Torkild Thanem
Biographic Data
| ID | 3432439 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Torkild Thanem |
| GIVEN NAMES | Torkild |
| FAMILY NAME | Thanem |
| SIGNATURE | THANEM T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stockholm University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6020-1304 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 66 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Dissensus! Radical Democracy and Business Ethics
Embodied Research Methods
A book guiding researcers in the use of embodied methods in social science.Disembodied research erects false dichotomies between flesh and reason, and between the corporeal and the social. By contrast, Torkild Thanem and David Knights engage with approaches and practices that exploit the body’s capacity to generate knowledge, craft lively accounts, and create fleshy concepts. These approaches enrich our understanding of how people live, work, and…
Affective politics in gendered organizations
Current approaches to the study of affective relations are over-determined in a way that ignores their radicality, yet abstracted to such an extent that the corporeality and differentially lived experience of power and resistance is neglected. To radicalize the potential of everyday affects, this article calls for an intensification of corporeality in affect research. We do this by exploring the affective trajectory of ‘becoming-woman’ introduced…
Just doing gender? Transvestism and the power of underdoing gender in everyday life and work
While previous research in organization studies has utilized transgender to show how gender is done, overdone and undone, this literature lacks empirical grounding, and the theoretical arguments dominating it tend to idealize the transgressive power of transgender while reducing transgender to hyperbolic drag and stereotypical passing. To further advance the understanding of transgender within and around organizations, this article presents a qua…
What can bodies do? Reading Spinoza for an affective ethics of organizational life
Recent attempts to develop an embodied understanding of ethics in organizations have tended to mobilize a Levinasian and ‘im/possible’ ethics of recognition, which separates ethics and embodiment from politics and organization. We argue that this separation is unrealistic, unsustainable, and an unhelpful starting point for an embodied ethics of organizations. Instead of rescuing and modifying the ethics of recognition, we propose an embodied ethi…
Postscript
Sexual Politics, Organizational Practices
Guest editorial
More passion than the job requires? Monstrously transgressive leadership in the promotion of health at work
Despite Weber’s early emphasis on passionate emotions in charismatic leadership, and a recent but broader interest in the embodied and emotional aspects of leadership, we still know relatively little about how passions are embodied in leadership. We also know little about how such passions may transgress formally and socially defined limits of leadership in organizations. Through a case of workplace health promotion this paper therefore investiga…
All talk and no movement? Homeless coping and resistance to urban planning
Privileging the discursive expression of micro-resistance while exploiting spatial metaphors such as cynical distancing and escape, recent work in Critical Management Studies (CMS) has tended to find resistance everywhere without actually examining its spatial whereabouts. Utilizing a spatial approach, this article therefore investigates how homeless people in Stockholm not only resisted but also coped otherwise with two urban planning projects t…
Buggering Freud and Deleuze
Both Freud's and Deleuze's understandings of masochism limit the transgressive and subversive forces of masochism by taking sexual difference for granted. Drawing on Newton's fashion photography for Wolford and on feminist interrogations of Freud, Deleuze, and masochism, this paper therefore seeks to develop an alternative, queer theory of masochism as sexual indifference. Viewing masochism as sexual indifference opens up movements of desire beyo…
There’s no limit to how much you can consume’
During the past decade or so, organization studies has witnessed a small but growing interest in the human body, in health, and in the management of life beyond organizational boundaries. In light of this development, this paper investigates how the New Public Health seeks to construct and manage people as healthy bodies beyond the boundaries of formal work organizations. The paper does so through a discourse analysis of a UK health campaign on h…
Free At Last? Assembling, Producing and Organizing Sexual Spaces in Swedish Sex Education
This article seeks to critically investigate the assembling, production and organization of female and male sexuality in contemporary Swedish sex education. The empirical focus is on booklets and leaflets published by the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education (the RFSU). Employing the concept of assemblages articulated by Deleuze and Guattari and rearticulated in social, organizational and feminist theorizing, the article examines how the R…
Multiplicity, Virtuality and Organization
