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DOI: 10.1177/1350508407076146

2007 14: 315OrganizationSilvia Gherardi, Davide Nicolini and Antonio Strati

The Passion for Knowing

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Volume 14(3): 315329ISSN 13505084

Copyright 2007 SAGE(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi

and Singapore)

The Passion for Knowing

Silvia GherardiUniversity of Trento, Italy

Davide NicoliniIKON, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK

Antonio StratiUniversity of Trento, Italy and University of Siena, Italy

What are we talking about when we merge knowledge, organizations andpassion together? Although this may seem a somewhat eccentric question,

it in fact highlights a very simple and everyday relation. We are talkingabout the importance of the expressive relation and attachment to theworld and the limit of a purely instrumental and economic view of humanactivity: the idea that people do what they do for the love of what they doand not for the money.

This relation requires brief historical contextualization. The oppositionaland hierarchical relationship between emotion and rationality, with thelatter term predominating over the former, is a relatively recent phenomenon.As noted by Elias (1994), the individual control and the public regulationof emotions are a central part of the process of modernization. The removal

or deferral of emotions and passions from the public and organizationalsphere can thus be fully identified as one of the main features of the projectof modernity.

Things, however, used to be different. Many of the 17th-century writerswere concerned with the passions as a source of self-knowledge, self-control, and power over others; and they were moving away from thetreatment of passions embedded in discussion of vice and virtue. Mostof these works are not well-known today, even if they contributed to anearly philosophy of mind (James, 1997). The 17th century was marked bya growing spirit of inquiry that moved from experience to generalization,

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Organization 14(3)Introduction

not only concerning experience in the physical world but also the mentalworld of psychological and socio-economic relations (Barbalet, 2005: 186).This was a historical period of growing market exchanges and effortsto understand market practices in theoretical and practical terms. This

intellectual development was expressed by Adam Smith in The Theory ofMoral Sentiments (1759). Market exchanges at that time relied mainly oninformal credit, and it was consequently important to understand the usesof emotions and how to build trust relations. It was only subsequently, withthe growth of institutions regulating the market, that the orientation shiftedto the commodity alone. Utilitarianism was a modern project based on trustand the myth of rationality. Formal and rational organizations epitomizedthe spirit of modernity, and the ways in which they were studied, describedand theorized relegated the passions to the private sphere of individualemotions while simultaneously connoting them as irrational.

The removal of passion, however, was never fully accomplished. Likea river in the desert which runs for long stretches underground only toemerge occasionally on the surface, the idea that emotion and passion playa central role in individual and social conducts has remained alive duringthe last two centuries.

Haliwell (1999), for example, suggests that common threads connectapparently distant authors such as James, Binswanger, Luria, and Sacks.All these psychologists rejected the normal science of their times andargued that excluding experience, emotion and mystery from the explan-ation of conduct means excluding what can be called fundamentally human.

This common framework, which Luria attributed to the legacy of romanticscience (Haliwell, 1999), is especially visible in the pragmatist treatmentof the relationship between emotion and knowledge. Take sensation, em-bodied desire, and the aesthetic experience out of the act out of humanactivity, say authors such as James, Dewey, and Mead, and what you areleft with is a pale representation of both how people know and what itmeans to be human.

Sensitivity to the constitutive role of emotion and passion, however, goeswell beyond the individual sphere. Knorr Cetina (1997), for example, hasconvincingly argued that the passion of knowledge fuelled by the inherent

incompleteness of epistemic objects is a primary source of sociality, bothfor scientists and, increasingly, for members of society at large. To theextent that objects in everyday life become high tech devices which war-rant a continuous process of refinement and development, they triggeremotional affiliation, common search processes, and collective obligationswhich all become power sources for post communitarian relationshipsand organization.

Knorr Cetina is just one of the many authors who in recent years haveresumed the idea that pathos should be considered a primary explanatorycause of social phenomena.

