The Other Organization: Heterotopia, management and entrepreneurship
Résumé
Historically, organizations have been viewed as ordered places and times that have
legitimized the hand that holds back, and that formalizes structured, institutionalized ways of saying and doing. Against this backdrop, we want to see the more recent attention to the entrepreneurial as a reason to conceptualize and think the new organization that emerges from within the existing organization as the ‘other organization,’ accomplished
through heterotopia. We propose that such creation of organization, the process of entrepreneurial emergence, can be thought as part of organizations: organization entails both the already organized and the emergent; and organization-creation efforts are tactically exploring the cracks, the interstices, of the already organized. The ‘other organization’ is actualized within the heterotopic and ephemeral space opened by such efforts. Bringing heterotopic/heterochronic space-time back into the study of organizations requires that we immerse ourselves in the spaces of resistance, emergence and play. This essay – hopefully, also playfully – does that.