Waiting

Many services with limited capacity face wide swings in demand that can be caused by the change in seasons. The effective use of expensive productive capacity is one of the secrets of success in such businesses. By working with managers in operations and human resources, service marketers need to develop strategies to bring demand and capacity into balance, in ways that create benefits for customers as well as to improve profitability for the business. Balancing Capacity and Demand of Service Operations is the seventh book in the Winning in Service Markets series by services marketing expert Jochen Wirtz to cover the key aspects of services marketing and management based on sound academic evidence and knowledge. 

The present article argues that despite growing rates of single living worldwide, alternative representations of the single women who do not necessarily spend their life 'waiting for the one' are regularly absent from public view. By exploring the injunction as well as the option of non-waiting, this paper contributes to time studies by stressing how understandings of waiting inform hegemonic and alternative forms of temporal subjectivity and sociality. In the first part of this paper, I explore the ways in which the injunction to stop waiting is articulated in het-eronormative imagery. This call is regularly expressed with temporal urgency, and from this vantage point waiting comes to represent passivity and immobility. Accordingly, women are expected to 'move on' and be active in their own self-governance, which adapts to conventional norms of femininity. In the second part of this article, I demonstrate how the option of non-waiting dismantles and reworks heteronormative life scripts, and offers new subject positions for single women. These reflections propose alternative timetables that allow single women to reclaim their temporal agency and redefine their own temporal rhythms and life trajectories.

Una lettura attenta dell'opera narrativa di Thomas Mann svela l'esistenza, in particolare nella sua produzione più matura, di un legame fecondo e di certo non scontato tra Legge e Narrazione. Una delle tracce di questa sotterranea relazione è offerta dall'insistenza sull'idea di 'patto', inteso nella sua doppia accezione 'orizzontale', di contratto tra uomini, e 'verticale', di alleanza tra l'uomo e forze supreme, divine o infernali.

Focusing on Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Beck's account of 'freedom's children', this essay explores the dilemmas and potentials of the 'risk society'. Godot enacts the mess of Western culture and its radically debilitated capacity to support the gift of sociality, while revealing the unconscious ground of desire, destructiveness and repetition that sociality both incorporates and represses. Can 'freedom's children' renovate the gift of sociality under such unpropitious conditions?

Short abstracts in English and German of my doctoral dissertation exploring the time of waiting to discuss the relationship between power and temporality in aesthetics through the performative practices of Jack Smith, Lorraine O’Grady and Ana Mendieta.

Types of waiting: web resources
Clues to "meta-waiting"?
Degrees of "meta-waiting" recognized as "deep waiting"?
Pro-active waiting and nowness
Clues to "waiting" from "weighting"?
Mysterious relation between waiting and patience?
Waiting society versus Business society?
Waiting framed by other modes of engaging with time
Future of waiting in society?

Few concepts are as central to understanding the modern world as borders, and the now-thriving field of border studies has already produced a substantial literature analyzing their legal, ideological, geographical, and historical aspects. Such studies have hardly exhausted the subject’s conceptual fertility, however, as this pioneering collection on the aesthetics of borders demonstrates. Organized around six key ideas—ecology, imaginary, in/visibility, palimpsest, sovereignty and waiting—the interlocking essays collected here provide theoretical starting points for an aesthetic understanding of borders, developed in detail through interdisciplinary analyses of literature, audio-visual borderscapes, historical and contemporary ecologies, political culture, and migration.

Traditional religious ideas of eternity were abhorrent to Georges Bataille. A critic, philosopher, heterodox mystic, pornographic novelist, and dissident surrealist, Bataille, who died in 1962, developed a heterogeneous body of work that ranged over art, philosophy, eroticism, politics, and economics. But

This paper analyses two dimensions of ‘waiting’ in the realm of family reunification: the policy perspective and the immigrants’ experience. First, in line with the migration management paradigm, the Canadian government has introduced various measures to reduce ‘waiting times’. We discuss changes in the family reunification programme of parents and grandparents implemented since 2011 as emblematic of these measures. Such changes are also situated within global trends that make family reunification policies more restrictive. Second, based on 19 interviews with already established immigrants who are sponsors of a parent, we analyse the experience of ‘waiting for care’. For families attempting to reunite to fill care needs, new measures may speed up reunification, but they may also mean that being together is, for many, more difficult to achieve, temporary, and precarious. We argue that the politics of ‘waiting times’ management has depoliticised the right to family reunification and institutionalised temporariness in this component of immigration policy. These repercussions of state policies significantly alter how immigrant families can provide care to their members and sustain social reproduction.