This applies to the sphere of work and production as well. Arendt(1959), argues that the exclusion of passion from the sphere of sociality

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The Passion for KnowingSilvia Gherardi et al.

and production is a consequence of the historical conflation (or confusion)between what she calls labour and work. While labour is a function ofbiological and economic necessity, work is intrinsically creative ratherthan merely reproductive. As such, work and passion cannot be thought

of in complete opposition.Schwalbe (1986), addresses the unexamined affective dimension ofMarxs analysis of labour. He argues that a pivotal dimension of work is itsaesthetic and passionate character. All activities have an aesthetic dimen-sion to the extent that the actor experiences an appreciation of the endvalue of the act as the act is being carried out (Schwalbe, 1986: 64). Suchdimension is strategically underplayed in the capitalist mode of production.By concealing the aesthetic experience derived from the manipulatoryphase, and focussing exclusively on the consummation phase, capitalismpromises to repair alienation through material consumption, thus fuelling an

endless circuit of domination through consumerism. Passion, in the neutralsense of pathos, although often invisible, hidden or repressed, is thus a keyingredient of what Schwalbe (1986) calls natural (as opposed to alienated)work. Such passion can be found in almost all human activities, and it isnot relegated to such specific spheres as those of art or leisure. Accordingly,passion is an inherent trait which is not limited to the increasingly commontype of work that Freidson (1990) would define labor of love, e.g. workingfor a charity or for an alternative organization. Passion, unrecognized andunexplored, is an ingredient of most human activitiessuch as Spinozaargued against Hobbes (Bodei, 1991)provided we are ready to critically

interrogate the conventional attachment of work, or labour to economyand exchange.This Special Issue begins with an invited essay1 by Pasquale Gagliardi

which reflects on these topics and on the development of intellectual debatein organization studies over the past 30 years. His point of departure isthe observation that while considered legitimate today, passion as a topicwas previously censored within the spirit of the discipline. How has thishappened, and what does it teach us?

Within the modernist knowledge project, organizational discoursewas constructed and intellectually organized on the basis of the dualism

between utility and gratuitousness, and of the hierarchical order be-tween these two terms, where the former prevailed over and dominatedthe latter. Consequently, the literature, and also, the awareness itself oforganization scholars, privileged interpretative categories which, on thebasis of the value ascribed to utility, engendered a socially constructedblindness to all experience that could not be related to instrumentality,rationality, and utilitarianism. Thus, as modern scientific knowledge wasformed, the dimension of pathos gave way to those of logos and ethos. Butthe return of pathoswhich Gagliardi explains in light of the spread ofqualitative and ethnographic methods and the greater sophistication

of theoretical conceptshas expanded our understanding of what consti-tutes knowledge.



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One contribution that this Special Issue intends to make to the studyof organization is consequently to broaden the concept of organizationalknowledge so that it encompasses intellectual and sensory knowledge aswell. Organizational knowledge is not solely mental. It is not situated in

the brain of the human body or the organization; nor do the body or theorganization serve as its instruments. Valorizing pathos in organization stud-ies is giving salience to the corporeality of sensitive-aesthetic knowledgeand to organizational action undertaken through the senses (Strati, 2007).It emphasizes the ability to express judgements based on taste, and tolive the social practices performed in organizations with emotion, affectand attachment. Pathos in understanding organizational life requires duescholarly attention to be paid to the intimate, confused, and ambiguousrelations among feeling, thinking and acting in the world of experience.This world is material and social even when it reveals its impalpability

in, for example, the work and organizational practices concerned with thevirtual domain of information and telecommunication technologies.

If we consider organizational knowledge no longer in terms of one-dimensional knowledge (to paraphrase Marcuse)and therefore not ascognitive and mental knowledge based on thought, or indeed restrictedto only the rational thought capable of causally modelling social andpost-social relations (Knorr-Cetina, 2006) in organizational settingsthenmuch of the organizational literature will leave us disappointed and dis-satisfied. For a large part of the organizational discourse, as regards bothrepresentations of organizational lives and the methods and epistemologies

of the social research which produces them, is a censorial narrative thatseeks to rationalize, sterilize and moralize everyday organizationallife. Such disclosure is consequently able to recount neither the pluralityof the experiential forms of organizational knowledge and action, nor thehuman richness embedded in them.

