has been an increasing dissatisfaction with the constraints and lacunae in the underlying tenets of social constructionism and it has been challenged by a number of important developments and trends in social theory and research such as materialism and practice theory. It may appear strange to start a chapter on new materialism with a discussion of social constructionism, but the latter’s popularity in housing studies and the links between the two approaches make this way of proceeding useful. In part, new materialism was adopted as a reaction to the social
well-being’ or CICT ( Sikka, 2022 , 2023 ) . Following a précis of this definition, I apply my ‘auto-ethnographic and rhizomatic socio-material feminist approach to science and technology’ method in four phases, via: (1) a case study-driven overview of Purearth, a UK-based wellness company; (2) a deeper discussion of method; (3) the application of new materialism to the company and its products through the use of an ‘agential cut’; and (4) an auto-ethnographic exegesis through which I chronicle and reflect on my consumption of Purearth’s ‘Immunity Drinks Pack’ over
’ve arrived at an inflection point, where CCO theorizing must engage with a body of thought not conventionally associated with communicative thinking. I’ll lay out the challenge and then present a possible path (one I’ll quickly reject). In the next section, it’ll take a few pages to arrive at the intellectual connection, but I’ll be arguing for the necessity of engaging with a body of thought called new materialism(s) if CCO thinking is to develop novel theorizations of the firm under communicative capitalism. New materialism(s) and CCO theorizing The preceding
“Corporate purpose” has become a battleground for stakeholders’ competing desires. Some argue that corporations must simply generate profit; others suggest that we must make them create social change.
Leading organization studies scholar Timothy Kuhn argues that this “either-or” thinking dramatically oversimplifies matters: today’s corporations must be many things, all at once.
Kuhn offers a bold new Communicative Theory of the Firm to highlight the authority that creates corporations’ identities and activities. The theory provides a roadmap for navigating that battleground of competing desires to produce more responsive corporations.
Drawing on communicative and new materialist theorizing, along with three insightful case studies, this book thoroughly redefines our understandings of what corporations are “for.”
REPLY Enriching discourse theory: the discursive-material knot as a non-hierarchical ontology: a reply to Nico Carpentier Mads Ejsing, mae@ifs.ku.dk Lars Tønder, lt@ifs.ku.dk University of Copenhagen, Denmark In this reply, we question whether ‘the knot’ is the best way to describe the relationship between the discursive and the material. Our main objective is to show that the discursive and material are co-extensive and therefore emerge from within the same assemblage, prior to any ‘knot’ between them. To develop this idea, we draw on the new materialism
categories only become relevant after the event or experience ‘has happened’? The ‘new materialism’ on which Carpentier draws (as do we) makes a case for the latter. New materialism begins by insisting that material ‘stuff’ is neither passive nor mechanical, but rather embodies degrees of agency that enable it to affect real change across time and space. The name for this capacity, in Jane Bennett’s felicitous vocabulary, is ‘thing-power’ ( Bennett, 2004 : 375). While thing-power highlights the vibrancy nested in all modes of materiality, the concept does not amount to a
discursive and the material, and by providing a better theoretisation of the entanglement of the discursive and the material. This article remains grounded in, and loyal to, discourse theory, but aims to learn from new materialism in order to develop a non-hierarchical theory of entanglement, as a discursive-material knot. In particular, it investigates the theoretical- conceptual potential of three concepts, namely the assemblage, the invitation and the investment. This theoretical development also has strategic importance, in that it facilitates a better and more
metaphor and keep in mind that the knot can never be unravelled or disentangled. What we can do, as analysts of the discursive-material knot, is follow the rope (a bit like Actor Network Theory (ANT) researchers ‘follow the actor’ – see Law, 1991 ; Ruming, 2009 ). When engaging in this expanding discourse theory project, the accomplishments of ‘old’ materialisms need to be acknowledged (after all, Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory is a post-Marxist theory) but especially the developments in the field of new materialism 10 (which aims to rethink and revalidate the
inhabit. I discuss these linked narratives later and consider the ways in which HIV medicines have enacted a dynamic set of socialities that call attention to the world ‘inside’ the body as well as the precarious social and economic context in which these women live their lives. This chapter is located at the intersection of medical anthropology and science and technology studies (STS), and it is principally informed by feminist new materialism that has brought bios and the materiality of our embodied lives back into focus in the humanities. In ‘new materialism
at overcoming the traditional nature-culture dichotomy by adopting positions that could be called monistic (as opposed to dualist). Versions of the metaphysical idea that all phenomena in the world hark back to a single substance or entity can be found, for example, in ancient philosophy, in Hinduism, in Spinoza, and in Deleuze. All these approaches share the panentheistic belief in an impersonal creative life force and in active matter. A major proponent of a new strand of monism, often referred to as new materialism, is the American physicist and feminist