Formal organization is often seen as opposed or resistant to change, in theory as well as in practice. Drawing primarily on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze we argue that the reverse is true - that organization is itself a dynamic quality and that change and organization are imbricated in each other. We expand several key concepts of this philosophy in relation to organization (the multiplicity of order and the multiplicity of organization, strat…
Living on the Edge
Following the recent curiosity for monsters in social and organizational research, this paper questions the power, purity and boundaries of organization by accentuating its risky encounters with heterogeneous, monstrous bodies. In an attempt to problematize organization theory’s implicit dissociation of monsters from organization, the understanding and treatment of monsters is traced across a variety of discursive formations in Western history—fr…
The body without organs
In an attempt to challenge the status of the organizational, this paper proposes a ‘nonorganizational’ turn towards embodiment and desire. Introducing and critically discussing Deleuze and Guattari's () notion of the ‘body without organs’ (BwO), it argues that this may improve organization theory's opportunities to think about the forces of embodied desire that disrupt, undermine and escape organization, upset the homogeneity of organizational li…
Multiplicity, Virtuality and Organization
Formal organization is often seen as opposed or resistant to change, in theory as well as in practice. Drawing primarily on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze we argue that the reverse is true - that organization is itself a dynamic quality and that change and organization are imbricated in each other. We expand several key concepts of this philosophy in relation to organization (the multiplicity of order and the multiplicity of organization, strat…
Sexual Politics, Organizational Practices
The body without organs
In an attempt to challenge the status of the organizational, this paper proposes a ‘nonorganizational’ turn towards embodiment and desire. Introducing and critically discussing Deleuze and Guattari's () notion of the ‘body without organs’ (BwO), it argues that this may improve organization theory's opportunities to think about the forces of embodied desire that disrupt, undermine and escape organization, upset the homogeneity of organizational li…
There’s no limit to how much you can consume’
During the past decade or so, organization studies has witnessed a small but growing interest in the human body, in health, and in the management of life beyond organizational boundaries. In light of this development, this paper investigates how the New Public Health seeks to construct and manage people as healthy bodies beyond the boundaries of formal work organizations. The paper does so through a discourse analysis of a UK health campaign on h…
Free At Last? Assembling, Producing and Organizing Sexual Spaces in Swedish Sex Education
This article seeks to critically investigate the assembling, production and organization of female and male sexuality in contemporary Swedish sex education. The empirical focus is on booklets and leaflets published by the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education (the RFSU). Employing the concept of assemblages articulated by Deleuze and Guattari and rearticulated in social, organizational and feminist theorizing, the article examines how the R…
Postscript
More passion than the job requires? Monstrously transgressive leadership in the promotion of health at work
Despite Weber’s early emphasis on passionate emotions in charismatic leadership, and a recent but broader interest in the embodied and emotional aspects of leadership, we still know relatively little about how passions are embodied in leadership. We also know little about how such passions may transgress formally and socially defined limits of leadership in organizations. Through a case of workplace health promotion this paper therefore investiga…
Buggering Freud and Deleuze
Both Freud's and Deleuze's understandings of masochism limit the transgressive and subversive forces of masochism by taking sexual difference for granted. Drawing on Newton's fashion photography for Wolford and on feminist interrogations of Freud, Deleuze, and masochism, this paper therefore seeks to develop an alternative, queer theory of masochism as sexual indifference. Viewing masochism as sexual indifference opens up movements of desire beyo…
The body without organs
In an attempt to challenge the status of the organizational, this paper proposes a ‘nonorganizational’ turn towards embodiment and desire. Introducing and critically discussing Deleuze and Guattari's () notion of the ‘body without organs’ (BwO), it argues that this may improve organization theory's opportunities to think about the forces of embodied desire that disrupt, undermine and escape organization, upset the homogeneity of organizational li…
Living on the Edge
Following the recent curiosity for monsters in social and organizational research, this paper questions the power, purity and boundaries of organization by accentuating its risky encounters with heterogeneous, monstrous bodies. In an attempt to problematize organization theory’s implicit dissociation of monsters from organization, the understanding and treatment of monsters is traced across a variety of discursive formations in Western history—fr…
Multiplicity, Virtuality and Organization
