Victims of others' success: processes of subjectification on job search websites

Event synopsis: The substantive theme for the 2012 conference – Processes, Practices and Performance – refracts a range of analytic themes which have come to characterise process approaches to organizational analysis. Discourse analytical approaches are particularly well suited to address repeated calls: \n \nto develop our understanding of the discursive aspects of organizing or organization as an emergent process and illustrate how such processes sustain, disrupt or transform institutionalized power asymmetries; \nto bring everyday work practices back into organizational analysis in order to illuminate how social action contributes to the creation and re-creation of the institutional realm; and \nto explore the relationships between discourse and the variety of ways in which we might call the ‘role’ of performance contributes to the everyday construction of organizational life. \nWe welcome submissions which develop a process understandings of organization, taking seriously the notion that – within the contextual constraints of what are taken to be pre-defined structures – organizational actors can be viewed as ‘talking’, ‘writing’ and ‘acting’ organizations into existence. We also welcome papers which take the workaday practices and discursive acts of organizational members as its primary focus, bringing organizational analysis closer to the mundane, day-to-day aspects of organizing. Finally, we wish to investigate the performative dimensions of organizational life by analysing the material, textual and bodily performances at work and organizational actors’ ‘dramaturgical’ presentations of their individual and collective ‘selves’ in different arenas.