Reflecting upon, deconstructing, and destabilizing the interpretativecategories of a discipline comprising such a large body of theoretical andempirical analysis as organization studies requires interrogation of thepolitics of knowledge and the effects thereon of the dominant discourses.In this regard, it is of interest to include other disciplinary areas, so thatforms of organizational knowledge can interact with other approaches tothe study of contemporary society. Thus possible will be a view of organ-izational life obtained through the eyes of other disciplines concerned withthe issue of the politics of knowledge. This is the purpose of the secondinvited essay in this Special Issue. Written by the feminist philosopherCarla Locatelli, it examines the complex social phenomena bound up withthe everyday nature of social and post-social relations in organizations.

The ambiguity of the categories used to interpret attachment to theworld, or love, is paradigmatic for interpretation of value and power

relations. Love, writes Locatelli (p. 339), is the stereotype of passive care-giving ascribed to womens natural loving attitude which often justifies



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womens exploitation in the most diverse social situations, and whichimplies that the domain of womens knowledge is just emotional,emphatic, timicalthough, in truth, it generally signifies that womensknowledge is illogical, non-objective, and engrossed. We again find here

the effects of representation in binary terms explored by Gagliardi. Ration-ality is inscribed in the domain of instrumentality, utilitarianism, logosand the male, while emotionality is inscribed in pathos, gratuitousness andthe female. But just as art suffers from being segregated in museums andin the sphere of leisure-time entertainment, so love suffers from beingsegregated in the sphere of femaleness. Locatellis essay suggests that loveshould be conceived not (only) as emotion, but also as action, and thatwe should consequently interrogate the politics of desire. The politics ofknowledge and desire are the core themes of this Special Issue, and theyinduce examination of the knowing subject and the type of knowledge

that it produces. The theme of passion foregrounds relationality, proximityand attachment. These, in their turn, display empathy with the world butalso the potential destructiveness and self-destructiveness of that bond.By contrast, the image of dispassionate, objective and rational knowledgeis constructed on the spatial metaphor of distance, uninvolvement andestrangement. As we shall see, this theoretical register traverses all thearticles in this Special Issue. Indeed, almost all the authors examine,each in his/her own way, the social responsibility of creating, proposing,representing and communicating organizational knowledge. They assignthis responsibility to the education system, as well as to experts like

ourselves as intellectual workers. But Locatellis article does so even moreforcefully by giving voice to the feminist reflection on gender as politics ofknowledge (whose knowledge is considered legitimate knowledge?) andquoting Luce Irigaray (1996): Can the I separated from the she count(or even figure), as an agent of knowledge?. We shall address this questionby translating it as follows: can an organizational knowledge purged ofpathos be considered knowledge?

The theme of passion for knowledge and in knowledge prompts furtherreflection regarding organization studies. Such reflection concerns:

How a non-instrumental conception of knowledge activates unconven-tional styles of research, and leads to the identification, invention andcommunication of forms of organizational understanding based on therevision of analytical and interpretative categories or the constructionof new ones

How the sociology of attachment reveals unusual aspects of the con-nections among those who work, the objects of their work, and thesubjective and objective meanings of work and of organizing workrelations

The results of valorizing forms of sensible knowledge in terms of the

theory on organizations and organizing.



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This approach has antecedents and corollaries that are apparent inthe essays collected. They include: the strand of studies concerned withaesthetic knowledge about and within organizations (Strati, 1999); thepotential role of the humanities in refounding managerial knowledge

and in promoting an extended notion of knowledge that also comprisescharacter formation (Gagliardi, 2006); and the mystery-driven know-ledge (Gherardi, 1999) related to non-knowledge and practical knowledge(Nicolini et al., 2003).

Before proceeding, we would specify that the term passion does notdenote some univocal and easily definable phenomenon. Rather, it is apolysemous term able, in certain respects, to comprise meanings that mayeven be contradictory: for instance the simultaneous feeling of pleasure andpain. In this regard, passion has a feature in common with the aestheticcategory of the sublime as comprising beauty both intense and painful.

