Atmospheres of care,coercion,and containment: An affective ethnography

Introduction: “the Sunset Syndrome”

How does an organization learn to dwell within an affective atmosphere of care and coercion? What happens when care and coercion are entangled? How does this entanglement affect professionals who use restraints both physical and pharmaceutical? How do they collectively learn to contain the anxieties arising from the use of coercion? Who cares for them? We answer these questions, drawing upon a 2-year affective ethnography in the context of a nursing home in the North of Italy specialized in care for people living with Alzheimer’s disease. ¹ Our aim is to theorize affective atmospheres emerging as ordinary affects in (and through) everyday practices.

Before proceeding with the traditional structuring of an empirical article—the introduction of a research theme, the methodology, empirical results, discussion, and conclusions—the reader will be led into the atmosphere of a crucial moment in which care, coercion, and containment “happen.” We assume that an affective atmosphere happens “by accident and by design” (Michels and Steyaert, 2017: 22), and it should not be described as pure human experience, nor as external to the situatedness of the care practices in which it is embodied and embedded. Rather, it is processually emerging in caring practices, and a practice is conceived as the agencement of humans, materialities, and discourses (Gherardi, 2019a). We suggest that care is not separate, nor separable, from its “doing.” It is not an object or a quality that is added to work; rather, it is “caring,” a situated, collective competence that may be learnt, improved, or abandoned (Gherardi and Rodeschini, 2016; Miele, 2023). Our intention is to offer the reader the opportunity of perceiving an atmosphere through a performative text aimed at mitigating the limits of representational language in describing an atmosphere as an “objective” phenomenon.

The vignette that follows introduces the readers to what is named the “Sunset Syndrome” by the professionals in the nursing care home. The narrator of this story is Francesco, the first author of the article, who traces the origin of the syndrome name as something well known in nursing practices:

The care aid Giuseppe explains to me that his colleagues are worried about the so-called “Sunset Syndrome,” which usually appears in the late afternoon, adding ‘It’s the only thing I remember from the course.’ Shortly afterward, while another care aid is arranging some wheelchairs in the ward’s closet, a noisy and alarmed voice bothers the staff of the nursing homes: a senior lady, seated on a wheelchair in the hallway, is shouting that she does not know where her room is and that she does not find her wallet. She does not remember being in a nursing home and thinks she is in a hotel. Her body is leaned forward and the expression of her face is frightened. At first, the care aides try to ignore her, continuing to assist other residents and preparing the things for the dinner. The voice continues to resound for several minutes, transmitting to me (Francesco) a sense of loneliness and abandonment that reminds me of the first time when I was 9 years old and I was left home alone. Given the fact that the state of agitation of the lady does not seem to wane and that ignoring it does not seem a good way for toning it down, a care aid tries to calm her, explaining that the number of her room is “216” and she could pay the day after. The care aid, Daniela, explains to me that she attempts to put in practice the teachings of the psychologist in charge of the nursing home who invited the staff to ‘see the world through the eyes of residents living with Alzheimer’s,’ understanding and validating their beliefs. The old lady seems to have calmed down, but after a few minutes she restarts to be agitated until dinner time. At this point, the care aides become worried about the overall well-being of the lady because her tone of voice becomes a disturbance. The staff start to be nervous and tired, sensing that the emotional state of the lady is transmitted to other residents. Then, when the lady has just finished her dinner, she is moved from the dining room to her room. Although the care aides had previously advised me that the lady is “lively” and might become upset upon noticing my presence, consistently with my interest for the relationship between care and coercion, I decide to follow Daniela into the resident’s room.

Once there, she consults the register of residents, in which the clinical decisions taken by the doctor are annotated. The lady at night must use bed rails (long metal rails placed on either side of the beds) and the gait belt (a plastic belt grasped by care aides for tying the resident to the bed). Both restraints are generally adopted in the nursing home for preventing seniors from getting up during the night, risking falling; they are especially used for residents that frequently experience state of agitation. If for most of the resident bed rails are judged enough, the gait belt is added to these restraints for the seniors characterized by a continuous state of agitation or by a high postural instability. Daniela approaches the bed and starts to tighten the belt, but the lady implores: “Make it wider than yesterday!” The care aid slackens the belt a little bit and adds, in a sorry tone of voice, ‘That’s the best I can do.’ When the lady realizes that I am in the corner of the room, observing the scene, she asks to the care aid: “Is he your boyfriend?” Daniela answers: ‘He’s too young!’ But the lady persists, becoming even more upset, “Precisely because he is young! Enjoy it!” I sneak out of the room, feeling embarrassed for the sexual innuendo of the lady and feeling responsible for her growing agitation. After few minutes Daniela joins me explaining that sometimes the restraints have the effect of making the residents even more upset. She comments on how unpleasant it is to have to use restraints because they make you feel bad and disrespectful of human dignity, despite what the managers say.

With this vignette, we invite the reader to enter in affective resonance with the intensity of the scene felt by Francesco and enclosed in his words when he describes how he came to sense a specific atmosphere and know about it as an organizational phenomenon. The corporeal presence of Francesco enters in resonance with the bodies and the tone of voice of the residents and with the resonances that those bodies exercise on the staff’s bodies and vice versa. Affective resonance refers to relational and processual aspects of emotional experience whose progression is dynamically shaped in an entanglement of moving and being moved (Mühlhoff, 2015). The capacity to resonate with other materialities and corporealities is tied to imagination, memory, senses, and emotions.

The body of the old lady, her tone of voice, and her interaction with the staff became triggers of other bodies’ affections, and Francesco’s inner reliving of a childhood memory can be noticed as a bodily affective reaction. His embodied presence in the field, perceived as sexual, affects his feelings of embarrassment and of feeling guilty, and they are sensed by the care aid who is prompted to give him an explanation for letting him understand what is going on in the situation and what the Sunset Syndrome does in it. Both the care aid—who is an insider—and Francesco—who is an outsider—are similarly (and differently) affected by the atmosphere of coercion triggered by the presence of restraints whose normative use is materialized in written professional instructions, but the imagination of their potential use is haunting the scene.

In the vignette, the reader may notice the absent presence of the psychologist in charge of the nursing home, who codifies the organizational knowledge about neurodivergence, defining Alzheimer’s as a different mode of existence. The psychologist’s suggestion to look at the world through the eyes of residents living with Alzheimer’s may be considered as the materialization of a social defense (Menzies, 1960), aimed at the containment ² of the anxieties of those organizational members who enact coercion. It expresses a situated ethicality embedded in material tools and texts.