In this article, I examine detained third-country nationals’ negotiations with the immigration system during detention, focusing on how immigration and removal proceedings inform their waiting while in detention. Based on multisited ethnographic research into the immigration detention system in Finland, I argue that waiting in immigration detention needs to be understood as a relational concept that involves different objects and expectations depending on the details of detainees’ immigration cases that affect the possibility of being released and the country of removal under the common European border regime. Immigration detention is a ‘waiting room’ of immigration law in that detainees wait for the outcome of pending immigration proceedings or the implementation of enforceable removal decisions. At the same time, immigration detention constitutes a space of border struggles, or what I call the ‘waiting game’, where detainees actively negotiate with authorities concerning their immigration cases, including terms of removal. Contrary to common belief, deportable detainees did not usually actively resist removal, especially to other European Union Member States. Instead, waiting in detention is a different matter for those with pending immigration decisions or whose removal would be to African or Middle Eastern countries. Additionally, detainees’ migration preferences affect their level of compliance and attitudes while in detention: many research participants planned to come back to Europe. My empirical analysis demonstrates that detention times and detainees’ attitudes toward removal are significantly dependent upon their individual immigration cases and their country of removal, resulting in different temporal horizons among waiting detainees.

Based on ethnographic fi eldwork among Burundian refugees living clandestinely in Nairobi and living in a refugee camp in Tanzania, the article argues that displacement can be about staying out of place in order to fi nd a place in the world in the future. I suggest that the term dia-placement describes this sense of not only being out of place but also being en route to a future. Burundians in the camp and the city are doing their best to remain out of place, in transition between a lost past and a future yet to come, and the temporary nature of their sojourn is maintained in everyday practices. Such everyday practices are policed by powerful actors in the camp and are ingrained in practices of self-discipline in Nairobi. Comparing the two settings demonstrates that remaining out of place can take on diff erent forms, according to context.

Taking as its point of departure youth-political subjectivity influenced by the demarcation protest in Khutsong, South Africa, between 2005 and, this article considers inherited politics and political imaginaries and the ways in which young people create connections to histories of political struggle. Using as a case study the protests themselves as recalled by two brothers, who played a leading role in the demarcation protests, and their reflections on their political motivations, this article reveals how youth involved in politics reference antiapartheid struggle forms, personalities, terminology, and motivations to situate their legitimacies. This article considers how young people adopt a nostalgia for memories that are not their own and that become renegotiated in meaning and significance. Further, it considers how these adoptions of memory are mediated and communicated, and the ways in which inheritance is negotiated between generations. At a stage in which youth involvement in state-level politics quotes heavily from and retranslates state histories and struggle narratives, this article considers how nostalgia by the young might present a redefining of understandings of history, and history's representative power in the present.

The present paper investigates the optimal timing of investment for a high speed rail (HSR) project, in an uncertain environment, using a real options analysis (ROA) framework. It develops a continuous time framework with stochastic demand that allows for the determination of the optimal timing of investment and the value of the option to defer in the overall valuation of the project. The modelling approach used is based on the differential utility provided to railway users by the HSR service.

I. Ausharren und Aushalten im Schützengraben: der gestählte Frontkämpfer
II. Ausharren und Aushalten im Theater: 1914-1918 und 1930-1939
III. Die Ästhetik des dramatischen Wartens
IV. Die Phänomenologie des heroischen Wartens
V. Fazit und Ausblick

Beklemek zamanla ilgili bir eylem. (…) Art arda gelen zamanda arkadan gelecek olanı içeriyor. Bir tür zamanın içinde bekleme, bir nevi ‘sakin ol, arkadan gelecek’ anlamı taşıyan bir bekleme hali. (…) Epistemolojik olarak yumuşaklıkla, sakinlikle bir alakası var ‘bekleme’ sözcüğünün. Bir tür sükûnet, eylemsizlik aynı zamanda. Sert bir eylemsizliği çağıran bir eylem aslında beklemek.”
Nilgün Toker


İktidar ile öznenin ilişkisinde beklemenin, daha doğrusu bekletilmenin, eylemsizliğe zorlayan bir niteliği var. Bununla beraber bekle(til)me deneyimi, yeniden biçimlendirdiği özneyi yeni bir eylemliliğe sevk edebiliyor. Nasıl? Bekle(til)mek insana ne yapar, onu nasıl etkiler? Bekle(til)menin ritmi ve rutini, nasıl duygusal etkilere yol açar? Olağanüstü hal politikaları “altında,” hukuki pratiklerin adaletsizliği karşısında, belirsizlik ve sürekli tetiklik halindeki bekleyiş… Mahkeme kapılarındakilerin bekleyişi… Açlık grevi ve ölüm oruçlarındaki
bekleyiş… Mültecilerin ve sınırda kalan veya sınır geçenlerin “yerleşme” bekleyişi… Ve bambaşka bir deneyim: Bektaşilerin tekke ve zaviyelerinin kapatılması üzerine “kollektif eylemsizlik” içinde döngüsel zamanın getireceği adaleti bekleyişleri...

Zerrin Özlem Biner ve Özge Biner’in hazırladıkları derlemede ayrıca Özlem Durmaz, Aslı İkizoğlu Erensü, Özgür Sevgi Göral, Rabia Harmanşah, Sevcan Karcı, Kemal Vural Tarlan ve Nilgün Toker’in katkıları yer alıyor.

