Call for Papers

Talking about violence, the actual or potential physical harm (Costas & Grey, 2019: 1573), often prompts feelings of discomfort. Indeed, violence is largely publicly condemned and outlawed. It is put at a distance, minimized, and invisibilized (Arnold & Costas, 2024) through normalization (Abdelnour & Abu Moghli, 2021), othering (Kenny, 2016) or relabelling (Sandman, 2023). Yet, at the same time, violence is still ubiquitous in contemporary societies. Recent movements such as #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, or Abolish the Police have restated the importance of accounting for the lived experiences of violence while the Ukraine War has, once more, put the spotlight on organized violence in public and academic debates. Whether in relations between the state (especially the police or the military) and citizens (Malešević, 2017), corporations and local communities (Alcadipani & de Oliveira Medeiros, 2020; Banerjee, 2008; Chertkovskaya & Paulsson, 2021; Van Lent et al., 2022), the workplace (Way, 2023) or in intimate interactions at home (Hearn, 2013), violence, in its different shapes and forms, remains embedded in power relations. Violence is thus at the root of social interactions within various contexts.
 
Recent studies have drawn attention to how violence can constitute a strategic resource (Böhm & Pascucci, 2020), be exercised for control purposes (Arnold & Costas, 2024), serve achieving compliance (Martí & Fernández, 2013) or order (Crawford & Dacin, 2020) as well as be mobilized to protest and resist (Lobbedez, 2023). Following this emerging line of research, this sub-theme takes an interest in how violence, as an organized phenomenon, is performed and experienced by different actors and in different settings. Our aim is to shed more light on the invisible and visible forms of violence as to develop a better empirical and theoretical understanding of the intersections between power, control, resistance, and violence. We invite contributions that explore the discursive and embodied dimensions of violence, aiming to understand how actors creatively carry out and display (or not) violent acts as well as cope, adapt, and respond to violent contexts. We believe an increasingly pressing matter is also to reflect on how to study violence without engaging in a “pornography of violence” (Bourgois, 2001: 11). We are therefore equally interested in papers which address how to approach violence methodologically.
 
Potential contributions include, but are not restricted to, the following themes:

• The invibilization and visibilization of violence

• The embodied performance of violence, including the crafting and training of the body

• The discursive construction of violence by different actors, such as violators, violated, the media or the public

• The differentiated and situated perceptions of violence and its legitimacy

• The use of violence in various power relations, such as those between the Global North and South, the state and citizens or movements, organizations and their members

• Violence and its interrelation with gender, race, or class

• The lived experience of violence and possibility of resistance to violence

• Conceptualizations of violence, i.e. what falls under the concept of violence, how do different types of violence interrelate, and how/whether different categories of violence should be distinguished

• Engagements with different theoretical approaches to violence, such as situational, philosophical, or clinical ones

• Methodological concerns and challenges of studying violence, such as assessment and mitigation of the risks, degree of participation, politicization, positioning, and normativity

References

• Abdelnour, S., & Abu Moghli, M. (2021): “Researching violent contexts: A call for political reflexivity.” Organization, https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084211030646.

• Alcadipani, R., & Rodrigues de Oliveira Medeiros, C. (2020): “When Corporations Cause Harm: A Critical View of Corporate Social Irresponsibility and Corporate Crimes.” Journal of Business Ethics, 167 (2), 285–297.
• Arnold, P., & Costas, J. (2024): “Control Through Violence: A situational analysis of embodied practices of violence in a refugee reception centre.” Organization Studies, 45 (3), 409–431.
• Banerjee, S.B.(2008): “Necrocapitalism.” Organization Studies, 29 (12), 1541–1563.
• Böhm, S., & Pascucci, S. (2020): “It’s Not Just About the Mafia! Conceptualizing Business–Society Relations of Organized Violence.” Academy of Management Perspectives, 34 (4), 546–565.
• Bourgois, P. (2001): “The Power of Violence in War and Peace: Post-Cold War Lessons from El Salvador.” Ethnography, 2 (1), 5–34.
• Chertkovskaya, E., & Paulsson, A. (2021): “Countering corporate violence: Degrowth, ecosocialism and organising beyond the destructive forces of capitalism.” Organization, 28 (3), 405–425.
• Costas, J., & Grey, C. (2019): “Violence and Organization Studies.” Organization Studies, 40 (10), 1573–1586.
• Crawford, B., & Dacin, M.T. (2020): “Policing Work: Emotions and Violence in Institutional Work.” Organization Studies, 42 (8), 1219–1240.
• Hearn, J. (2013): “The sociological significance of domestic violence: Tensions, paradoxes and implications.” Current Sociology, 61 (2), 152–170.
• Kenny, K. (2016): “Organizations and Violence: The Child as Abject-Boundary in Ireland’s Industrial Schools.” Organization Studies, 37 (7), 939–961.
• Lobbedez, E. (2023): Resistance Movements Under Repression: An Ethnography of the Yellow Vests’ Responses to Sanctions and Pushback. Dissertation, emlyon business school.
• Malešević, S. (2017): “The organisation of military violence in the 21st century.” Organization, 24 (4), 456–474.
• Martí, I., & Fernández, P. (2013): “The Institutional Work of Oppression and Resistance: Learning from the Holocaust.” Organization Studies, 34 (8), 1195–1223.
• Sandman, T. (2023): “How violence dis/appears in narratives on war-like operations: a conceptual framework.” Critical Military Studies, 9 (3), 285–305.
• Van Lent, W., Islam, G., & Chowdhury, I. (2022): “‘Civilized Dispossession’: Corporate accumulation at the dawn of modern capitalism.” Organization Studies, 43 (12), 1941–1966.
• Way, A.K. (2023): “Cruel optimism as organizing strategy in USA Gymnastics: The threat of high-stakes organizations in precarious times.” Human Relations, 76 (4), 577–601.
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