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Affective atmospheres of sensemaking and learning: workplace meetings as aesthetic and anaesthetic

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journal contribution
posted on 2019-11-21, 09:21 authored by Chloe Vitry, Dan SageDan Sage, Andrew Dainty
The aim of this paper is to explore sensemaking and learning processes with and through affective atmospheres. We engage with recent research within the ‘affective turn’ across the social sciences and humanities to conceptualize the significance of quasi-autonomous affective atmospheres that emanate from and also condition collectives of humans and non-humans. Drawing on this atmospheric scholarship, we propose and elaborate an atmospheric analysis of sensemaking and learning processes to examine how such atmospheres aesthetically transform and anaesthetically constrain the potential of bodies, including our own as researchers to affect and be affected to sense and learn. Through empirical engagement with workplace meetings in a UK housebuilding firm, our analysis contributes by explaining how such atmospheres condition sensemaking that both registers the disorganising novelty of events and reduces such ambiguity and equivocality to enable purposeful action. While extant research has suggested how the interplay of these two dimensions of sensemaking enables learning, our analysis contributes by drawing attention to how the production, maintenance and transformation of specific atmospheres in workplace meetings imbues affects that condition these two dimensions of sensemaking. Such atmospheres thus constitute vital, yet seldom discussed, phenomena in conditioning learning within organisational life.

History

School

  • Business and Economics
  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Department

  • Business

Published in

Management Learning

Volume

51

Issue

3

Pages

274 - 292

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Rights holder

© the Authors

Publisher statement

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Management Learning and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507619893930. Users who receive access to an article through a repository are reminded that the article is protected by copyright and reuse is restricted to non-commercial and no derivative uses. Users may also download and save a local copy of an article accessed in an institutional repository for the user's personal reference. For permission to reuse an article, please follow our Process for Requesting Permission.

Acceptance date

2019-11-20

Publication date

2020-01-24

ISSN

1350-5076

eISSN

1461-7307

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Dan Sage Deposit date: 20 November 2019

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