Configurations of Otherness and Power: From Loneliness in the Pyramid to Encounter on the Network

Abstract

This article is the result of an integrative synthesis of different projects executed by a research team. Its aim is to show research about social practices that, although they are strongly conditioned by a historical-political context, at the same time restrain the ability to generate new products, perceptions, expressions basis. The theoretical and methodological perspective starts with the microphysics of power (Foucault, 1980) and moves toward practices “in the world of every-day life” (phenomenological sociology) (Schultz, 1974), dealing with this dynamic field combining the micro and the macro. Contributions of the micropolitical perspective (Ball, 1989; Bardisa, 1997; Terren, 2004; Blase and Blase, 1997; López Yañez and Sánchez Moreno; 2004) offer a psychosocial framework for understanding collective action in the organizational context. Thus, taking configuration of the other and power as an organizing axis, diverse categories of analysis are presented, such as: games logic, emotion, bonding, communicative dimension, time and space, collective change and learning methodologies, to explain and understand the way in which these different configurations of otherness hinder or permit human encounter in the organizational network.