Formal organization is often seen as opposed or resistant to change, in theory as well as in practice. Drawing primarily on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze we argue that the reverse is true - that organization is itself a dynamic quality and that change and organization are imbricated in each other. We expand several key concepts of this philosophy in relation to organization (the multiplicity of order and the multiplicity of organization, strat…
There’s no limit to how much you can consume’
During the past decade or so, organization studies has witnessed a small but growing interest in the human body, in health, and in the management of life beyond organizational boundaries. In light of this development, this paper investigates how the New Public Health seeks to construct and manage people as healthy bodies beyond the boundaries of formal work organizations. The paper does so through a discourse analysis of a UK health campaign on h…
Free At Last? Assembling, Producing and Organizing Sexual Spaces in Swedish Sex Education
This article seeks to critically investigate the assembling, production and organization of female and male sexuality in contemporary Swedish sex education. The empirical focus is on booklets and leaflets published by the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education (the RFSU). Employing the concept of assemblages articulated by Deleuze and Guattari and rearticulated in social, organizational and feminist theorizing, the article examines how the R…
Buggering Freud and Deleuze
Both Freud's and Deleuze's understandings of masochism limit the transgressive and subversive forces of masochism by taking sexual difference for granted. Drawing on Newton's fashion photography for Wolford and on feminist interrogations of Freud, Deleuze, and masochism, this paper therefore seeks to develop an alternative, queer theory of masochism as sexual indifference. Viewing masochism as sexual indifference opens up movements of desire beyo…
All talk and no movement? Homeless coping and resistance to urban planning
Privileging the discursive expression of micro-resistance while exploiting spatial metaphors such as cynical distancing and escape, recent work in Critical Management Studies (CMS) has tended to find resistance everywhere without actually examining its spatial whereabouts. Utilizing a spatial approach, this article therefore investigates how homeless people in Stockholm not only resisted but also coped otherwise with two urban planning projects t…
More passion than the job requires? Monstrously transgressive leadership in the promotion of health at work
Despite Weber’s early emphasis on passionate emotions in charismatic leadership, and a recent but broader interest in the embodied and emotional aspects of leadership, we still know relatively little about how passions are embodied in leadership. We also know little about how such passions may transgress formally and socially defined limits of leadership in organizations. Through a case of workplace health promotion this paper therefore investiga…
Guest editorial
What can bodies do? Reading Spinoza for an affective ethics of organizational life
Recent attempts to develop an embodied understanding of ethics in organizations have tended to mobilize a Levinasian and ‘im/possible’ ethics of recognition, which separates ethics and embodiment from politics and organization. We argue that this separation is unrealistic, unsustainable, and an unhelpful starting point for an embodied ethics of organizations. Instead of rescuing and modifying the ethics of recognition, we propose an embodied ethi…
Postscript
Sexual Politics, Organizational Practices
Just doing gender? Transvestism and the power of underdoing gender in everyday life and work
While previous research in organization studies has utilized transgender to show how gender is done, overdone and undone, this literature lacks empirical grounding, and the theoretical arguments dominating it tend to idealize the transgressive power of transgender while reducing transgender to hyperbolic drag and stereotypical passing. To further advance the understanding of transgender within and around organizations, this article presents a qua…
Affective politics in gendered organizations
Current approaches to the study of affective relations are over-determined in a way that ignores their radicality, yet abstracted to such an extent that the corporeality and differentially lived experience of power and resistance is neglected. To radicalize the potential of everyday affects, this article calls for an intensification of corporeality in affect research. We do this by exploring the affective trajectory of ‘becoming-woman’ introduced…
Embodied Research Methods
A book guiding researcers in the use of embodied methods in social science.Disembodied research erects false dichotomies between flesh and reason, and between the corporeal and the social. By contrast, Torkild Thanem and David Knights engage with approaches and practices that exploit the body’s capacity to generate knowledge, craft lively accounts, and create fleshy concepts. These approaches enrich our understanding of how people live, work, and…
Dissensus! Radical Democracy and Business Ethics
Sociology (13 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Law (8 works) · Politics (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Social Psychology (5 works) · Embodied cognition (4 works)