Francesco’s embodied knowing about this organizational atmosphere is made possible by an opening process in which he makes himself vulnerable to the presence of other bodies and the affective resonances they have with his own. By choosing to enter the lady’s room, the ethnographer becomes open to involvement and to experiencing firsthand a dense atmosphere that, precisely because of its heaviness, ultimately pushes him out of the room by the end of the reported vignette. Together with sensing an atmosphere, we notice how a verbal artifact “Sunset Syndrome” is used as a taken-for-granted expression that names an atmosphere. By naming it, an atmosphere is materialized into a knowledge object that is learnt, not only during the everyday life of the nursing home but also during professional training. It acts as an anticipatory pointer for knowing, and collectively sharing, what to expect in a situation enveloped by such atmosphere and how to collaborate collectively to live in it and face its picks. In fact, as we will see, the Sunset Syndrome expresses both a name for the unfolding of an affective atmosphere and a verb for the beginning of an improvisational choreography of actions and feelings.

We have presented this vignette to introduce the reader in media res, describing an affective atmosphere that affects bodily capacities and potentialities in differential ways and that appears, at first sight, as a single and all-encompassing atmosphere in the context of organizing. In the panorama of organizational literature on the atmospheric, which conceives it as a quasi-thing (Griffero, 2017) or half-thing (Jørgensen and Beyes, 2023) and favors “exceptional” and generally “harmonious” atmospheres, we focus on the other side of the same coin. We chose to study a recurring, ordinary atmosphere (Stewart, 2007) substantially unpleasant, if not difficult, to dwell in. In fact, upon a second, more detailed glance at the vignette, we “see” an atmosphere characterized by multiplicity, composed of a plurality of atmospheres of care but also of coercion and containment, where the intensity of feelings and moods circulates like underground currents.

The aim of our article is to theorize affective atmospheres, on the basis of an empirical study that problematizes how to study affect without reducing it to a “thing.” Affect, originating from Spinoza, (Manning, 2016; Massumi, 2017) is defined very basically as the bodily ability to affect and be affected. Every encounter is an affective patterning of capacities to affect and to be affected. However, we have to think of affect/being affected as two sides of the same phenomenon that cuts across bodies who are always “more than one” (Manning, 2016). Affect escapes the active-passive opposition as in the following example. When you are affected by anger, you also affect it in turn, for example, by stiffening up to repel it or to brace for a fight: “your affecting your being affected-by the anger immediately affects the other person” (Massumi, 2017: 109).

In the remainder of this article, we first introduce a theoretical framework that offers an alternative view of affective atmosphere as vital materiality, grounded in feminist new materialism. Subsequently, we illustrate affective ethnography as the chosen methodology based on three pillars—embodied knowing, affective placeness, and trans-formative power. Our ethnographic writing takes the form of three vignettes, each amenable to one pillar. While the first vignette has been incorporated in the introduction, the subsequent two sections present one vignette each which performs the affective entanglement of care, coercion, and containment. In the discussion, the three vignettes are read transversally to illustrate how the concept of trans-corporeality transcends individual embodiment and highlights the material co-composition of bodies that, in their encounter, are affected and affect each other, thus overcoming the boundaries between neurodivergent and neurotypical bodies. In the conclusions, we summarize our contribution, highlighting the materiality of atmosphere and its multiplicity and arguing that atmospheres should be approached as organizational phenomena, shaped by rules, practices, and capabilities that materialize in a daily flow of practical activities.

The atmospheric as affective, material, and multiple: a theoretical framework

The first vignette offers a situated description of a recurrent affective atmosphere. Like all descriptions, it carries with it our implicit epistemological assumptions. In what follows, we make explicit that our descriptive apparatus is inspired by feminist new materialism and position ourselves critically within the atmospheric literature that is predominantly informed by phenomenology. Our critical positioning is not based on an oppositional thought, “against” the mainstream; rather, it looks for a diffractive reading of texts and authors that will enhance multiplicity (Barad, 2014). We follow Latour’s (2004: 246) remark that critique has run out of steam and that “the critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather.” His invitation to move “from matter of fact” to “matter of concern” and Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2011) invitation to move further toward “matter of care” declare the end of critique as ethos and practice. As others have stressed (Cutcher et al., 2020), in organization studies, there is an urgent need for new forms of knowledge where respect and generosity are evident.

An ethico-onto-epistemology (Barad, 2007) inscribed in feminist new materialism not only considers that the researchers’ epistemic practices construct the object of knowledge but also that the ethical dimension of doing research, grounded in the thought of Despret (2004), Barad (2010), and Haraway (2016), constitutes a significant move away from the careless habit of critique that is negative and destructive. Moreover, feminist new materialism is concerned with overcoming the limits of producing knowledge through dualist categories that privilege one term over the other (nature/culture, subject/object, mind/body, masculinity/femininity, and also neurotypicality/neurodivergence).

We intend to offer an alternative conceptualization of the atmosphere which enters in dialogue with the contemporary debate. We start acknowledging the work of Hermann Schmitz (2005 [1969]), who introduced the term atmosphere into phenomenology in the 1960s, viewing atmospheres as meaningful situations and as spatially extended nonsubjective feelings. A phenomenological approach has been dominant in the study of atmosphere, and in this way, atmosphere has been taken up in organization studies (Borch, 2009; Jørgensen and Holt, 2019; Julmi, 2017; Leclair, 2023; Painter et al., 2021; Vitry et al., 2020;). Atmospheres have been mainly seen in the realm of perception and have been conceived as “quasi-things” (Griffero, 2017); “spaces with a mood” (Böhme et al., 2014); “quasi-autonomous entities” (Vitry et al., 2020) or “half-things” (Jørgensen and Beyes, 2023) that influence what is socially and communicatively possible (Böhme, 2017; Mühlhoff, 2015); mediums of perception (Thibaud, 2015); a capacity to modulate situations and collectives into coherent wholes (Riedel, 2019); and permeating a space but not occupying it (Bissell, 2010).

Atmosphere is also a central concept in the study of organizational aesthetics, which stresses the materiality of the body and its sensorial knowing (Moriceau and Paes, 2016; Strati, 2009, 2019). It is framed as an aesthetic object of study which: “is felt and judged by being experienced. Not, that is, through the cognitive or rational knowledge process, but through the feeling of being immersed in the air being breathed” (Strati, 2009: 231).

