Paper short abstract:

In this paper we compare critical practices on the Danish fishery inspection ship The West Coast to such practices at the Nordic Folk Center for Renewable Energy. These cases are the ingredients for examining the role of critique in organizational experimentation.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper we compare critical practices on the Danish fishery inspection ship The West Coast to such practices at the Nordic Folk Center for Renewable Energy. These cases are the ingredients for examining the role of critique in organizational experimentation. We highlight critique as an immanent feature of organizational practice. In both cases critical practitioners resisted certain governmental influence, and used the critique to shape the direction of the organization. Yet, they did so in quite different ways. Our interest in critique in these two rather different organizations differs from sociological and anthropological critical theory, which relies on a difference between practitioner and academic, and on a difference between an insider and an outsider perspective. Our analysis shows that critique is immanent to the practices we study and conceptualized by the practitioners. To further problematize the already ongoing critical engagements in the organizations we study we draw on the notions critical proximity (Latour) and infra-critique (Verran). If critique is a matter of frictional relations rather than of distance, how might this insight problematize established practices and value systems in Science and Technology Studies' approaches to organizational life?