OVERWHELMED BY OVERFLOWS? Overwhelmed by overflows? How people and organizations create and manage excess EDITED BY BARBARA CZARNIAWSKA AND ORVAR LÖFGREN Lund University Press Copyright © Lund University Press 2019 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Lund University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors. This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) licence, which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the author(s) and Lund University Press are fully cited and no modifications or adaptations are made. Details of the licence can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Lund University Press The Joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology P.O. Box 117 SE-221 00 LUND Sweden http://lunduniversitypress.lu.se Lund University Press books are published in collaboration with Manchester University Press. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 9 1984 6980 6 hardback ISBN 978 9 1984 6981 3 open access First published 2019 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover image: Liubov Popova, Travelling Woman, 1915 (Art History Project/Wikimedia) Typeset by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Contents List of figures page vi Notes on contributors vii Acknowledgments xii Introduction – Orvar Löfgren and Barbara Czarniawska 1 1 Consumer and consumerism under state socialism: demand-side abundance and its discontents in Hungary during the long 1960s – György Péteri 12 2 Metamorphoses, or how self-storage turned from homes into hotels – Helene Brembeck 44 3 Moving in a sea of strangers: handling urban overflows – Orvar Löfgren 60 4 Too much happens in the workplace – Karolina J. Dudek 81 5 Just like any other business or a special case? Framing excess in a Swedish newspaper group – Elena Raviola 96 6 Overflowing with uncertainty:controversies regarding epistemic wagers in climate-economy models – Jonathan Metzger 111 7 More means less: managing overflow in science publishing – Sabina Siebert, Robert Insall, and Laura M. Machesky 130 8 Guides and an overflowof choices – Lars Norén and Agneta Ranerup 151 9 Virtual red tape, or digital v. paper bureaucracy – Barbara Czarniawska 170 Afterword: a surplus of ideas – Richard Wilk 191 References 194 Index 208 Figures 1.1 Sándor Gerö, cover of Ludas Matyi, 21 April 1960 (Courtesy of National Széchényi Library) 22 1.2 Tibor Kaján, ‘Mohóság’ [‘Voracity’], Ludas Matyi, 16 May 1963 (Courtesy of National Széchényi Library) 25 1.3 István Hegedűs, ‘Családi fotoalbum’ [‘Family album’], Ludas Matyi, 5 March 1964 (Courtesy of National Széchényi Library) 26 1.4 István Hegedűs, ‘Civilizáció’ [‘Civilization’], Ludas Matyi, 9 May 1957 (Courtesy of National Széchényi Library) 27 1.5 Tibor Toncz, ‘Külföldi kiküldetésben’ [‘On assignment abroad’], Ludas Matyi, 12 June 1958 (Courtesy of National Széchényi Library) 28 2.1 Teaching customers storing techniques (Retrieved from the webpage of Humlan on 4 April 2016) 52 7.1 Numbers of indexed scientific publications since 1940 134 7.2 Numbers of indexed scientific publications since 1940 (logarithmic plot) 134 7.3 Publications in two open-access journals 139 7.4 The champagne tower (Aflo Co. Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo) 147 8.1 Healthcare Guide (Vårdguiden 1177) (Photographed 8 December 2015) 157 8.2 Joint Funds (Kollektiva fondval) (Photographed 8 December 2015) 161 Contributors Helene Brembeck is a Senior Professor of Ethnology and Co-Director of the Center for Consumer Research (CCR) at the University of Gothenburg. Her research interests are consumer culture and everyday life, family, parenting and childhood, food and eating, and issues of secondhand and reuse. She is currently working on projects about convenience food, the market for retro and vintage, and cultural planning. Her recent publications include articles on food and eating in Food, Culture and Society and in Consumption, Markets and Culture (with Maria Fuentes), on secondhand consumption in International Journal of Heritage Studies (with Niklas Sörum), and the book Reframing convenience food (co-authored with Peter Jackson and others, 2018). She has contributed chapters in the previous books from the project Managing Overflow:Managing overflow in affluent societies (2012) and Coping with excess (2013). Barbara Czarniawska holds an MA in Social and Industrial Psychol- ogy from Warsaw University and a PhD in Economic Sciences from the Warsaw School of Economics. She holds the title of Doctor honoris causa from the Stockholm School of Economics, the Copenhagen Business School, the Helsinki School of Economics, and Aalborg University. At present, she is Senior Professor of Management Studies at Gothenburg Research Institute, School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She takes a feminist and processual perspective on organizing, recently exploring con- nections between popular culture and practice of management. She is interested in techniques of fieldwork