In the context of organizing, atmospheres have been explored mainly in relation to space and places such as co-working spaces where atmospheres are conceived as affective commons (Waters-Lynch and Duff, 2019); in craft laboratories (Bell and Vachhani, 2020); in community-based organizing (Keevers and Sykes, 2016); in touristic tours (De Vaujany et al., 2019); in the intertwinement of space and place in contexts of sexual sociality (Green et al., 2010); and in digital technologies that create sensory orders in mediating the affective and atmospheric qualities of space (Jørgensen and Holt, 2019). Atmosphere has been explored as central to sociality, politics, and aesthetics, as orchestrations of space (Bille et al., 2015), and as something holding people together as in the context of urban art interventions (Michels, 2015; Michels and Steyaert, 2017), film festivals (De Molli et al., 2020), or football matches (Edensor, 2015). An atmosphere may hold people together also as a form of resistance through the force of laughter in a Polish art collective (Marsh and Śliwa, 2022).

While atmospheres are seen in organization studies mainly as standing outside humans, related to and influencing human activities but not the object of such activities, in marketing (Biehl-Missal and Saren, 2012) and architecture (Borch, 2014), they are the result of intentionality and are intentionally constructed to shape situations.

We argue that a phenomenological approach to atmosphere as experience and mainly human experience (Jørgensen, 2023; Slaby, 2019) may be complemented by joining and developing a feminist new-materialist conceptualization of atmosphere as a vital field of forces (Bell and Vachhani, 2020; Gherardi, 2017; Hitchen, 2021). We are interested in exploring how situated atmospheres, happening “by accident and by design” (Michels and Steyaert, 2017: 22), can be studied empirically in the context of daily organizing. The term “by design” does not denote a planning of spaces or situations similar to what is done in architecture; rather, it covers an attempt to control and the dynamics that arise from the intention of generating, managing, changing, or retaining a given atmosphere and that is always in excess of the intentions to control it. Atmospheres cannot be controlled, even when humans and human-made technologies try to capture and master them. Something always escapes such attempts and continues to exert a force of its own (Massumi, 2015).

An alternative view of atmosphere in analogy with breathing frames it as a dynamic flow, as an in-between motion of the outside in and the inside out, thus opening the way to frame atmosphere as vital materiality according to a feminist new-materialist theorization (Bennett, 2010) in which atmosphere is both outside and inside. Vital materiality is the key for conceiving atmosphere as a process always in continuous transformation and which always materializes in changing forms, following its own rhythm and constituting an interstitial phenomenon in-between influx and efflux (Bennett, 2020), crossing the boundaries between the air outside bodies and the air inside them through the flow of breath.

A conception of atmosphere as a material-discursive phenomenon has been elaborated in the context of human geography (Ash, 2013; Michels et al., 2020; Sumartojo and Pink, 2018), in the process ontology taken up by Anderson (2009, 2016) as affective becoming and in his idea of atmospheres as unfinished, pre-consciously felt, and spatially composed. For Anderson (2009: 80), “the term atmosphere presents itself to us as a response to a question; how to attend to collective affects that are not reducible to the individual bodies that they emerge from?” In writing the first vignette, we have described the Sunset Syndrome as an affective atmosphere, neither solely located in the material environment nor solely in human bodies, but as emerging from the affective resonances between various sociomaterial components, tools, and discourses included.

The materiality of affective atmospheres has been explored in relation to sound (Henriques, 2010), colors (Beyes, 2017, 2022), smell (Riach and Warren, 2015), writing practices (van Eck and van Amsterdam, 2021), and even ghostly matter (Pors, 2016). The centrality of the body in atmospheric thinking has been elaborated by McCormack (2010, 2015, 2018) as an invitation to think atmospherically, foregrounding the corporeal, affective, and perceptual. Thus, the body in its materiality can be thought of as a verb, as bodying (Manning, 2016), and the noun/verb is grounded in the bodily answer to “what can a body do?” When Massumi asks what a body does “to earn that name, two things stand out. It moves. It feels. In fact, it does both at the same time. It moves as it feels and it feels itself moving” (Massumi, 2002: 1). He relies on Spinoza’s definition of the body in terms of relations between movement and rest, the body’s capacity (power and potentia) to affect and to be affected, and the variation in intensity as bodily felt. For Massumi (2002: 35), affect “escapes confinement” in the body, while emotion is the capture of affect, that is, a sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience. Since emotion is the expression of that capture, this implies that something always escapes. For this reason, Massumi views affect as an eluding form, cognition, and meaning.

This feminist new-materialist and processual conceptualization of affect offers a theoretical and methodological ground for an advancement in the field of affective atmospheres in the context of organizing. It suggests a way to think about feelings, emotions, and affective atmospheres in terms of activity and movement in situated practices in the world and in connection to temporality. Atmospheric embodiment is also something that can be learned and practiced since “to have a body is to learn to be affected, meaning ‘effectuated,’ moved, put into motion by other entities, humans or nonhumans” (Latour, 2004: 205, emphasis in original). The dual movement between being affected and affect is also a movement between the voluntary and the involuntary implicated by affect. The bodying sensing maybe conceived as a membrane that resonates with the vibrant matter of the world. Feminist new materialism is the philosophical matrix for elaborating affective atmosphere in relation to the vibrancy of mattering (Brennan, 2004), to the entanglement of materiality and concern, and to the atmospheric attunement to the world as matter and meaning (Stewart, 2011).

Often, both the concepts of atmosphere and affect assume a sense of something “exceptional” and unique in its elusiveness. However, we can enrich this debate with a new nuance on recurrent atmospheres when we consider “the ordinary” and frame both atmospheres as ordinary atmospheres and affects as ordinary affects. To attend to ordinary affects “is to trace how the potency of forces lies in their immanence to things that are both flighty and hardwired, shifty and unsteady but palpable too” (Stewart, 2007: 3–4). Ordinary atmospheres, those commonly sensed and emerging in everyday organizing, are not the kind of analytic object that can be fixed on a static plane of analysis. They are instead always in motion and that “move,” that are sensed by their capacity to affect and to be affected, they surge and become submerged. They can be “seen” through their “affecto-rhythmic order” (Katila et al., 2020: 1314) and can be written performatively, evoking the transmission of affect. Thus, we join those who ask: “what atmospheres do and how they work?” (Ash and Anderson, 2015: 44), how to avoid the “quick jump to representational thinking and evaluative critique?” (Stewart, 2007: 6), how to explore at once the “key dimensions of affects: their spatio-materiality, their sensuality and their (in)stability?” (Michels, 2015: 255), and how to explore the “fluid affective spacing of organizing?” (Gherardi, 2023: 2). An affective ethnography enables us to address these research directions, and it is our chosen methodology for approaching ordinary affective atmospheres in a nursing home for people living with Alzheimer.

