ORGANIZING ROCKS
All good things come to an end, but then again, although we closed our exhibition in Luleå this weekend, it is ready to go to another place, in another time:-)
We’re grateful to the city library in Luleå for making this possible and to all the visitors, some of who left very kind words in our guestbook!
Yesterday we opened the exhibition of the project at the city library in Luleå. Colleagues, friends and strangers made it through our photos, videos, sounds, music and texts, as well as Magnus Fredriksson’s artwork. We’re very happy to be able to have this interaction with people and hope many more find their way to the library during the remained of September (we close the exhibition on Sep 30).
A friend and colleague to us, professor Rickard Garvare, took some wonderful photos, which he has allowed us to share on our site:
It’s Summertime and as Swedes, we’re hell bent for vacation. But, we have happy news and want to share them with you.
On September 9, the town of Luleå celebrates “The night of culture” (Kulturnatta, in Swedish) and we have been invited by the city library, located down town in the House of Culture, to set up the art exhibition of Organizing rocks. This, we believe, is a very good reason to visit Luleå! The exhibition will be open all through September and you’ll find the exhibition as soon as you enter the library.
Now, continue having a nice Summer:-)
Blogupdates have been less frequent during the last couple of months. We believe its because we’re in the writing-up phase. It’s not easy to invite you to the analytical mess we’re in. But on the other hand, that’s probably the reason why we should share more.
We’re conceptually tearing our hair (oh well, we’re both almost bold), sometimes splitting hairs, around the concepts of space and time. In the application for Organizing rocks, as sources of inspiration, we cited the work on “action nets” by Barbara Czarniawska, but we haven’t really returned to this concept during our empirical endeavors. Since a couple of months back, we’re digging into it and are finding ourselves back into the actor-network theory literature.
In 1999, we took a doctoral course together that introduced us to this literature. Johan used it lightly in his dissertation while Tommy went deeper and developed part of this literature in his dissertation. He also ended up spending a year at the sociology department (with John Law, a main contributor to ANT) in Lancaster, UK. Together, we’ve since then also written two articles on codes of ethics with ANT as main body of reference (also co-authored with Sven Helin). So, here we go again, older and wiser, we thought…
Nah, if it is one thing that the ANT-literature manages well, it is to simultaneously inspire and confuse the reader. There is a mixed feeling of ‘there is something here’ and ‘what the h-ll do they mean?’ How about (our constructions): a ‘flat mine in fire space’ or a ‘mine as a mutable mobile in fluid space’? Czarniawska’s writings help out to some extent here, predominantly because she develops her own ‘dialect’ of ANT that is useful to organising studies. We must follow her in that ambition, although our ethnography of the Kiruna mine in particular also challenges her previous ANT-inspired theorising on space-time. Which is good of course, it’s how it should be!
The picture heading this post is of the Hjalmar Lundbohm house, part of the area that at the time of writing is moved to another location in Kiruna due to the expanding mine. In the background, you’ll see the famous clock at the city hall. This clock is also being dismantled and moved to the new city centre.
Our logbook has been updated. And by the way, Tommy has released a solo album in Swedish with some of songs also relevant to Organizing rocks. Click here to listen to it on Spotify.
Three days of sensemaking on ‘what is this about?’ and ‘so what?’.
A Baldrick-style idea for one article and a h-ll of a lot stories with which to cook a book.
Between March 11-25, an art exhibit of Organizing rocks will be on display in the city hall in Kiruna. It is organised by the local art association, Kiruna Konstgille. The exhibition also includes illustrations of our project by the local artist Magnus Fredriksson (one of his illustration serves as the picture for this blogpost).
In the exhibition we intend to evoke the question of how we can understand the organising of a mine. Contrasting our two cases – the Kiruna mine and the McArthur River mine – with each other, we particularly hope to raise questions and trigger thoughts about where a labor process begins and ends, and how this might be relevant for where Kiruna is heading.
To be given the opportunity to exhibit our project in Kiruna, and in Sweden’s most beautiful city hall, is beyond any of our expectations. We are very grateful to the art association for this chance.
Click here for the invitation in Swedish. Please spread the word!
