Affect in Collective Organizing

This doctoral dissertation explores the role of affect in collective organizing, namely in the context of change processes. Current research has shown that affective flows, which emerge in encounters between humans and materialities, can energize groups, generate a sense of connection, and drive collective action. Overall, the potential of affect to enhance or constrain the participants’ capacity to act makes affect essential to the success of expert-led change processes. Scholars have, however, highlighted that despite the choreographing of managers, facilitators and other actors, affective flows remain unpredictable. We therefore need to extend our knowledge of how affect bears upon change processes. How do affective flows enhance and shut off possibilities for connection, openness, responsiveness, and multiplicity that allow participation and moving forward? The dissertation addresses these aims through three essays based on an ethnography with three child psychiatric teams at a Nordic university hospital. Each essay examines the coaching process—in which I acted as the researcher-coach—as it unfolded with one of the teams. Resting on a relational ontology, the essays do not foreground the actions of individuals. Instead, they focus on the ever-shifting relations among humans, and humans and materialities, viewing this ongoing movement as collective organizing. The first essay attends to the collective leadership process, through which the team pursued direction and created spaces for co-action, while tracing how the process unfolded through collective affective gravitation and affective points of inflection. The second essay focuses on affective attunement, or the intentional disposition to affect and be affected. It shows how affective intensities shape the participants’ capacity to act by enabling or disabling response-ability, which refers to the embodied ability to notice and respond to others. The third essay addresses communitas— spontaneous experiences of existential connection—conceptualizing it as a relational accomplishment that unfolds through an affective dynamic, in which both humans and nonhuman elements participate. This dissertation makes two main contributions to the studies of affect in organizational research. First, it theorizes and empirically illustrates two types of affective dynamics—centered on collective gravitation and affective points of inflection, and respectively, affective resonance—that shape how affective flows emerge and shift, thus either expanding or reducing the group’s collective capacity to act. In doing so, the dissertation provides tools to help scholars recognize and follow how affect shapes collective organizing in situated contexts. Second, the dissertation makes a methodological contribution by indicating that to grasp the lived sense of affective events, researchers must immerse themselves in the empirical setting and engage with the affective flows. Additionally, it encourages researchers to combine different forms of writing differently to craft texts that convey the affective tone and speak to the senses. Overall, the dissertation emphasizes that because affective flows are open-ended, the outcomes of collective organizing cannot be predetermined. The dissertation also offers practical suggestions to coaches, process consultants and organizational actors seeking to support change.