Affective ethnography: a methodological framework

Within the variegated methodological reflections on organizational ethnographies, affective ethnography has recently emerged with a distinctive identity (Gherardi, 2019b; Holck, 2018; Holck and Villeseche, 2023). In organization studies, affective ethnography has been taken up quite rapidly and extensively, but often as a simple lip service to any kind of ethnographical sensibility toward embodiment and emotions. ³

Affective ethnography is positioned within affective and post-qualitative methodologies (St, Pierre, and Jackson, 2014) grounded in ethico-onto-epistemologies that do not separate “knowing” and “being,” describing the world as intra-actions of entangled elements: subjects and objects, humans and nonhumans, materialities and discourses, as in practice-based studies.

For Knudsen and Stage (2015), affective methodologies are characterized by the re-thinking of traditional fieldwork techniques such as observations and field notes, the consequent creation of an inventive experimental milieus, and finally, by the development of new approaches to text and writing to grasp their affective dimensions. With affective methodologies, we move away from rule-based methods and entity-based research toward encounters that ask how things come to matter in the ways they do. The individual subject is not at the apex of inquiry. Subjects, including the researcher, are emergent in encounters with others—with humans, with discourses, and with physical and social landscapes. In these encounters, the entangled enlivening of being is emergent (Barad, 2007; Davies, 2018). Such research demands of the researcher new skills of listening to the minute details of life, of noticing differently, and new capacities to explore a range of “bodies” in and around organizations. Nonhuman bodies, organizational spaces, and objects all play equally as human bodies, a viewpoint that questions the anthropocentric tendencies of much of organizational scholarship (Hunter and Kivinen, 2022; Revsbæk and Simpson, 2022).

Affective ethnography has been defined as “a style of performative ethnographic process that relies on the researcher’s bodily capacity to affect and be affected in order to produce interpretations that may transform the things that they interpret” (Gherardi, 2019b: 742). It does not appoint an ethnography of affects, nor a generic attention to emotions and emotional writing; rather, the term affective ethnography denotes a switch in the basic question from “what affect is” to “what affect does” in ethnographic practices and to what researchers can do with their own embodied capacity to affect and be affected. Through an affective ethnography, we experiment how affect works and how to work affectively. When we focus on caring practices, we consider how all practice elements—texts, actors, materialities, language, agencies—are already entangled in complex ways and how affect should be read in the elements’ intra-actions, as their capacity of affecting and being affected by one another, as data in motion/data that move. In fact, its roots have to be traced back in a posthumanist practice theory (Cozza and Gherardi, 2023; Gherardi, 2019a) that de-centers humans as the main source of agency in favor of the agencement of all the elements from which the agency of a practice emerges.

Affective ethnography, as a style of openness to encounters while conducting fieldwork, is based on the following three pillars. The term “pillar” should not be intended as a method, a phase, or a stage, but rather as a point of attention that works as an anchor in the flow of the processual becoming of the field and the researchers within the field.

The first pillar is embodied knowing and refers to the body’s capacity to experience itself as always “more than one,” more than itself, open to affective resonance with other human and more-than-human bodies. Embodied knowing is an important resource for the researchers in their encounters in the field. It does not mean simply that the researcher has a body, knows through the senses, and is perceived as an embodied being in all embodied differences (gender, race, age, ableness, sexual orientations, neurotypicality, and other differing marks). Embodied knowing, seen through the lens of affect, relates to vulnerability as an ethical fundamental dependency on the other (Butler, 2004), to vulnerability as an affective relation (Gilson, 2014; Rozmarin, 2021), and to the capacity of making oneself vulnerable for encountering the other. While vulnerability commonly carries a negative connotation of weakness, Gilson (2011) conceptualizes it as a radical openness that critically informs our efforts to learn and transform, pointing out how “vulnerability is a condition of potential that makes possible other conditions. Being vulnerable makes it possible for us to suffer, to fall prey to violence and be harmed, but also to fall in love, to learn, to take pleasure and find comfort in the presence of others, and to experience the simultaneity of these feelings” (Gilson, 2011: 310). Embodied knowing as a pillar of affective ethnography can be seen as a means of learning to make oneself vulnerable for becoming open to the world and for being in the world. In an affective ethnography of care practices, the embodied and learned capacity of being affected and affecting becomes a means for relating to vulnerability across the binary of weakness/invulnerability.

The second pillar is affective placeness as the collective capacity to feel and to shape the meaning of a space and the situated affective atmospheres that enable and constrain the array of activities and practices potentially re-enactable within a place and by emplaced bodies. Placeness is central in an affective ethnography because it enables re-thinking of affective atmosphere in terms of the spatialization of affect and the affectivity of space. In other terms, we can see moving bodies making place and emplaced bodies. Bodies enter in affective resonance with places, with other bodies, with the artifacts encountered, and with the discourses around place and care. The capacity of going beyond individual embodiment is expressed both as affective resonance and as trans-corporeality, which “means that all creatures, as embodied beings, are intermeshed with the dynamic, material world, which crosses through them, transforms them, and is transformed by them” (Alaimo, 2018: 435).

The third pillar is the transformative power of affect in performing the agencement of all practice elements: from the bodily knowing to the material-semiotic-affective staging of events and atmospheres that “make things happen” and, in so doing, acquire a form, are formed and trans-formed. In the movement of affecting and being affected, bodies, things, and discourses not only take shape but also change shape, and we can see how this is a trans-formational process of becoming-with affect. The three pillars have oriented the attention of the ethnographers in the fieldwork and have informed how the three ethnographic vignettes have been written, each informed by a pillar and aiming to cross the binary between form and content.

This article is based on a 2-year (2019–2021) ethnography conducted by the first author in a nursing home in the North of Italy, specialized in the care of people living with Alzheimer’s disease. On this basis, we present an excerpt focused on an ordinary affective atmosphere, the Sunset Syndrome that happens with a certain frequency. Our aim is not to report “data” from the field, but to move toward the making of vibrant engagements with a scene of care, coercion, and containment of the anxieties generated by the use of coercion on those who do it. In this scene, the reader will encounter the personnel on duty in the nursing home: the director, the nurses, the care aids, and their coordinator. Some care aids are men, and all the other professionals are women. The gendered and gendering feature of care is well known; nevertheless, we invite the reader to keep in mind the gender segregation of the professions of care while imagining the scene of the three vignettes.

This text aspires to be written as a more-than-representational text that picks up both the affective dynamics of affecting and being affected and the affective intensities in connection with the fieldwork, focusing on how life takes shape in shared experiences, everyday routines, fleeting encounters, embodied movements, enduring urges, unexceptional interactions, and sensuous dispositions (Lorimer, 2005). In the following two sections, we present a couple of vignettes that refer to the second and third pillars, with the aim of making readable and sensed what is as elusive but palpable as an affective atmosphere.

