Elke Weik - Böcker

Institutions Incorporated draws together aspects of human and organizational corporeality and links them to institutions. This book explores the 'dark side' of institutions, their materiality and the bodily involvement of their users, in an environment where perfection is measured in intangible entities, notably reason and will.

Institutions Incorporated draws together aspects of human and organizational corporeality and links them to institutions. This book explores the 'dark side' of institutions, their materiality and the bodily involvement of their users, in an environment where perfection is measured in intangible entities, notably reason and will.

This book presents an experiential, aesthetic-affective approach to the study of institutions. It complements current thinking about institutions by showing how institutions constitute people long before people constitute them.

This book presents an experiential, aesthetic-affective approach to the study of institutions. Drawing on institutional sociology, hermeneutics, phenomenology and process philosophy, it conceptualises institutions as collective experiences with their own self-promoting and self-propelling powers. Instead of seeing institutional emergence, change and decline as the result of actors’ interests and manipulations, this book re-establishes the importance of factors beyond human design and intervention. Drawing on process theory, it shows how ideas, norms and values can form self-stabilising configurations that affect people without conscious realisation. It complements current thinking about institutions by showing how institutions constitute people long before people constitute them. With the help of authors as diverse as Antonio Damasio, A.N. Whitehead, J.W. von Goethe and Max Weber, Elke Weik crafts a perspective that allows us to understand institutions as aesthetic and affective powersin their own right. This book is for researchers interested in process theory, institutional and organisational studies, hermeneutics, and aesthetics.

This handbook gathers contributors from different disciplines of the social sciences, such as organization and management studies, sociology, anthropology and political science, to constructively discuss the kinds of transformations we need to see in coming years. These transformations concern the way we work, produce and consume but also the way in which we think about work, production and consumption. In an explicit rejection of the demand that the social sciences provide quick fixes, the contributors of this handbook discuss possible solutions in a critical and comprehensive manner and with an eye to both their environmental and societal implications. The handbook is divided into four parts: Opening up futures, Techno-economic transformations at work, Sustainable environmental transformation, and Radical democratic futures. The handbook is of interest to all critical academics interested in constructive suggestions regarding necessary societal transformations.