize, even manage, by conducting relational boundary work with animal agencies, spacings and timings. Our argument is empirically illustrated and theoretically developed across two cases of the spacings and timings of construction project organizations – an infrastructure project in the UK and a housing development in Scandinavia. Construction projects are well-known for their tightly managed linear timings and for producing the built spaces that separate humans and animals. Three concepts – Invitation, Exclusion and Disturbance – are offered to help apprehend how such organizings of space and time are themselves dependent upon entanglements between human and animal agencies. We conclude by suggesting that animals should not be negatively constituted as an ‘Other’ to human organizing, or indeed management, but rather acknowledged as sometimes constituting human capacities to organize, even managerially control, space and time.

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Published in

Organization

Volume

23

Issue

3

Pages

434-450

Citation

SAGE, D. ... et al., 2016. Organizing space and time through relational human-animal boundary work: exclusion, invitation and disturbance. Organization, 23(3), pp.434-450.

Publisher

Sage

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2016-02-11

Copyright date

2016

Notes

This paper was published in the journal Organization and the definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1350508416629449

ISSN

1350-5084

eISSN

1461-7323

Language

  • en