Affective placeness: the spatialization of affect and the affectivity of space

We introduce a second vignette that describes the moment of the day when the transition from the dining room to the bedrooms takes place and how affect circulates among all the bodies and the activities involved in co-constructing the sense of these spaces (Kuismin, 2022), that is, their placeness. This description aims at illustrating how bodies enter in affective resonance with other human and nonhuman materialities (spaces included) and how their capacity to go beyond individual embodiment (trans-corporeality) constitutes the common ground for a joint dynamic intra-action of bodies overcoming the boundaries between neurodivergence and neurotypicality.

The materiality of the Sunset Syndrome transpires from its happenings at specific points in time. How the sunset affects human beings has been the subject of literature, ⁴ films, songs, paintings, and many other cultural elaborations. The weather, daylight, and lightening of the rooms (Katila et al., 2023) contribute to the surge of an affective atmosphere. This time of the day is incorporated in physical activities that organize how having dinner and going to bed will put an end to the residents’ daily schedule, open the door to unplanned night events, and constitute a threat to the staff’s capacity to move smoothly along the temporal flow of caring while coping with what is unexpected or feared and what generates anxiety.

All bodies are implicated in sensing how an affective atmosphere unfolds; however, these bodies are differently oriented in sensing and co-producing the Sunset Syndrome. The concept of orientation (Ahmed, 2010: 234) helps us to see “how the world acquires a certain shape through contact between bodies that are not in a relation of exteriority” and what these bodies can do (Thanem and Wallenberg, 2015). To be oriented in a certain way is how certain “things” (e.g. the tools of coercion or activities) come to be significant and come to be objects for somebody and different objects for somebody else. In the Sunset Syndrome, the bodies of the residents are oriented toward a form of resistance to the activities that take place at the end of the day and that epitomize the transition between a waking state and a sleeping state, between light and darkness. The bodies of the staff are oriented toward the worrying signs of the insurgence of the Sunset Syndrome and the means for avoiding or toning it down, and the body of the researcher is oriented to sensing the emotional tone of the encounter and is kept in this affective atmosphere since his body’s posture is readable to the others and he is affecting it willingly or unwillingly.

In the previous days, Daniela had invited me (Francesco) several times to join the evening shift, saying, “You’ll see, there are special effects. I don’t understand why there are only two persons at that time.” It’s around 7 in the evening, and there’s a certain nervousness in the dining room. Roberto, a resident in a wheelchair with a restraint belt, finishes eating and starts moving in the chair. I heard that he is going through a hard period and, for this reason, he has provisionally been sedated and restrained. Daniela sighs and says, “Now it will go on like this all night; he’ll fall asleep tomorrow morning.” Two elderly residents begin to argue loudly, and the coordinator of the care aids says, “Hey, that’s enough!” and—approaching one of the ladies—says, “Hold the spoon properly!” to which she responds: “Fuck off!” After about half an hour, the care aids start putting the residents to bed. I follow Daniela and her colleague Miguel, who “team up” to put the residents to bed, being the only two care aids on duty. With the first resident, defined as a sweet lady, everything goes smoothly. She willingly goes to bed and Daniela wishes her good night with a kiss on the head. Things take a different turn in the next room. Daniela tries to undress the resident, who seems particularly upset because she can’t find her glasses, and dress her with a sanitary pajama that has a zipper on the back, aimed to prevent the patients from taking off the diaper or the pajama. In the meantime, two residents enter the room, playfully called “troublemakers” by the staff. They, especially when the Sunset Syndrome is at its peak, wander arm in arm through the wards, entering rooms. In this case, the “troublemakers” peek into the room, start talking to me incoherently, seem particularly restless, and begin to rummage through the room. Daniela looks at them disheartened, takes a dress and hands it to one of the “troublemakers” in an attempt to keep her occupied, then looks at me and says, “See, it’s impossible with just two people!” At the end of the shift, I go to the kitchen with Daniela and Miguel, who invite me to stay and eat the leftovers from dinner with the other staff members. I take the opportunity to chat about what I’ve just witnessed. Although everyone agrees that the evening shift is particularly challenging due to the Sunset Syndrome, at the same time, they acknowledge that there are “good” and “bad” days. Moreover, the relationship each member of the staff has with individual residents also influences the aggressiveness of each resident. Beatrice, a care aid with several years of experience, says, “If you catch a bad day, it’s crucial to pass the ball. I couldn’t handle Veronica—a particularly anxious and agitated resident—today. She was restless, so I asked my colleague to take care of her, and with him, she became calm.”

This vignette describes the affectivity of a space in which bodies, materials, and discourses are entangled and that constitutes a sensed place, that is, the felt meaning of that place. The hallway is the place of transition from day to night, the transition from the end of something to the beginning of something else. It is the stage for the Sunset Syndrome that the affective atmosphere envelops a practice and enables us to describe the spatialization of affect through the movements of bodies circumscribing a space.

We want to stress how discursive practices materialize these bodily interchanges though the mobilization of the labels adopted for defining some residents, periods, and days (aggressive, sweet, hard, bad or good), which express expectations that pave the way for improvising a choreography of activities in which care, coercion, and containment are intermeshed. Feeding, clothing, unclothing, and taking to bed are care activities that include immobilizing recalcitrant bodies, reprimanding verbal assaults, pointing out unwritten codes of conduct. In this case, caring also means limiting the freedom of human bodies and the spread of certain “undesirable” collective feelings that, in accordance with organizational and professional rules, could be dangerous for residents’ health, personnel safety, and, finally, for the repute of the organization itself. The materialization of these frightful events is sensed in the bodies of the staff and is communicated through verbal orders (silencing the residents), diversionary tactics (to occupy their hands), and the use of restraints.

The trans-corporeal capacity to affect and be affected emerges through: the encounters between the ‘sweet’ lady and Daniela’s body, who kisses her goodnight; the anger that ignites tension between the bodies of the coordinator and the two older adults ; the bodies of the ‘troublemakers’ wandering all night and affecting the sleeping bodies in different rooms; the bodies of other residents who may or may not enter into resonance with Roberto’s visibly sedated body; and, finally, Daniela and Miguel’s bodies, which tacitly coordinate the flow of their shift, sharing their feelings about the difficulty of coping with the continuous interplay of juxtaposed sociomaterial forces. We can say that while bodies do things, things also “do” bodies. The effects of these encounters are somewhat unpredictable and constantly changing in the dynamic interplay of different bodies, differentially positioned in terms of their reciprocal relationship, as well as by the time of the day and the number of available care aides on duty and of the eventual presence of other older people in the room in which care practices take place. Care practices, coercive means, and containment of anxieties shape different and entangled orientations in which bodies are mutually reshaped and dynamically re-oriented. When the atmosphere tones down, the use of coercion appears unnecessary, and the encounters between bodies become sweeter and softer. On the other hand, care activities exercise clear effects on the emerging affective atmosphere. For instance, a strong verbal order directed toward a “rebel” resident can set fire to an unexpected violent reaction, not only affecting the professionals’ orientations in their actions but also entering in resonance with the other residents’ bodies and orientation and thus with the trans-corporeal matter of all bodies in situation.

