Organization Studies and Posthumanism

Abstract

In this chapter, we develop a posthuman, process-based, organizational perspective on the Deleuzoguattarian notion of cartography, and we propose cartographic mapping as a research perspective from which to study the human–robotic workplace. Cartographies are interesting from an organizational perspective because they yield space-time images of work and work transformation that are alternatives to the idea of work as a discrete phenomenon representable in static pictures. Moreover, they avoid taken-for-granted anthropocentric assumptions that technology and human work should be conceptualized separately, and they advance the view that the technical and the social are analytical referents of the immanent phenomenon of organizing. To illustrate our arguments, we present an exercise of cartographic mapping in the field of human–robotic medical work, where work is performed by humans and robots, and agency emerges in a posthuman processual entanglement of human and material agency. We discuss this exercise, and we explain how drawing cartographies of work may create new spaces of possibilities for the design of actions in the human and nonhuman realms that are pervading contemporary ways of working and organizing.