In this methodological paper, we introduce Affect Houses as a novel method to attend to affective experiences in research. We understand affect as an energy, a sensation that is felt through our bodies before it becomes cognitively known to us. This means that it is particularly challenging to identify affect in the research process. Hence, following a burgeoning body of methodological accounts, we foreground creative methods as a way out of this methodological impasse. We organized six workshops in which a total of 25 perinatally bereaved mothers – mothers who have lost their babies during pregnancy or in the first five weeks after giving birth – created affect houses. These are small cardboard boxes filled with all sorts of matter that resonated with the complex feelings as experienced through their bodies upon their return to work. Our innovative Affect Houses method advances the upcoming literature on creative methods and affect in three ways. First, it reveals the vibrant agency of more-than-human matter – the colours, texture, density and sound of materials such as paint, rope, cotton wool, tooth pics and cardboard – resonating with the sensorial, spatial and temporal intensities as felt through these mothers’ bodies. Second, affect houses foreground the non-linear, complex and flowing intra-action between those intensities. And finally, our account shows the political potential of our method, as it fosters solidarity and de-individualizes affective feelings of loneliness produced through the taboo around perinatal loss.

Workers in the low-wage service sector represent a sociodemographically heterogeneous and particularly vulnerable group in terms of job security, job quality and health implications. However, organizational inclusion research has largely neglected this group. In contrast, this article builds on a qualitative study of a Dutch aircraft cleaning company in order to assess the ‘inclusivity of inclusion approaches’ for less privileged groups of employees. By reconstructing how managers and cleaners draw/rework boundaries, we identify certain configurations of inclusion and exclusion that can unfold more or less ‘inclusive’ consequences for historically disadvantaged group members, and more or less exclusionary repercussions for particularly privileged and/or majority group members. We stress the need to say goodbye to a linear narrative of organizations becoming ‘inclusive as such’. Furthermore, we argue that the presence of decent working and employment conditions and the absence of steep differences in those conditions between groups represent the ‘silent foundation’ of creating inclusivity. Consequently, we ask: does inclusion research reach its ‘natural limits’ by tiptoeing around the topic of equality?

Women who step into the spotlight may be burdened with managing their sexualised bodies, unlike men. This is true also in stand-up comedy, where more women than ever are entering the field. Investigating this unequally distributed body work, we use Sara Ahmed’s idea of the wilful subject to spot naturalised beliefs of women as unfunny who ‘will too much’. We do so through a qualitative study carried out with 26 professionals. We contribute by showing how ‘informal’ organisational body work, which comprises the purposeful efforts workers undertake on their and others’ bodies as part of informal role demands, is underpinned by diversity-related power dynamics. Anticipating how the burden of such ‘work’ does not fall equally on the shoulders of everyone is key in imagining more egalitarian futures of work. We demonstrate the embodied and political merits of wilfulness as an analytical tool focusing on the historically persistent labelling of women as wilful, a difficult-to-spot inequality, while taking into account how such wilfulness charges are mobilised by the target. Inspired by queering and cripping, we introduce the term ‘hagging’ to indicate women reclaiming positions of power and reappropriating their sexual objectification in male-dominated sexist environments.

In this paper, we offer a collective, multi-vocal reflection on using poetry for research purposes. These were reflections on an online sub-plenary session organized as a workshop, which was held at the European Group for Organization Studies conference in 2021. During this workshop, the first three authors presented a step-by-step method for doing poetic inquiry and invited participants to apply it to their own empirical data or research praxis. The method was created in response to the marginalization of affect and embodiment in mainstream research in organization studies. Poetic inquiry aims to formulate specific practices of "writing differently" that assist researchers in their attempts to analyze and articulate their findings in embodied and affective ways. In this paper, we describe the method and bring together multi-vocal reflections from the participants and organizers of the workshop on the affects of poetic inquiry and the (ethical) questions that it poses.