What matters in the composition of an emerging affective atmosphere is itself an effect of bodily proximities and forms of entanglements.

Coercion-with-care: on forming and being formed

In the following vignette, we delve deeper into what coercion “does” when it is entangled with care, as a vital force in performing an affective atmosphere. As previously observed (Hennion and Vidal Naquet, 2017), the presence of legal and regulatory texts (clinical guidelines and written best practices) emphasizes how, in certain well-defined cases, constraining practices (with specific reference to the use of physical restraints) can be justified and transformed into something ethically right. In the following vignette, we describe coercion in terms of what it does and how it is made “doable.” Thus, we address the third pillar of an affective ethnography: a focus on trans-formative power. The trans-formation of coercion is written with a hyphen for stressing how forming and being formed can be seen as a nondirectional process that continuously and reciprocally forms and transforms itself.

It’s 5 pm, and I (Francesco) am sitting in the hallway of the nursing home. My attention is suddenly drawn to an angry voice that shouts: “Go away! Asshole!.” These words are pronounced by a standing senior lady with the body and the face directed toward an old man who is walking in her direction. The man waits until she turns her back and, at that point, he kicks her in the pants. The reaction is immediate: “Dickheaaaad.” The voice of the woman resounds throughout the nursing home. The man first punches the wind in the direction of the lady and, then, slaps her in the face. Care aides promptly separate the residents, taking them away in opposite directions. I observe the scene along with the third care aid who explains that the aggressiveness of the lady and the man has probably worsened by the Sunset Syndrome. A few minutes later, the director comes back and, after a small talk with the care aides, concludes that “it is always Mina (the lady) to pick a fight,” implying that she had to be sedated. In accordance with regulations, the sedative, as well as other medications, is administered by the nurse, after consulting with the general practitioner, and a note is made in the resident’s personal clinical record.

During dinner, the coordinator of the care aides explains to me that “the drugs intervene when you have not been able to manage the situation. When you have a resident who is so agitated, aggressive that you can’t give him/her the tranquility he/she should have, then therapy is needed . . . Physical restraints such as the anti-fall sheet, that reduces the movements of the elderlies and prevents them to get out of the bed, or the sanitary pajamas are envisaged for protecting the residents . . . Care aides cannot be in every resident’s room.”

The coordinator’s explanation seems to minimize the effects of restraints both on residents and on the staff. Once the Sunset Syndrome tones down, the residents go to the bed and I remain with two care aides, Beatrice and another experienced colleague. After completing the tour of the rooms, it is around 1:00 in the morning, I join them and stay with them in the dining room. Shortly thereafter, the conversation turns to the enormous challenge of working in a nursing home for people living with Alzheimer. Beatrice expresses profound sadness at witnessing the residents in “that state,” referring both to the disease itself and to their deprivation of freedom. In this regard, care aides speak with enthusiasm about “wonderful” nursing homes in other parts of Italy, where people living with Alzheimer’s are free to lie down on pillows left around the wards. After a few minutes, the two caregivers begin discussing the case of Maria, a colleague who recently left the nursing home. “This was the culmination of months of absenteeism and illness. When she did come, she cried at work,” explains Beatrice, adding reproachfully, “But, I don’t know . . . control yourself, change your workplace, if you are unable to face this.”

The prompt execution of the improvisational choreography (Whalen et al., 2002) and activities described in the vignette would not have been possible without the knowledgeable gaze of care aides that, activated by the incumbent atmosphere of the Sunset Syndrome, carefully observe the ongoing interactions among residents. A choreography is a matter of time and space, and like in the steps of a dance, the participants (human and nonhuman) in these repetitive temporal patterns intra-act by fashioning a choreography of resources. In doing so, they enact a competent performance that discursively and materially mobilizes all the relevant resources available in the setting and can be activated within it. Care aides have been trained to mobilize a form of knowledge learned in the field for separating agitated residents, nurses know when and how to administer sedatives, and legal and regulatory texts about the use of restraints have been incorporated in daily organizing for care work. Although the use of coercion is regulated and collectively negotiated, the fear of potential occurrence of negative events brings with itself anxieties concerning when the use of coercion should be put in practice, whether it would be effective or whether its use would be “moderate” or “excessive.” Care aides and other members of the staff are constantly concerned about the potential materialization of frightful events which, in turn, leads to feelings of anxiety about their capacity for coping.

Coercion, understood as the use of force directed to limit individual freedom and restraining “hostile” physical and verbal manifestation, affects the bodies of those who willy-nilly have to use it. It induces a form of sadness, pain, and compassion regarding the ongoing condition of the residents who are perceived as being diminished in their humanness.

The affective atmosphere in which coercion appears as an element in a field of intra-acting forces extends before and after the use of means of restraints, generating an unexpected affective overflow, often labeled as “compassion fatigue” (Gerard, 2017). In daily organizing, the extreme state of tension and preoccupation for those being helped can create “a secondary traumatic stress” (Figley, 2005) for the caregivers. Care aides who are expected to put coercion in practice do not get used to do it, and coercion does not slip into the background of daily care practices since their bodies are constantly touched and moved by the explicit reactions of anger, pain, verbal assaults, and sometimes, excitation of the residents in front of the real or potential use of force. This sufferance resonates in organizational spaces, which envelop human bodies and other materialities, nullifying once again the attempts of establishing boundaries or controlling an emergent atmosphere. Creating social defenses to contain anxiety therefore becomes an organizational process that follows some specific strategies.

In this regard, a discursive strategy is enacted by the coordinator at the end of the episode of aggression, when she describes the use of restraints as a mere technical matter of choice between different devices for the legitimate use of coercion. This discursive practice minimizes the affective significance of the choice by listing the relative advantage of one means over another and how to switch from one to the other in the event of an escalation. At the same time, the discursive practice that minimizes the emotional significance of the choice operates as a means of containment, since it may be seen as an attempt to fend off the painful feelings arising in the professionals after the use of coercion and the associated anxieties. In addition, the coordinator of care aides engages herself in the same discursive strategy of minimization, emphasizing that the harm caused by restraints is less significant than the potential harm that could occur in its absence (Miele, 2022). By this minimization move, the emerging anxieties that are inherent in coercion are dealt with by reducing their relevance, assuming that without coercive tools, the pain felt by resident (and implicitly the displeasure of care aides) would be worse.

