Reintroducing Light to the Study of Organizations: Affective montages from the Cluny monastery

This article revives the study of light and organization and explores how light, as a generator of organizational atmospheres, is part of organizational life. The study is set in the ruins of the 13th-century Cluny monastery north of Lyon, France, where I combine ethnographic detail, material from old Benedictine rule books, contemporary archaeological excavation data and fictive videographic elements of a monk’s experience of light and work to produce affective montages of light experiences. The result is a collection of montages exhibiting both moments where light guides towards the pure, ideal and divine and moments where the surprising, embodied and neglected emerges. I suggest light as an important atmosphere generator and foreground an interplay between light experiences of both distance-based control and affective reactions that rely on an immersive body. The experiential light interplay oscillates between deliberately idealistic light control and visceral affective daydreaming under monastic light. Methodologically, I propose the technique of affective montage as a poetic approach for the study of light in organizations. Importantly, through a study of light at the Cluny monastery, this article reintroduces light as a central topic to organization research.