As noticed from all the storytellerposts perhaps, we’re in the process of writing-up our empirical material. The feeling of having too little material is quickly changed into a feeling of having too much…
At the outset of the project we aimed at writing two scientific papers and one research monograph. The two papers are now in process. We sent one extended abstract of a paper on the Kiruna mine to the European Group of Organizations Studies (EGOS) conference in Copenhagen, early July. We just got accepted, which is great news. EGOS tends to be a high quality conference. For us, this means a clear deadline, which is also great news (how else get things done?!). We’ve also sent one extended abstract on the Canadian case to the Swedish society for working life studies (FALF) conference outside Malmö in mid-June. Hopefully, they’ll give us the green light, and another deadline. Maybe we see some of you at one or two of these conferences?
The research monograph, however, is debated between us at the moment. It’s not a debate on whether or not we should write it – we will – but in what format (traditional or more ‘thick magazine’ like) and in which language (English or Swedish). While quarrelling, the massaging of the empirical material continues. Either way, we look forward to come out and speak with more ‘traditional’ scientific products in the near future.
The frontman of AC/DC, Brian Jonson, once replied to a journalist’s question about why AC/DC has remained so popular since the 1970s, that their music enters the listener through the groin first – men and women alike. Listening to, playing and recording music we can sort of relate to this groin sensation. But what has this to do with science?
Nothing says the instrumentalists and the purists. Nothing says those who fear conflict and going against the grain. We say that the importance of groin is there, for sure, but it’s almost a taboo-thing to expose and talk about. Doing fieldwork, reading a text or engaging in conversations, is something that the groin is taking part in. It’s not bracketed off from the rest of the body. The groin, however, is not always related to physical attraction and sex, although this sometimes is the case when reading or writing texts, engaging in conversations or observations.
By this we do not mean to downplay reason. There is great danger in following your groin (or your gut feeling or a sudden feel in the heart), in following your senses, without consulting the faculty of reason. But, we have to accept and be open about that our groins (as well as gut feeling and heartaches) sometimes are dead right from the beginning and without which the faculty of reason many times is helplessly left in the dark.
This post could be interpreted as another text seeking to address the problematic abyss between body and soul, mind and body, but it has a twist: the groin, so connected to physical attraction and sex, is an “elephant in the room”. Very rarely do we come across researchers who take in their groinly experience in research and seriously ponder its scientific importance (scientists do spend time and effort trying to understand how, when and why the groin matters for their objects of study, or interviewees, or respondents, or even co-participants). So, the basic point is to bring in the groin to accompany stomach, heart, senses and reason. An example from our Organizing rocks study would perhaps be appropriate here, but we need to come back on this one…
The third album from the project, “Gruvan makten samhället” (in Swedish), is now on Spotify and soon on the sites of all major digital distributors. On the left-side menu you’ll find the album booklet (in Swedish) in which you can read about all songs. Hope you’ll enjoy it and that you’ll consider spreading it!
As noted in the Storyteller-posts, we’ve started to read interviews related to the Kiruna mine. This awoke a discussion between us on how much we should allow theories and concepts to guide our reading. On one hand, lets just read them and trust our reading. After all, we know what we’re interested in. Don’t we? On the other hand, lets fine-tune a coding scheme based on an extended view of labour process theory and ship it all into NVivo. Order in the project! On top of that, reading interviews is fun but really deceptive, isn’t? A full-senses conversation once upon a time reduced to 15 pages of text…
In principle, we’re in favour of the first alternative. In principle, social science is in favour of the second alternative (one clue: Robert Yin’s case study book, on today’s date, has 120615 citations in Google Scholar). Given our bias then, we agreed on a rather simple and open ‘coding scheme’ (for now without NVivo), reminding us to make notes in the texts of the following themes or categories(?):
Context – background descriptions (historical or contemporary) of how it is to live, work, be in Kiruna; how the mine unites and/or pulls Kiruna apart
Labour process – knowledge/skills, technology/technology development, influence/autonomy, identity/subject, global/local, boundaries (time/space, mine, work, society, nature)
Method – when methodological issues are explicitly drawn into the conversations
Stories – highlight all stories that, for whatever reason (don’t have to be labour process connected), have a strong impact on us
These very broad themes are – and should be – amorphous and we try to read the interviews parallel to each other, reading, talking, reading, talking, now and then write a storyteller post so that you’ll get a feel for our material and where we are in the process. So, to be continued.