This paper focuses on the experiences of self-identified fat women employees. Combining the works of Karen Barad and Sara Ahmed, we offer a feminist new materialist analysis of the production of difference in organizations related to size as an entanglement of bodies, discourses, organizational materials and affect. We show how our participants predominantly became shameful and a ‘bad fit’ within their jobs through the intra-action of their large bodies with obesity discourse and organizational materials such as chairs and workwear. Yet we also illustrate how some material-discursive entanglements offered situations where shame was circumvented, instead producing our participants as acceptable within their organizational context. Our research contributes to discussions on embodied normativities in organizations by taking these issues beyond the discursive realm and highlighting the importance of materiality and affect in ‘fitting in’ at work. We offer new theoretical pathways to explore differentiating practices by looking at shame as part of collective and affective histories of marginalization.

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

As most scholarly work on the conceptualization of organizational inclusion seems to be implicitly based on contexts of high-wage labor, this article investigates whether the common themes of organizational inclusion as identified by Shore et al. (2018) also align with the low-wage labor context. Our respective analysis identifies several mismatches between the current conceptualizations of organizational inclusion and the needs and interests of low-wage workers. Consequently, we offer suggestions for adapting these conceptualizations: by paying attention to (1) material and physical safety next to psychological safety, (2) opportunities of non-task-oriented involvement in the workgroup and (3) the recognition and accommodation of low-wage workers’ voices and needs. Furthermore, we argue to extend the scope of scholarly work on organizational inclusion by taking into account the broader (historical) social order and different stakeholders who influence the organizational processes of inclusion and exclusion. By engaging with the current “inclusion turn” and providing adaptations, this article contributes to a less “exclusive” conception of organizational inclusion as well as outlines where the organizational inclusion approach might come up against its own limits.

Dear readers. Below you will find two poems. These poems give voice to the practice of security work in a Dutch airport. Writing poems is for us a process of engaging with the research data in an affective way, a process of writing together-apart (Barad, 2014), and a process that sparks joy and creativity. We see the contributions of this paper as twofold: (1) with these poems we feel that we can better capture the material agencies that constitute organizational life, and (2) we hope to spark an affective engagement from you when reading these poems on the doings of airport security work.

This article documents the experiences of a group of working women who were amongst the first diagnosed with COVID-19 in their country. Through interviews at two points in time, personal diaries and WhatsApp conversations, we lay bare how feelings of shame, hate and guilt for being patient zeros intersect with the experience of intensified care work during the lockdown. Care during the confinement became a central feature of everyday life and often took a virtual turn, both among families and friends as well as in the distanced workplace. Yet meaningful caregivingfromthe organizations in times of economic uncertainty was mostly lacking and passed on to individual employees who felt a moral and gendered obligation to substitute for the corporate carelessness. The conflicts of care that emerged out of this situation came at the cost of self-care. We argue that, although the women in our study are mostly privileged, there is a surprising amount of suffering that took place. Finally, we question our own care ethics as researchers in further burdening those suffering in pandemic times to participate in this study.

Using examples from an ethnographic study of aircraft cleaning, we discuss and illustrate how "writing differently" can be performed throughout the research process-in the literature review, data collection, data analysis, and writing up. We argue that writing differently is an ongoing methodological tool in order to rethink/refeel research practices in ways that generate affective, embodied and caring accounts of empirical organizational contexts, particularly when marginalization is key such as in cleaning work. We turn to poetry to better understand and portray the affective and embodied intensities in different phases in the research project. Furthermore, instead of presenting a sanitized authoritative account of writing so that it becomes recognizable as academic knowledge, we leave in the messiness, struggles, and insecurities in "doing" writing differently.