Passion in Knowledge and for Knowledge and the Study of Organizations

How can it be argued that knowing is a mundane activity which mobil-izes emotions and desires, creates bonds and attachments, and producespleasure and pain? This task is undertaken by Steve Linstead and JoanneBrewis, who converse with the two invited essays preceding their own.

Whilst Gagliardi and Locatelli deal with the dualisms of utility versusgratuitousness, and rationality versus emotionality, Linstead and Brewisargue that the heuristic and emancipating value of the idea of a passionate

knowing is strictly dependent on a non-domesticated reading of the idea ofpassion, a reading which does not reduce the latter to something elsebeit need, aspirant desire as the fulfilment of a lack, or motivation.

Linstead and Brewis recall the etymology of the terms passion anddesire to highlight the duplicity and ambiguity of their roots. In Latin,passion conveyed a sense of pain and suffering, and also of passivity. Forpassion, like love, may be destructive and anything but pleasurable. Thoseprey to their own passions or those of others are passive: they have lost orrelinquished control over themselves. Constructed on the myth of controlover oneself and the situation is the image of the volitive and volitional

actor: the self-made man (sic!) master of his destiny in the world of organ-izations created by industrial capitalism. By contrast, being prey to onespassions is indicative not only of intensity of feeling but also of dubiousmorality and a weakness of will. Moreover, passion binds a person to his/herbody, because it is the latter which desires. When the mind is discursivelyseparated from the body, it becomes the seat of knowledge uncontamin-ated by physical urges and a desiring body. It becomes, for our purposes here,the non-material locus of the sociology of organizations, of organizationtheories, and management studiesthe non-corporeal intermediary oforganizational life.

Here, we may again intermingle organizational analysis with otherdisciplines. In the history of Western philosophy. Aristotle, write Linstead



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and Brewis (p. 355), used the general term orexis to indicate the naturalhuman desire to know. This desire calls for practical reason because itcauses humans to reach out for something or someone. In fact, someonewho does not reach out, or has no desire, is anorexic. The desire to know

is therefore intrinsic to human nature and, as suggested by the etymologyof the Latin term desiderium (de + sidu mening toward a celestial object),it is the force that drives outwards and upwards towards the Other as if itwere a heavenly body.

Linstead and Brewiss interpretation of desire as flowin light of thephilosophical reflections of George Bataille and Alexandre Kojveisset in opposition to interpretations of desire as lack of. The intransitiveuse of the verb desire enables desire to be viewed as a desiring state: asan amorphous urgethe authors contend (p. 356)which lies beneath ourbasic curiosity about and willingness to engage with the world. It is in this

sense that the Special Issue proposes a reading of knowing as desiring,2

or in other words, of desire as an epistemological mode to know about theworld through the relation that ties the knowing subject to it. Desire con-stitutes this basic curiosity about the world and willingness to engage withit. As Linstead and Brewis well illustrate (p. 356), the reconceptualizationof desire as flow allows for non-knowledge, the passion for not knowing(Bataille, 2001: 196), whereby we are drawn to things around us even whenthey seem at best ambivalent or counterproductive, and at worst threatento overwhelm or imperil us.

But Linstead and Brewiss intention is not only to specify a philosoph-

ical conception of desire. They also use the conception as the basis fortwo cautionary tales on how organization studies have appropriated thenotion of desire for knowledge and tamed it within a discourse of control.Two constructs in particular have anaesthetized desire in organizationstudies: its routinization and reduction to motivation, which evinces anendeavour to tame desire; and the discourse of knowledge managementthat constructs knowledge as something that can be managed/tamed andbent to the organizations will.

Is this to operationalize the concepts of desire and knowledge for prac-tical purposes, or is it to enfeeble the concept of desire for knowledge?

The three articles that follow the one by Linstead and Brewis reflect on thetopic in light of empirical research. They provide a detailed description ofhow passion is expressed in desire and through the desire for knowledgein work and organizational settings.