On November 9-13, we are invited to Krakow, Poland, to give talks and live concerts about Organizing rocks, at the Jagiellonski University as well as down town Krakow. It’s a fantastic opportunity to tell stories on research method and on mining, labour and power, through a mix of talking, showing images and videos, and playing music.
Perhaps the most evident, positive effect (so far) from our decision to go public from the start with Organizing rocks is our new friendship with Dr Michal Zawadzki at Jagiellonski University in Krakow, Poland (warm hugs to Monika Kostera who connected us). Michal early on started to follow our project and he proved not only a very intellectual, engaging academic (he is an assistant professor in management), but also a beyond awesome drummer. When you listen to our music production, it’s Michal who plays the drums.
On October 20-21, we participated at the annual conference for business studies in Sweden, FEKIS, at Uppsala University.
During the day, our project was one out of three examples of scholars in business studies researching societies; a session built on the idea of research challenging the predominant focus on formal organizations. Besides Organizing rocks, there were Caroline Wigren’s study of Gnosjö and Mikael Holmqvist’s study of Djursholm. Our project, however, does not aim at studying Kiruna as such (although it is hard to avoid), but definitely aimed at challenging a lot of formal organizational boundaries, given that an understanding of the labour process cannot be confined to such boundaries. The crowd was large and although difficult to say, interest also seemed to be high.
Some of the questions asked during the session were: how do you know you have the theories needed, how do you present yourself in the field, why did LKAB stop you from going inside the gates etc.
After the sessions ended and people were mingling before dinner, we played live outside the lecture halls, in total four songs from our upcoming Swedish album on the Kiruna mine. The songs were: Regn över berget, Den svenska malmen, Stänger alla kranar and Vackert. This was the first time we played together (photo by Mikael Holmqvist):
The morale of this story is that any kind of social science research implies going in and out of moods. Being in a mood, and throughout life, in different contexts, going in and out of moods, is a precondition for human lives. And of course, this is a lived experience that is totally left out in social science textbooks, conferences and PhD education. Different moods imply different conversations, different writing, different analysis, different reading, different, well, you name it. So, here follows a rather moody text about different moods in our project – so far.
At first, we passionately ”wrote” the project (i.e. research applications). Passion, then, was the primary mood. Then when entering the field in Kiruna, we fell in love with the project. Love at first sight, actually. Call it “the Kiruna people effect”, all the stories they told, the way they did it. The mine and the people are deeply, historically, connected, and so are our interests in the project, changing power relations and the labour process.
After that we got into a sort of “nitty-gritty” mood; visiting the site, trying to understand the complexities in rather familiar ways (eg. very loose conversations, normally called interviews in the genre of social science) and in unfamiliar ways (eg. shooting film, taking photos, writing blogposts, making music). The prime mood in this stage was joy.
Then all of a sudden, we stumbled upon problems: we were denied entry to the mine. The mood here was a mild shock. The post-shock mood, at first, was of the kind that “this will be solved”, a mood best called pragmatic. Working in this mood for a couple of months, eventually realizing that this will most likely not be sorted out, led to a post-shock sadness (on some days, even a bit anger) mood. The project continued, but was seriously changed as we could no more observe and take part in the daily work in the mine, and also losing out on the top-management perspective.
However, sadness turned to a need to change plans. We entered into a sort of a strategy mood and started to focus on broader categories of people and society. These had been on our “radar” and in our plans, but now we took time and effort to meet and engage. New meetings, new people, brought back some of the initial passion and love (meeting new people up here always do!), but experiencing difficulties meeting more employees of the company (as we’re always honest with them about how top management approaches us, employees get a bit worried, even though they would like to meet us), there is always a semi-dark cloud of hanging over the project.
This is where we are today, reflecting on our research process in a hotel room in Kiruna (where we are right now). Time has therefore come to start taking stock of what we have, partly in order to start writing up, partly to return to the field with analyses.
