Organizational Atmospheres: Foam, Affect and Architecture

Organizational Atmospheres
Christian Borch
Deleuze’s case, see Alliez, 2004). However, Sloterdijk’s foam theory has a
much greater emphasis on Tardean imitation dynamics than Deleuze who
is more interested in Tarde’s focus on beliefs and desires (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1987: 219). Although imitation and beliefs and desires are closely
interrelated in Tarde, this inspirational difference has implications for the
interpretation of organizational behaviour. Thus Deleuze-inspired work is
likely to emphasize desire (Sørensen, 2005), whereas a foam-theoretical
view on organizations has as a major concern the role of imitation. 3
The emphasis on spatiality (and thereby the fifth dimension listed above)
is also one of the points where the foam theory differs from, in particular,
Niklas Luhmann’s work. According to Luhmann, social systems, including
organizations, have communicative boundaries rather than spatial bound-
aries (Luhmann, 1997: 76). It is this a-spatial conception of organizations
that Sloterdijk’s foam theory avoids (not least by emphasizing the significance
of atmospheres, thereby attributing greater importance to the environment
than Luhmann does in his systems theory).
Before investigating the spatial aspects of foam, however, I wish to look
closer at the second dimension listed above, the deliberate disregard of the
individual subjects in the organization. This disregard is far from unique to
foam theory. Indeed, it is shared by many post-structualist accounts. This
applies, for instance, to Luhmann’s (2000) systemic sociology of organizations
as well as to Foucauldian studies (e.g. Karlsen and Villadsen, 2008;
Munro and Randall, 2007). The main difference between these approaches
and foam theory does not regard the overall ambition of going beyond indi-
vidualistic analyses, but lies rather in how this is done. Whereas both
Luhmann’s systems theory and Foucualdian studies are part of the linguistic
turn in social theory, which has emphasized communication and discourse
rather than subjectivity, Sloterdijk’s foam theory does not attribute primary
importance to communication but to imitation. As mentioned above, this
move from communication to imitation relates to Sloterdijk’s inspiration
from Tarde. Tarde analyses imitation as a kind of somnambulistic suggestion
and thereby points to its hypnotic and contagious-affective foundation.
It is this notion of suggestion, or imitation-suggestion, which, I claim,
is key to understanding foam sociality, and hence organizations. 4 One of
the major implications of suggestion is that it undermines the notion of
individuality. The individual and his or her desires, inclinations, gestures,
etc., are seen as hypnotically transmitted and therefore not specific or characteristic
to the individual in question. Indeed, in Tarde’s sociology, the
individual is nothing but the ‘container’ or agglomeration of various rays of
imitations, some of which may be in conflict with one another. Ruth Leys
has put it this way:
By dissolving the boundaries between self and other, the theory of imitationsuggestion
embodied a highly plastic notion of the human subject that radically
called into question the unity and identity of the self. Put another way, it made
the notion of individuality itself problematic. (Leys, 1993: 281)
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