Landscapes of Organizational Knowledge and Passion

The connection among work, the workplace and the object of work is asubjective relation made up of love and hate, obsession and pleasure,exploration and passionate knowledge. In the words of one of the sailors

interviewed by Kathy Mack, it is feeling alive there. Consequently, thereis a bond of passion with what we do that makes us present when doing



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it, and also with the place where we do it. The aesthetic knowledge thatsprings from the senses and from the corporeality present in situation is away of being in-relation with ourselves and with the world. At the sametime it is to relate and communicate with those who have the same passion

as ourselves by sharing stories, memories and a state of mind.The first of the three articles which explore the relationship betweenpassion and work describes the passion felt by sailors for the sea and forseascapes. The sea is the workplace of sailors, and the sense of place andthe aesthetics of the natural environment are parts of their occupation.Being a competent member of the blue water workforce means knowingwhat a passion for the sea signifies, recognizing the relation betweencertain odours and the memories that they evoke, sensing that places havehistories and stories, and that these histories and stories form part of indi-vidual and collective biography. Mack explores the aesthetic (but also un-

aesthetic) relationship between the seafaring occupation and the sense ofthe place in which it is performed. She argues that, because the sea alwaysexceeds the limits of the frame, it becomes both a source of the sublimeand an obsession. The sea is to sailor what the object of research work is toKnorr Cetinas scientists: an endless source of attraction and pathos that be-comes an inexhaustible and incontrollable lure. In this sense, her analysiscan be extended to other occupations as well. And in fact, the aestheticbond between individual, workplace, object of work and the communityof workers is again apparent among the mathematicians studied by PaoloLandri, or in the community of Weblog producers described by Kaiser andcolleagues.

What Kathy Macks article highlights is the materiality of the passionalbond. The passion for knowledge is anchored in the corporeality andphysicality of the work setting. The sense of place constitutes the sym-biotic connection between aesthetic knowledge and the multisensorialexperiences of people at work. Workplaces are not abstract containersof equally abstract activities. Rather, they are actively appropriated andinteriorized by:

The body and its perceptive faculties (feeling, seeing, smelling, hearingand tasting): intrinsic to all of these faculties is the sensitive-aesthetic

judgement The community of workers, which develops a vocabulary to communi-

cate those sensations, learn and distinguish them, to enjoy them (or berepelled by them), and to transmit them to new members

The discursive practices that give shape to the negotiative processeswhich give rise to the aesthetic categories used in organizational action,which develop and stabilize an aesthetic knowledge conserved in thecommunitys work practices, and which pass aesthetic judgement onthe beauty or ugliness of one practice compared to another.

Aesthetic knowledge is passionate knowledge; just as passion is theaesthetic relationship with the world, both because it passes through



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the senses, and because it underpins the aesthetic judgements with whicha community relates to the work practices that distinguish it. Aestheticjudgements about the workplace, its natural environment, and the personswho perform it, socially sustain work practices.

Paolo Landris study of a school of mathematicians theorizes passionas active conditioning, where the explicit reference is to a sociology ofattachments (Hennion, 1993). Whether studied in a community of enthu-siasts (for music, drugs, wine) or in a community of practitioners, passionis considered to be an activity which weaves together the individual, thecommunity, the knowledge object, and the environment in which theserelations arise. As an activity, passion creates continuity between whatare apparently opposites: in the words of Gomart and Hennion (1999: 227)between passivity and activity, determining and determined, collectiveand individual, and intention as against causality.

The mathematicians of the Naples school demonstrate how passion forthe knowledge object is a force which creates community and identity. Itdrives the discussion within the epistemic community on what constitutesgood and elegant mathematical practice, and thus enables the practiceitself to be innovated. Landris article depicts passion not just as an emo-tion or an individual relationship, but as a situated practice of knowledgetransmission, and as a historically situated cultural practice of meaningcreation, belonging, community, and organization. Hence, the passion forthe knowledge object which underpins an occupation or a skill is also anorganizing practice: it creates organizations, and organized groups withinorganizations. Passion therefore socially sustains work practices, and the

continuing practise of the latter requires constant discussion among thepractitioners on what constitutes a good practice.