Below is text on responsible research by guest blogger, Anette Hallin at Mälardalen University, Sweden (read more about Anette by clicking here):
What is our responsibility as researchers? To develop knowledge about the world, most people would answer. But how do we do this in a responsible way?
According to my view, performing responsible research involves issues about the relationship between the researcher and that which she studies; a question addressed in several blogs here (see Jan 29 and March 24). My conviction is that it is necessary for us, if we are claiming to develop knowledge about the world, to engage in all ways possible with that which we study. We need to combine sense and sensibility.
But how to we do this? As researchers we are trained to use our heads; to observe, document, measure, analyze and theorize. We are less skilled at feeling and expressing emotions. It is as if we have ruled out the possibility of knowledge residing also in the parts of the brain where this type experiences are processed. Even though there has been a lot of talk about “embodiment”, “situated practices” and phenomenology-informed research, we seem, also as qualitative researchers, to trust one part of our body the most when developing knowledge about the world: the part of our brain prone to analytical thinking.
Maybe we are not to blame. After all, the moving away from the human body as the source of knowledge about the outside world and the development of logical positivism was developed based on the same set of ideas that led to development of the metric system. Before this, people used their bodies to gain knowledge about things outside their bodies through anthropomorphic measurements like “a foot”. In stratified societies, exact and non-anthropomorphic measures however were symbols of justice and came with time to be seen as a criteria distinguishing civilization from non-civilization. Today, just as the knowledge about how to use the physical body to measure and weigh things has gone out of fashion, we seem to not know how to use all of that which is ourselves when it comes to doing research. We may even have lost our ability to feel with other people, as concepts such as “feelings”, “emotions” and “empathy” seem to belong to a different discourse than that of science.
This is sad because if we are to believe Aristotle and his idea of catharsis, knowledge about the human condition (which we all are interested in understanding better in some way as social scientists), can be developed through the internal process of experiencing a strong emotional experience, which is what fictional tragedy provides us with, according to him. And he is right. How many of us have not been struck with radical insights when reading a piece of fiction, or when watching a film? The notion of catharsis suggests that knowledge can only be developed when we experience strong emotions in relation to something. This is, as we all know, quite far from how we are supposed to perform research.
What would happen if we became better at using all of our selves when performing research; if we combined sense and sensibility? I think that developing a research of sensibility would help us move beyond the dichotomies that we seem to be so fond of creating in our attempts at making sense (sic!) of things. For a long time now, thinkers have argued that dichotomies like subject-object; body-mind; local-global; humans-artifacts; science-art; etc, don’t correspond to reality – in the world there are no dichotomies, only continuity and interaction. At the same time we keep using them, lacking better ways of making sense of what we experience. A research where we combine sense and sensibility would thus provide us with a different understanding of the world.
But how would such research be performed in practice? And how would scientific criteria be challenged – and met – with such a research agenda of combining sense and sensibility? There have been some suggestions as to how this could be done, often based on a phenomenological understanding of the world, for example by learning from the work of artists. And I hold good hopes there will be more. As human beings we are equipped with the ability to feel, not only to think. So in order to combine sense with sensibility we, the researchers, need to develop the ways we work with feelings and emotions in addition to our work with (visual) observations and analytics in all phases of research work. This way, the research we perform will be “thick” and will draw upon all kinds experiences we have when studying a phenomenon.
The exploration by the Organizing Rocks-team, of how to express their research in music is such an example. Music can in a special way express emotions and capture feelings, thus relating to a different sphere than the sphere of analytical logics that we so commonly use as researchers. Therefore, music has the ability, together with other forms of expression – also the traditional ones such as papers in journals and presentations at conferences – to constitute a “thick” description such as the one argued for here.
As researchers and intellectuals we organize, direct, lead and educate others, which means that we inevitably exercise cultural hegemony as Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci put it, also when aiming at making our informants active participants. I think that our position as researchers involves a responsibility to aim at a nuanced understanding – to the extent that this is possible – about the life-worlds and practices that we aim at saying something about. In order to do so we need to make research a matter not only of sense, but of sensibility.