ABSTRACT This paper engages with the question of how fat female employees manage weight-related stigma at work. We use poetic inquiry to show the reader how it feels for our participants to be stigmatized based on their size. We interviewed 22 women who self-identify as full-figured, fat, overweight, or obese. The results consist of six poems, five of which were written by us, the researchers. These ‘tri-voiced poems’ (Leavy 2010b) illustrate the spectrum of affective responses and stigma management strategies that our participants talked about, ranging from feeling anxious, super-smart, impeccable, and funny to rebellious and confident. The sixth poem was written by one of our participants and voices her first-person experiences and perspective. Our aim is to do justice in our writing to the emotions that circulated in the interviews and to make a political statement with regards to the stigmatizing practices in organizations related to size and health.

This paper offers a new materialist perspective on processes of inclusion and exclusion in the professional lives of women who identify as fat. Contemporary ideas about health, size and productivity have resulted in a dominant assumption that a legitimate corporate body needs to be slender - or at least not fat. However, how fat employees are included and excluded in their everyday work context remains understudied. Adopting a new materialist analytical lens, we argue that the fat body is given meaning within organizations via negotiations of the extent to which it literally 'fits in' to everyday objects such as chairs and clothes. We show that fat employees' stories reveal that their basic needs with respect to suitable clothing and adequate seating are made un- or extraordinary by both colleagues and organizational structures, and that this puts them at a disadvantage in the context of their employment. We use the works of Karen Barad and Sarah Ahmed to unpack the intra-actions between material objects, discourses about size and our participants' large bodies, and the role affect plays in these. The article thus contributes to Critical Management Studies' (CMS) recent turn toward examining the intersection between materiality and power relations within organizations.

This article focuses on the theorizing of organizational inclusion. As most scholarly work on the conceptualization of organizational inclusion seems to be implicitly based on high-wage labor organizations, this article questions whether the components of organizational inclusion as identified by Shore et al. (2018) align with the core aspects of low-wage labor organizations. Our respective analysis identifies several mismatches in the current conceptualizations of organizational inclusion and offers suggestions for adapting them: by paying attention to (1) a recognition of material conditions, (2) a reinterpretation of voice, and (3) a changed focus from instrumentality to relationality. Furthermore, we argue to extend the scope of scholarly work on organizational inclusion by taking into account the broader societal oppressive structures and different stakeholders involved in the processes of inclusion and exclusion. By engaging with the inclusion turn and providing affirmative critique, this article contributes to a ‘less excluding’ conception of organizational inclusion.

This paper focuses on practices of inclusion and exclusion through an organizational ethnography of an aircraft cleaning company, which can be characterized as an ethnic minority dominated organization. We make use of relational ontology to help demonstrate the complex, continuing and interrelated ways in which inclusion and exclusion takes place. We zoom in on the everyday routines in the aircraft cleaning company and zoom out on its inclusionary and exclusionary effects. Building on Mascareno and Carvajal (2015), we identify three practices of inclusion and exclusion (self-inclusion/self-exclusion, inclusion in risk/exclusion by danger and inclusion in subordination) and analyze how these take on a different meaning in the setting of low-wage labor. With this paper, we aim to strengthen the analytical tools to analyze the interrelatedness of inclusion and exclusion and to emphasize the importance of making ‘class’ part of diversity and inclusion conceptualization and management.

This study explores how fat female employees engage in identity work to manage stigmatizing expectations grounded in healthism and obesity discourse that construct fat people as unhealthy, stupid, unprofessional, and lazy. We interviewed 22 women who self-identified as fat, full-figured or obese. Our analysis reveals how our participants engaged in identity work strategies in order to project a professional appearance and highlight their work performances. Many strategies reproduced dominant notions about fatness such as 'smartening up', 'distracting', 'hiding', 'concealing', 'humour', 'compensating', 'explaining' and 'defensive Othering'. Yet at times some participants also used strategies that challenged dominant discourses about size, such as 'flaunting', 'irony' and 'self-acceptance'. The identity work strategies our participants engaged in were not just narrative; many involved what they did with their bodies. We therefore argue the need for further theorizing embodied identity work, specifically with regards to how size matters in the context of employment.