Weber (1919) wrote that there is a vocation (Beruf), or calling, in pro-fessions. Does not being called, in the secular sense, represent the intimateand passionate relationship with what one does? Landri adds a pragmaticdimension to this view by showing that the maintenance and transmissionof passion is a social practice within work practices. The mathematiciansof Naples, whom Landri studies by historically reconstructing the life oftheir charismatic leader, formed a school within the mathematics beforeWorld War II and created a school of thought which was able to survive

through the routinization of passion.Passion can be seen as the situated mobilization of feelings, understand-

ings, identities, practices and organizations, which unfolds on appropriateoccasions. Passion is therefore socially produced and reproduced, and itsustains both the object of mathematicians work and their identity, as wellas the material organization of doing mathematics at a particular time.

The passion-mobilizing practices described by Landriand which can befound in other professional communities which work with knowledgearecelebrating talent, arguing about work practices with other communitiesof practitioners, socially constructing the beauty of the knowledge object,

founding the division of labour on competence, extolling the community,and keeping its memories alive.



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Passion as the attachment of people in knowledge-related practices is alsodescribed as technologically-mediated passion in the article by StephanKaiser, Gordon Mller-Seitz, Miguel Lopes and Miguel Pina e Cunha.Their contribution leads us through the landscape of the Blogoshere,3 and

prompts us to ask whether there is a difference between looking at thesea with passion and gazing at a computer screen. These are two differentpanoramas which can be taken to be paradigmatic of a love for natureand a love for technology. It is possible to lose oneself in both the sea andthe computer screen: we may surrender to both of them in an act of love;both can make us suffer. Technoscapes are todays new ecosystems, andthey are also a new source of metaphors for knowledge and the collectiveimagination.

The term Blogoshere denotes the set of Weblogs interconnected byvarious means of interlinking on the internet and constituting a distinct-

ive IT-instantiated media ecosystem. As a metaphor it evokes a lifestyle, apost-capitalist ethic (Himanen, 2001), the cultural movement of open sourcedevelopment, and practices of freedom and communality. The Blogoshereis therefore a technological medium of high symbolic value embeddedin strongly ideologized interpretative frames. In a certain sense, it is anideal setting in which to study knowledge production and circulationpractices, and it well represents passion for knowledge for its own sake.Open source embodies a community which voluntarily devotes time andenergy to producing a knowledge-intensive good developed collabor-atively. In this case, technology is the environment of the cooperation as

well as its medium and purpose. The gratuitousness of this collaborationgenerally resists instrumental explanation, and is therefore construed interms of passion. But in what does this passion consist, and what drivesthe practice of Weblogging?

The authors use the standard terms of motivation theory, distinguish-ing between intrinsic and extrinsic motives. Within this framework theyshow that technological mediation gives rise to new discursive practices,and therefore to diverse forms of participation in discourses on practices.Their reasoning on the passion for knowledge proceeds as follows. Theybegin by arguing that Weblogging mingles pleasure with suffering, and thatpassion as the experience of pain and suffering arises during flow states(Csikszentmihalyi, 1997) which occur while reading, commenting upon,and writing Weblog entries.

According to Kaiser and colleagues (p. 405), flow states are self-motivatingexperiences that can be characterized roughly as an intense and focusedconcentration whereby action and awareness are merged so that temporalawareness is distorted. Pleasure resides in flow, in the fit between the diffi-culty of the task and the competence of the person, while anxiety or bore-dom characterizes the misfit.

Desire for this kind of pleasure can be described as passion for an activityas an end in itself, or as a state of grace in which the distinction between the



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self and the world disappears and pleasure is experienced as the plenitudeof self and absence of desire. Domination over technology is the momentwhen the latter becomes incorporated into the subject and the activity, sothat there is only presence or flow.

Can cyberspace as rarefaction of space and time more easily producethe pleasure of flow? The experience of Weblog practitioners shows thatit can, even when the flow is accompanied by suffering and comprisespassions two semantic referents: suffering and attraction.