Another discursive strategy of containment is staged in the same dining room of the second vignette, where, once the residents are put to bed, a small number of participants, late in the night, transform a common space into a “private” place for storytelling. It is a socialization time in which the staff collectively performs the containment of individual and collective painful feelings provoked both by the prolonged contact with people living with Alzheimer and by the way they are affected by the use of coercion. There they mobilize a well-known narrative that may be considered at the core of the containment process and—paraphrasing Menzies (1960, 102–103)—may be called “detachment and denial of feelings,” performed in order to contain the ongoing affective overflow. This discursive practice takes the form of a utopian narrative of an “other” place where it is possible to do otherwise. An element of phantasmagoria keeps the idea alive that elsewhere, in other nursing homes, coercion and care are done differently, perhaps better. At the same time, an element of realistic acceptance is introduced by the way the story of their colleague Maria is told. Maria’s failure of facing her distress is narrated as a purely individual responsibility. The moral of this story is to represent what is considered professional competence and how silence about the difficulties in coping with neurodivergence is implicitly enforced on the “competent” caregiver. There is a stringent complementarity between the social defense operated by the organizational process of regulating the use of coercion and the myth of professional competence able to cope with it in an impassive way. In telling the story of “the one who was unable to cope,” care aides avoid “disturbing identification” (Menzies, 1960: 103) with a colleague who has been overwhelmingly affected by the use of coercion, framing her conduct as excessive and labeling her as irresponsible for not requesting to be transferred to another nursing home. Professional competence is valued along the lines of individual competent containment of the affects that coercion urges.

Coercion is made “doable” through the organizational practices that regulate its legitimate use, through the normative artifacts that incorporate such legitimation (both texts as protocols and technologies of restraints), and through the ongoing discursive elaboration of situated meanings. A collective improvisational choreography is staged by the professionals in coping with situations of coercion, through the formal and informal discursive practices that make coercion morally acceptable, that inscribe them in deontological principles, and that enable coercion to become an object of conversation and a celebrated professional identity.

“Coercion-with-care” is the neologism that we propose for naming an organizational dynamic that is partially controlled and partially subjugated by organizational voluntary actions but, at the same time, affects the means of controlling and subjugating so that affect always transcends this dual movement between affecting and being affected. Care and coercion trans-form each other in the same process of forming and being formed.

Discussion

Writing is a constitutive process of every ethnography, and in an affective ethnography, it has the distinctive feature of soliciting in the reader a vibrant engagement with the scene. In writing, we have intentionally tried to avoid the language of emotions and the emotional description of intensities, leaving them to be felt and imagined by the reader, while we have privileged the description of “affect as a verb” in illustrating how bodies, materials, and discourses intra-act in caring practices.

In writing the three vignettes, we followed the three constitutive pillars of an affective ethnography (Gherardi, 2019b). First, in describing the Sunset Syndrome as an affective atmosphere, we put to work the capacity of embodied knowing through which the ethnographer makes himself vulnerable and relates to the object of knowledge through the senses, thus overcoming the binary between the subject and object of knowledge. Second, to illustrate placeness, as the spatialization of affect and the affectivity of space, we wrote a vignette focused on resonance as the bodily capacity of affecting and being affected by all the bodies, with other materialities and discursiveness engaged in the production of the sense of a place. Third, while describing how the containment of the professionals’ anxieties is collectively accomplished, we focused on the process of trans-formation by which an affective atmosphere expresses the restless capacity of forming and being formed by those (humans and other-than-humans) who participate in its production.

In writing, we have used the ruse of presenting three vignettes for imposing a certain order in the flow of events and participants that create the atmospheric quality of a continual and daily motion of relations, contingencies, and emergences. While the organizational literature on atmosphere has a heightened interest in events and wonders how the sustainable cultivation of atmospheres may nurture enduring forms of collaborative organizing (Resch and Rozas, 2024; Waters-Lynch and Duff, 2021), our study focuses on the other side of the same coin and considers recurrent, ordinary atmospheres entrenched in everyday organizing.

In this section, we aim to shatter this artificial order and to discuss the three vignettes transversally, so as to reflect on what we can learn about an affective atmosphere in the context of organizing and how we can theorize about the atmospheric.

The main lesson we learned from conducting our affective ethnography is the possibility of going beyond individual embodiment toward the material co-composition of bodies that are “more than one.” We can discuss the meaning of embodiment in relation to a collectivity rather than in relation to a bounded human body when considering how different bodies—those of the residents, of the professionals, of the researchers—are differently and reciprocally entrenched. These different bodies are affecting and being affected by being in reciprocal relation, in relation with specific tools, differently and similarly occupying a shared space and exchanging situated words, gestures, and meaning. Moreover, in relation to the new feminist materialist framework that we propose, we notice how we can “see” bodies across the binary that differentiate neurodivergence from neurotypicality. These two categories become blurred when we consider the reciprocal corporeal capacity to affect and be affected. The concept of trans-corporeality enables us to go beyond the labeling of bodies as particular bodies, independently from their situated relations and intra-actions. When we pass to consider the corporeal and agentic capacity from the individual (labeled) bodies within a situation, we acknowledge what their bodies “do” and how their bodies are “done” in a situated way. We can start to discuss how to do otherwise, and how different politics of bodies can be done and with which effects. We can reflect on whether these considerations enter or not in the philosophy of management and in the pedagogies of organizing. In other words, we propose to reflect on caring in practice and on practices of care starting from a relational epistemology that de-centers the human subjects and their actions in favor of an agencement of humans, materialities, and discursiveness.

