Reconstructing Organization

This unique book breaks original ground in management and organization studies by drawing on over 2½ years of ethnographic study in a major UK international airport group. Much has been written about the ‘McDonaldisation’ or ‘Disneyization’ of society, but few have been attentive to what the author terms ‘Loungification of society’. A minor mode of organization, but one whose effects are likely to become ever more profound, this study shows how management and organization is itself being reconstructed and reshaped by way of loungification. Drawing on critical management studies, actor-network theory, and debates in contemporary anthropology around the so-called ontological turn, Reconstructing Organization enacts a veritable experiment in business and management studies. Who are these coming loungers? What do they want? Can we manage them? Or will they soon capture us with their talking chairs and ‘crinicultural’ politics? 

“This is a highly original book looking to explain ‘ontologies-in-the-making’ where new objects/subjects zig-zig across formal organization within the highly artificial and self-enclosed space of the ‘lounge’. Based on 2½ years full time ethnographic fieldwork at Manchester Airport in the UK, O’Doherty’s provocative and controversial study reveals the spread of ‘loungification’, and the ‘loungers’ who briefly inhabit them. Loungification is that ‘lash up’ which exists in ‘the next five minutes’ and explains why organizations find loungers so difficult to deal with.With a host of empirical and heady theoretical insights, O’Doherty propels us airside, through his airport lounge, out into a wider world of problematic, indeed ethereal, organization. His aim is to challenge organization studies from its lethargy and show that organization matters.” (Professor Gibson Burrell, University of Leicester, UK)

“Written by one of the most challenging and original of contemporary organization scholars, this book bucks the trend of investing scholarly effort in the production of minimally worthy, rapidly forgotten journal articles. It offers a thoughtful and instructive account of a lengthy period of field work at Manchester airport. It's substance and form are testament to the author’s determination to produce an ethnography that is both theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich. It deals head-on with the question of howwe are to understand, and theorize, the flux and untidiness of everyday, nascent forms of organization and organizing that tend to be unacknowledged, disrespected or rendered neat and seemingly predictable within established forms of analysis.” (Professor Hugh Willmott, CASS Business School, London, UK)

“Like all the best ethnographies this book succeeds in revealing the true strangeness of some quite familiar things but it also does something more. In describing the, usually invisible,  work that underpins the emergence of the airport's various customers, O'doherty also explains that customers don't just have to be attracted, captured or seduced - they have to be made. This closely observed account should be read by anyone who wants to understand more about how contemporary social life and markets are organised.” (Professor Liz McFall, Open University, UK)

“In the company of the author we are offered the chance to depart the confines of business schools and their entrenched normativities to instead become ethnographically bound to the vicissitudes of the airport Escape Lounge. However, in place of a comfortable sofa, we are challenged to rethink this space with the work of Foucault, Laclau, Mouffe, Derrida, Mol, Stengers, Harraway, Latour and Strathern. We are asked to experiment with our methodological preoccupations. And we are told to think like a lounge. Loungers, lounging and a miasmic loungification provide the opportunity for O’Doherty to explore the question of what is it that is organizing us? How does organizing an airport as a constitutive action, provide specific form to ontologies-in-the-making? And how can ontologies form at the same time as an airport lounge disorganizes, hybridises and disrupts our conventions? Perhaps the Escape Lounge is a space from which we will not leave – at least not in the same shape nor with the same haircut.” (Professor Daniel Neyland, Goldsmiths University, London, UK)

Damian P. O’Doherty is a senior lecturer of Organization Analysis at the Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, UK. He has published widely in management and organization studies, is the current Associate Editor of Organization and Director of the Alliance Manchester Business School Ethnography Centre.