and in the application of narratology to organization studies. viii Contributors Her latest books in English include Social science research from field to desk(2014), A theory of organizing (second edition, 2014), and A research agenda for management and organization studies (editor, 2016). She is a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Royal Engineering Academy, the Royal Society of Art and Sciences in Gothenburg, and Societas Scientiarum Finnica. She received the Lily and Sven Thuréus Technical-Economic Award for internationally renowned research in organization theory in 2000 and the Wihuri International Prize ‘in recognition of creative work that has specially furthered and developed the cultural and economic progress of mankind’ in 2003. Karolina J. Dudek holds a PhD in Sociology from the Polish Academy of Sciences, an MA in Management and International Relations from the Warsaw School of Economics, and a BA in Ethnology from the University of Warsaw. She also finished a postgraduate course in Polish Philology at the University of Warsaw. Her research interests focus on management education, the role of design in modern organiza- tions, bottom-up initiatives, and cultural grassroots projects. She works as a business consultant, researcher, academic lecturer, and editor. Robert Insall is a Senior Research Group Leader and Professor at the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute, College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences, University of Glasgow. His PhD was from the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Following this he did postdoctoral research as a SERC/NATO fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in the lab of Peter Devreotes. He returned to the UK first as a Wellcome Trust Career Development fellow at the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology, then as an MRC Senior Fellow and Professor at Birmingham University. He moved to Glasgow in 2007. A member of a number of funding panels and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he uses microscopy, biochemistry, and computational models to understand how cell movement is steered. Orvar Löfgren is a Professor Emeritus in European Ethnology at the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University. He holds a PhD in European Ethnology from Stockholm University, 1978, and is an Honorary Doctor in the Humanities, Copenhagen University, 2008. Cultural analysis and the ethnography of everyday life have long been at the focus of his research. His central research fields are Contributors ix studies of urban life, transnational mobility, as well as domestic media and consumption. His latest books in English are: Coping with excess (edited with Barbara Czarniawska, 2013); Exploring everyday life: Strategies for ethnography and cultural analysis (with Billy Ehn and Richard Wilk, 2015). Orvar Löfgren is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities and of the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy for Swedish Folk Life. Laura M. Machesky is a Senior Research Group Leader and Professor at the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute, College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences, University of Glasgow. She did her PhD in Cell Biology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and completed postdoctoral training in Cambridge sup- ported by a Damon Runyon–Walter Winchell Cancer Research Fellowship. She went on to be an MRC Career Development Fellow and an MRC Senior Research Fellow, first in London and then in Birmingham. She was awarded a Junior Women in Science Career Award in 2001 from the American Society for Cell Biology and a Keith Porter Award in 2013. She is an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and the UK Academy of Medical Sciences (AMS) as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE). Her research interests center on the molecular basis for cell movement and how cells coordinate signals from multiple inputs into coherent cell migration. Jonathan Metzger is a Professor in Urban and Regional Studies at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and a Visiting Researcher at the Gothenburg Research Institute (GRI) at the University of Gothenburg. Most of his research deals with decision- making concerning complex environmental issues – often (but not exclusively) with a focus on urban and regional policy and politics. In his work he relates to, and finds inspiration in, research debates within the subject areas of planning studies, human geography, science and technology studies, and organization studies. His most recent book is the edited volume Deleuze and the city (with Hélène Frichot and Catharina Gabrielsson, 2016). Lars Norén is an Associate Professor in Business Administration at the School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothen- burg. His research on the construction of markets explores how calculating agencies are created in markets.