In a panorama where organizational literature has often conceptualized organizational atmosphere as a quasi-thing (Griffero, 2017) or a half-thing (Jørgensen and Beyes, 2023), we have approached it differently. Specifically, we describe organizational atmosphere as an ongoing, mutable composition emerging from a situated agencement. By doing so, we emphasize that humans, materialities, and discursive elements are agentic and co-produced within the dynamic flow of daily organizing. Both care activities and coercion devices, together with care discourses and coercion legitimation, are entangled elements of the same agencement from which coercion-with-care emerge. At first sight, coercion-with-care seems paradoxical because it unites the care with coercion. In blurring the boundaries between the two concepts, we can conceive of a trans-formational process that shapes the affective atmosphere—labeled as Sunset Syndrome—into another form that emerges from the co-existence of care, coercion, and containment as entangled, intra-acting elements. Like in influx and efflux, the Sunset Syndrome is absorbed and expulsed, and it hovers around as a mutable atmosphere of coercion with care. We have described how this trans-formational process is an organizational learning process that proceeds like an improvisational choreography in which other bodies, tools, and discourses participate in an affective dynamic in which bodies catch feelings as easily as fire (Gibbs, 2001) and affective contagion (Stewart, 2007) foregrounds moments of affective intensities. The affective dynamics inside the choreography unfold though a back-and-forth between actions of residents and staff in which residents perform the following acts: shouting, assuming burdened bodily postures, negotiation of restraints, getting even more upset, insulting, using physical assaults. For their part, the staff stages the following moves: ignoring, seeing through neurodivergence, consulting the archives to be informed, taking turns with colleagues to pass the buck. The researcher is inside the same dynamics and is busy in trying to notice, but not to intrude, and pretending to be an absent-present witness that sense a tense situation.

While existing studies have highlighted how beautiful atmospheres bring people together (De Molli et al., 2020; Edensor, 2015; Michels, 2015; Michels and Steyaert, 2017), we have complemented this literature by delving deeper into the processes through which a working collective learns to cope with a recurrent and distressing atmosphere. Specifically, we have explored how an ugly atmosphere, which causes distress among its members, is managed through the creation of social defenses. These defenses function as an organizing process of containment, achieved both through discursive practices and material artifacts. Thus, we can say that caring for organizational members—be they the professionals or the residents—is a working practice in which collectively and differentially all humans and all material devices participate and are actively engaged in producing a curative atmosphere. These are the answers to the questions with which we opened the article: How does an organization learn to dwell within an affective atmosphere of care and coercion? What happens when care and coercion are entangled? How does this entanglement affect professionals who use restraints both physical and pharmaceutical? How do they collectively learn to contain the anxieties arising from the use of coercion? Who cares for them?

Conclusion

The focus on recurrent, ordinary atmospheres intertwined with the rhythms of daily organizing has remained underexplored for a long time in the literature on organizational atmosphere. As Jørgensen and Beyes (2023: 13) observe, this field “still needs to build muscles of response to everyday atmospheric revulsions, ruptures, and withdrawals.” This is exactly the point that this article addresses, and our specific contribution deepens the understanding of affective atmospheres, pointing to the organized and improvisational choreography of activities that accommodate how learning to cope with care, coercion, and containment takes place. We assume a feminist new-materialist conception of affective atmosphere as a membrane that resonates with the vibrant matter of the world, as a dual movement between the voluntary and the involuntary, highlighting the material, multiple, and organizational dimensions of the atmosphere.

First, our focus on the materiality of atmospheres moves away from a phenomenological approach, which conceptualizes them as an external phenomenon influencing human activities. In contrast, we frame atmosphere as a field of forces with an internal dynamic, not simply enveloping organizational practices nor creating an affective spacing for them but as an always-mutable dynamic that substantially and perpetually interconnects humans and matter with the flow and the agencies of the environment. Such a framing of an organizational affective atmosphere directs attention to the multiplicity of participants (human and nonhuman) in the practice at hand and, simultaneously, to the sociomaterial forces animating that collection. The affective and sociomaterial effect is generated by the tension between the ethos of care (how to take care of) and the use of force (coercion), organizationally regulated and exercised legitimately, which affects the bodying of the professionals (and the tools they dispose of) as well as those of the residents. The excess of affects and fears flows through the relations between persons, positions, affects, tools, rules, and values that shape the form of the field of sociomaterial forces emerging from organizational practices and shaping them. The main forces at stake in the Sunset Syndrome are not only the corporeal forms of resistance and opposition staged by the residents but also the individual and collective feelings of uneasiness of both staff, residents, and researchers that are sensed in the context of everyday organizing, to which are added the staff’s attempts to tone down the emerging atmosphere and the discourses aimed at containing the anxieties generated by the professionals’ exercise of coercion. We have illustrated how affective atmospheres are not experienced as solely located in the material environment or in the individual human body; rather, they emerge as trans-corporeal relational effects of the continuous interplay between pervasive forces directed toward each other. The binary between neurotypicality and neurodivergence is overcome through the concept of trans-corporeality in which all bodies intra-act. Bodies are neither fully autonomous nor discrete, but rather always becoming in webs of mutual implications.

Second, we have stressed the multiplicity that characterizes affective atmospheres by exploring how they evolve along with organizational practices. The form that the Sunset Syndrome assumes is continuously shaped and reshaped by the ways in which all situated bodies (neurotypical and neurodivergent) enter in affective resonance and by subsequent re-orientations. Atmospheres are marked by multiplicity also depending on the different angles of arrival of people and tools and discourses. We acknowledge that, as researchers, we are only one possible “point of entry” in the described affective atmosphere. All the bodies are equally vulnerable when they enter in affective resonance with each other and with the atmosphere in which they take part, but they are also differently vulnerable and have different material resources for copying with trans-corporeality. Therefore, as researchers with specific embodied capacities to affect and to be affected, we provoked and have been provoked by emerging atmospheres, contributing to their co-production and generating unique ethnographic accounts about them. Vulnerability is an unavoidable feature of our existence that brings with it a certain ambivalence, making possible to embrace disruptive and fruitful experiences (Gilson, 2011). Becoming open to vulnerability, we immersed ourselves in a potentially disturbing and enriching atmosphere.

We argue that atmospheres should be approached as organizational phenomena, shaped by rules, practices, capabilities, and individual and collective negotiations and materialized in daily flow of practical activities. They are worked and reworked, always in the process of emerging and transforming as a part of lived experience.

Differently from previous studies where affective atmospheres are mainly conceived as a unitary phenomenon harmoniously holding people together, we have studied a “nonfashionable” setting in which emerging feelings are potentially disruptive and divisive. Consequently, we focus on those organizational practices through which unpleasant atmospheres are managed and affects are contained, revisiting the classical theme of social defense in organizing (Menzies, 1960). This daily effort of containing disturbing feelings resonate with what Fotaki (2023: 6–10) has more recently identified as the “avoidance of vulnerability,” a characteristic feature of neoliberal societies. Our study, rather than concentrating on the ways through which such avoidance is politically or ideologically motivated, has explored how it is practiced through an organized choreography of activities, collectively deployed, learned, and legitimated.

Finally, adopting a style of writing with resonance (Meier and Wegener, 2017), we have provided the readers with an opportunity to go inside a situated affective atmosphere, sensing its complexities and engaging them to contribute in bringing forward this field of research and its modalities.