Sub-theme 76: The Topological Imagination: Space, Time, and Organizational Form
Call for Papers
This sub-theme complements organization theory’s by-now well established ‘topographical imagination’ – investigating organization’s
sitedness, its everyday spatial multiplicity and contestation, and its spatial poetics (Beyes & Holt, 2020) – with a ‘topological
imagination’ attuned to the spatial interplay of organizational form, connectivity and deformation. How can we understand
and study organization in its spatial formations? Camps; zones; platforms; enclaves; markets; grids; (free)ports; networks.
And how does the study of such topologies alter our understanding of organization?
Mathematically understood,
topology deals with spatial types, generating their own ‘forms’ and ‘lines’ that remain consistent even in situations where
they are subject to deforming forces. In technological terms, it similarly denotes properties of technological objects or
processes that remain stable even if its physical settings or its application and uses change. In the past decades, topological
thinking has been resuscitated in fields such as Cultural Theory (Lury et al., 2012), Science and Technology Studies (Mol
& Law, 1994; Marres, 2012), Human Geography (Allen, 2011; Crang &Travlou, 2001; Latham, 2011) and Anthropology (Gros
et al., 2019), and it has also begun to make its presence felt in the spatial study of organization (Ratner, 2022), culture
(O’Doherty, 2013) and of alternative entrepreneurship (Redmalm and Skoglund, 2020).
In bringing topology
to organization theory this subtheme proposes that ‘the organizational’ (or ‘organizationality’) comes in different spatial
types or forms. Organization is (and always has been) performed in a topologically heterogenous manner, predicated on and
propelled by multiple topological figures and figurations such as neighbourhood, enclave, playground, marketplace, network,
grid, camp, or even crossroads. These figures are to be understood processually, as ‘spacetimes’ or ‘spacing’ (Beyes and Steyaert,
2012), since they ‘deform into one another’ (Lash, 2012, p. 264; emphasis omitted). In this sense, topological analysis has
been framed as the study of ‘spaces of deformation’ (Günzel, 2007), revealing and provoking the ways in which more or less
stable elements (structures, techniques, material forms) of organization are continually connecting and transforming, but
nevertheless still reproducing themselves.
Topology can then be understood as a way of investigating forms
of organizational space – spatial formations – that retain certain properties while allowing for continuous – situational,
relational – transformations. Topological thinking thus allows for thinking together the ‘knot’ of sameness and fluidity,
of continuity and change, that marks organizational space, while staying away from assumptions of stable spatial hierarchies
or scales or dialectics and their power differentials. The potency of topology, therefore, is its sensitivity to how power
works spatially (see Allen, 2011; Collier, 2009). While attuned to visible (and non-metaphoric) spatial forms such as camps
and prisons, topology registers the “quieter, less brash forms of power than domination and overt control” (Allen, 2016),
forms which mediate and pattern life almost invisibly, making centralized power an effect, not a cause, of circulation (Foucault,
2009, 18-19; see also Berlant, 2016).
As sociologists Noortje Marres and Celia Lury have argued, moreover,
topology is more than a theory adopted to help us see spatial forms and their everyday deformation; it has become a performative
logic or device which shapes organized life (Lury, 2013; Marres, 2012). Consider today’s electronic space of ‘topological
computation’ (Parisi, 2012: 165). Organization is both shaped by and embedded in ‘a global topology in which almost any point
can connect to any other, mobilizing resources on a planetary scale’ (Wark 2016: n.p.). Given the now ubiquitous and pervasive
computerization of organizational life, the notion of topology helps think and explore the abstracted and usually invisible
spatialities of digitized informational grids and linkages that span, control and shape organization: sets of points and their
connectedness, their (electronic) vectors and software-based operations, their atmospheric, sensory and affective force (Beyes
et al., 2022; Juhlin and Holt 2022).
This sub-theme is therefore dedicated to exploring and mapping different
organizational topologies (and their interplays): how we might identify and understand organizational forms as topological
forms, and how organization takes form through different topological shapes, as ongoing processes of spatial formation or
figuration. This both entails and takes us beyond classical and orthodox spatial figures of organization. We invite empirical,
historical and theoretical explorations of, for instance (and merely indicatively):
networked and platform topologies as the perhaps prevalent contemporary topological forms;
logistical topologies that shape how organization takes place;
the limits and dissolution of organization and organization form;
algorithmic forms of topological computation and their organizational power;
urban topologies that shape everyday organized life (from playgrounds to neighbourhoods);
the breakdown and repair of social infrastructures - from schools to finance systems
historical and contemporary topologies of the market place, the enclave, the grid, the zone, the camp and other ‘classic’ spatial forms of organization;
the political mediation of proximity (as opposed to belonging) in e.g. citizenship, membership, and other forms created from relation;
artistic renderings of, and experiments with, spatio-organizational forms, so prevalent in recent art practice;
alternative topological figures that help us make sense of today’s predicaments of organizing;
the aesthetics of organizational topologies, such as spatial and visual representations and prefigurations of organizational form;
idealizations and distillations (e.g. polis, distopia/utopia) of organizational form;
the rationalization of movement in artistic practice (e.g. choreography) as well as contemporary work practices (e.g. food delivery).
We envisage
the sub-theme to develop and map a topological imagination in, and for, the study of organization, to be translated into a
special issue or a handbook of organizational forms.
References
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