However, Kaiser and colleagues are less interested in the subjectivedimension of attachment to work for its pleasures sake than they are inthe collective dimension of Weblogging as a social practice which createsits community of practitioners. In this latter context, the authors argue,the motives of Webloggers are extrinsic and based on social recognitionand the reputation acquired as an expert practitioner. This interpretation

echoes the findings in the literature on communities of practices, but theauthors add a further dimension: that where the Blogosphere is a specificcontext of practices. In what sense is now explained.

We have seen in the cases of seamen and mathematicians that passion forknowledge and in knowing are mediated by and anchored in corporealityand materiality, and also in conversations both direct and indirect. Web-loggers evidence that technological mediation heightens the pleasureintrinsic to work by intensifying and densifying the discursive practicesthat sustain work practices. If we base our interpretation on the distinctionbetween talking in practice and talking aboutpractice (Gherardi, 2006),

we find that the Weblog is a large discursive ecosystem in which practi-tioners develop knowledge through discourse both about practice andin practice. We have seen the aesthetic dimension of talk about practice inthe case of the Naples mathematicians who disputed on proofs, doing soat a time when they could only do so at a distance with published papers.Talk about practices keeps those practices alive, gains them accreditationin the community, and institutionalizes them. The Blogoshere has becomea technological environment in which discursive practices determineparticipation in the community and anchor the passion for Webloggingitself. In regard to how the practices enabling participation in the discourseon practice come about, Kaiser and colleagues cite the following factors:

Freedom to decide upon ones own involvement regarding the use ofthe Weblog (a practice of freedom);

The ability to have an impact in improving the software (a practice ofdirect participation);

The social bonds among Webloggers (a practice of social linking).

The passion for the object of knowing is therefore anchored in, and de-velops through, participation in the conversations that create and maintain

the community. And technologies are important media for developing andmaintaining attachment to the activity.



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Hence the troubadour of knowledge, or better the troubadouresque asan index of personal style and sensibility (p. 25), is finally proposed torepresent a utopia consisting of passionate knowledge, Whiteheadsatmosphere of excitement, and the spirit of the epicurean learners that

combine adeptness with passion (p. 25).This relates to the desire and the passion that have inspired thisSpecial Issue: the endeavour to explore the research styles and practicesthat communicate the open road where the humanities are rediscoveredand passionate knowledge about the life of organizations is formed. Inthe awareness that, just as every dystopia contains a fragment of utopia,so the performativity of knowledge denounced by Lyotard as one of themain features of the post-modern condition contains a utopian antidote inthe passion for knowledge.

Notes1 The Special Issue comprises two invited papers (Gagliardi and Locatelli) whose

authors have been key-note speakers at the conference The Passion for Learningand Knowing that took place in Trento (911 July 2005) organized by the threeeditors of the special issue.

2 At the 17th EGOS Colloqium, (Lyon, 57 July 2001) there was a subgroup onKnowing as Desiring, convened by Silvia Gherardi, Herv Laroche and ElenaAntonacoupolou, in which the theme of knowledge and desire in organizationswas proposed and which gave birth to the Standing Working Group on Practice-based Studies that continues reflection on sensible knowledge and working

practices.3 Blogoshere or Blogsphere is the collective term encompassing all Weblogs or

blogs; or bloggers as a community.

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Beginnings of Sociology, The British Journal of Sociology56(2): 17189.Bataille, Georges (2001) The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge. Minneapolis,

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of organizations and its application the understanding of knowing, learning, andchange in organizations. Address: IKON, Warwick Business School, University ofWarwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK. [email: [email protected]]

Antonio Strati is Professor of Sociology of Organization and lectures at the Universities

of Trento and Siena, Italy. He is a founder-member of the Standing Conferenceon Organizational Symbolism (SCOS-EGOS), and of the Research Unit onCommunication, Organizational Learning and Aesthetics (www.unitn.it/rucola).His research interests focus on aesthetics and the qualitative study of organizationallife. Address: Dipartimento di Sociologia e Ricerca Sociale, piazza Venezia 41,I-38100 Trento, Italy. [email: [email protected]]

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Organization 2007 Gherardi PassionKnowing