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There are certain accepted points that influence ethnographic work, even though they do not condition or fully determine it. They include the notion that in order to develop theories about human life, an ethnographer must study human activities and the way people interpret their realities in their every-day context and must also identify and then synthesise the conditions of the field, the perspectives of the participants, the latent meanings of the context and the researcher's own ideas for the grounding, generation and expansion of propositions about what is actually going on in the events and places researched. In this process, foreshadowed problems are accepted to frame the initial focus, but producing and analysing materials from multiple sources and perspectives are also important in order to prevent over-steering from private ideas and concepts. Once formed, ethnographic propositions, descriptions or theories are explored and tested in terms of their general scope against further data. Ethnographic field-notes are one of the most important foundations in this activity.

Incorporating local space, matter, and society into our concepts of the global in analytically compatible ways poses a major challenge for contemporary scholars of both world systems and globalization. Many analysts ignore both materiality and locality of production. They assume the global as their point of departure, and attempt to incorporate the local into it. In this chapter, we aim to reverse that logic. We will take into account and theorize the interaction of natural and social processes. In other words, we will integrate ecologic or materio-spatial logic with sociologic within the economic logic of global markets.

This exploratory study, a Ph.D. dissertation completed at the University of Western Ontario in 2013, examines the materially embedded relations of power between library users and staff in public libraries and how building design regulates spatial behavior according to organizational objectives. It considers three public library buildings as organization spaces (Dale & Burrell, 2008) and determines the extent to which their spatial organizations reproduce the relations of power between the library and its public that originated with the modern public library building type ca. 1900. Adopting a multicase study design, I conducted site visits to three, purposefully selected public library buildings of similar size but various ages. Site visits included: blueprint analysis; organizational document analysis; in-depth, semi-structured interviews with library users and library staff; cognitive mapping exercises; observations; and photography.

Despite newer approaches to designing public library buildings, the use of newer information technologies, and the emergence of newer paradigms of library service delivery (e.g., the user-centered model), findings strongly suggest that the library as an organization still relies on many of the same socio-spatial models of control as it did one century ago when public library design first became standardized. The three public libraries examined show spatial organizations that were designed primarily with the librarian, library materials, and library operations in mind far more than the library user or the user’s many needs. This not only calls into question the public library’s progressiveness over the last century but also hints at its ability to survive in the new century.

Recent interest in the multimodal accomplishment of organization has focused on the material and symbolic aspects of materiality. We argue that current literature invokes diverse “multimodal imaginaries,” that is, ways of conceiving the relation between the material and the conceptual, and that the different imaginaries support a plurality of perspectives on materiality. Using the empirical case of a large urban renewal project in São Paulo, Brazil, we illustrate three different multimodal imaginaries – the concrete, the semiotic, and the mimetic – and indicate how each imaginary determines the way in which the site in question is discursively constructed. After outlining the different approaches, we discuss their theoretical implications, advantages, and constraints, setting an agenda for future studies of materiality in organizational and institutional contexts.

Drawing upon Alfred Sohn-Rethel's work, we argue that, just as capitalism produces abstract labor, it coproduces both abstract mind and abstract life. Abstract mind is the split between mind and nature and between subject/observer and observed object that characterizes scientific epistemology. Abstract mind reflects an abstracted objectified world of nature as a means to be exploited. Biological life is rendered as abstract life by capitalist exploitation and by the reification and technologization of organisms by contemporary technoscience. What Alberto Toscano has called “the culture of abstraction” imposes market rationality onto nature and the living world, disrupting biotic communities and transforming organisms into what Finn Bowring calls “functional bio-machines.”

The established role of communication in sustainability studies is mainly to transmit information, about or for sustainability: disciplinary knowledge or mobilization of popular support. This chapter addresses the sustainability of communication itself, with a performance accounting framework for sustainability of organizational communication. The organizational emphasis derives from incorporating basic concepts from the work of James R. Taylor and the “Montreal School” approach to theorizing organizational communication. Communication as “text” (discursive formats and genres) and “conversation” (interactive, situational sense-making, and exchange) is assessed according to narrative and dramatistic logics in addition to instrumental ones; and sustainability standards are applied to “triadic” dimensions of communications: (1) the physical-artifactual substratum, or “carriers” of communication, including technologies, (2) symbolic forms that convey information, meanings, and ideologies, and (3) relations and interactions of communicative role-playing. The goal is to provide for sustainable knowledge, meaning, and participation mainly in organizational settings.

The author conducted an ethnography of a social network site (SNS), a secret Facebook (FB) group with more than 60,000 members consisting of public school teachers from all over the Philippines, with the country being one of the fastest growing markets for FB in Southeast Asia with 47 million active FB accounts. The author frames her analysis of a social media group for educators within the larger socio-historical context of the Philippines to explore teacher agency. Teachers in the Philippines have historically held a low social and occupational status, shaped in part by colonialism, and maintained in policy discourse, social perceptions of cultural capital. Within a social media group, teachers are able to express frank views, but also reinforce certain norms. The chapter posits that the nuance of teacher status can be revealed from ethnographies that explore and promote teachers’ historical narratives. This study was undertaken during the initial stage of the implementation of the K-12 reform when various directives regarding curriculum, materials, pedagogy, medium of instruction, assessment, and reporting systems are being issued from the central office based in Manila to all 46,404 schools spread in the three major island groups.

In this paper, the authors explore the specific nature of material-based legitimation and examine how it differs from other forms of legitimation. Prior studies of institutional legitimacy have predominantly focused on the discursive and iconic aspects of legitimation, with much less focus placed on the role of materiality. To advance our argument, the authors introduce the notion of enactive legitimation. The authors suggest that legitimation is derived from and supported by the ongoing engagement and interaction with materials and material-based practices. To elaborate our argument, the authors study a case of the use of material signification to legitimize a new financial product within Islamic banking. The authors show that the legitimacy of the product is grounded in materials and the materiality of a number of ritualized practices. Materials and practices, however, also impose their own specific constraints on the process, and do so in ways that are more evident than when legitimation is based on signs and symbols (both language and images). The paper contributes to practice-based institutionalism by leveraging one of the central tenets of practice theory to extend the understanding of legitimation. It also illustrates what practice-based sensitivity may look like in action.

To defend the thesis that critical theory has become unable to call into question and challenge the main impulses of modern capitalist societies. The reason for this is that the capacities of language on the one hand and the hermeneutic processes that underlie the process of “recognition” are insufficient to counter the power of socialization to shape subjectivity and the cognitive and evaluative capacities of subjects.

I provide a critical reading of the methodology of linguistic and recognitive theories of intersubjectivity by means of a theory of domination derived from Rousseau which shapes the cognitive and epistemic powers of subjects thereby weakening their capacity to be socialized via the media of language and social recognition.

By divorcing our cognitive ideas about the social world from the social-ontological processes that shape and deform it under capitalism, this brand of critical theory succeeds in sealing off the mechanisms of social domination and power relations that were at the heart of the enterprise from its inception.

Critical theory must move toward a more comprehensive theory of the social totality in order for it to retain its critical character.

The paper questions the main ideas held by the mainstream of critical theory such as its reliance on hermeneutic and linguistic forms of consciousness and social praxis as well as a theoretical reliance on pragmatic theories of mind and Mead’s conception of socialization.