Waiting is an inescapable part of life in modern societies. We all wait, albeit differently and for different reasons. What does it mean to wait for a long period of time? How do people narrate their waiting? Waiting is about the senses. If you do not sense it, there is no waiting. We sense waiting in the form of boredom, despair, anxiety and restlessness, but also anticipation and hope. Prolonged waiting is like insomnia - a state of wakefulness, a kind of mood, an emotional state. But it is also about politics; affecting and affected by gender, citizenship, class, and race.

Blending ethnography, philosophy, poetry, art, and fiction, this book is a collection of works by scholars, visual artists, writers, architects and curators, exploring different forms of waiting in diverse geographical contexts, and the enduring effects of history, power, class, and coloniality.

Flight to Europe, surrogate motherhood in Russia, organ donation in Germany: wishes and hopes from an artistic, scientific and literary viewpoint.

With photographs by Sarah Hildebrand and essays by social anthropologists Gerhild Perl, Julia Rehsmann and Veronika Siegl

Shunning sensationalist reportage, Hope follows the trail of people who transgress borders so as to achieve a desired goal: to have a child, be to able to prolong their life or to have an autonomous existence.

In this paper, I explore patience as an attitude towards imposed waiting in uncertainty among peasants in rural Northern Sudan who were flooded out of their homes along the Nile during the 2003–2009 Merowe dam construction project. My aim is to examine the complex temporalities that appear in the politics of displacement. I show how such temporal alterations were related to the implementation of a large infrastructural project and to the shaping of the Manasir people’s perception of time as they attempted to stay and revive life in their homeland on the shores of the emerging reservoir. Corresponding to the gendered experience of imposed inactivity and the resultant dissolution of time, patience is practised to varying degrees. Amongst the displaced communities, patience, as a temporal practice, represents a commitment both to future divine rewards and to living within the present situation. This commitment, in turn, offers hope and enables people to persevere. I argue that patience is not, as is often assumed, a quietist attitude, but a political practice directed against attacks by the state.

Since the late 2000s, many rural-to-urban migrants in China have lost their rural land to development plans, have subsequently resettled in designated areas, and have acquired formal urban residency. They stopped migrating, and have apparently ended their life of "suspension," namely protracted mobility. While most existing research literature on this population foregrounds the issue of land dispossession, this article argues that, following resettlement, these former migrants' lives can be more accurately characterized as a state of suspension instead of dispossession. Many resettled young adults, while having secured livelihood thanks to state compensation, are excluded from the technology-and capital-intensive developments to which they have lost their land. Some of these young people instead became petty speculators and rentier capitalists by liquidating their compensated assets through mortgages, private lending, rent, and other financial means. They are constantly waiting for the next investment opportunity and windfall gains. Although physically settled down and economically secure, they remain anxious and unsettled. They continue to orient their lives towards an elusive future 2 rather than striving to transform the here and now, thus living in a state that I call "suspension 2.0."

In the shadow of a specific form of border spectacle (De Genova 2002) and the spectacle of statistics (Stierl et al. 2016), i.e. in the shadow of the spectacle of the mass transit of refugees on their way to Western Europe in the autumn and winter of 2015/2016, the so-called profiling and detention of migrants took place. Mostly invisible to the general public, this profiling led to the forced mass movement of refugees in the opposite direction and/or their explicit detention i.e. confinement. By relying on different types of sources, ranging from public reports to our own field observations, this article deals with detentions in the Croatian part of the Balkan corridor. According to the argument offered in this article, detention can be seen as an integral part of the corridor itself and can be traced from the beginning of its establishment. Furthermore, the article presents a basic outline of what was happening in the Slavonski Brod camp after the closure of the borders on the night of March 8th to the 9th, 2016. It proposes a possible framework for understanding the imprisonment of hundreds of people in the camp from the perspectives of the specific “productiveness” of the camp and modes of resistance towards it.

In both the academic literature and the public imagination, waiting time is often understood as passive, empty and wasted, particularly when associated with institutional or organisational settings. The purpose of this paper is to challenge this limited conceptualisation, by exploring the experiences of asylum seekers who waited between 2 and 9 years in the UK for a resolution of their precarious immigration status in Glasgow, UK. When asked to describe their experiences of waiting, these individuals tended to articulate the dominant notion of waiting as passive, stagnant time spent ‘doing nothing’. Rather than taking such narrative accounts at face value, I consider broader ethnographic material pertaining to their everyday lives, which attests to a more complex lived experience of waiting. I argue that their waiting was affective, involving a heightened anticipation of the future and reflection on desired and dreaded outcomes; active, as they structured and filled their time with a variety of routines, activities and projects; and, in a more limited sense, productive, as waiting time could be transformed into capital. I conclude that for the asylum seekers involved in this research, waiting was not an empty interlude between events but an intentional and agential process.

Recent work in sensory ethnography has drawn attention to the integration of both corporeal and cognitive dimensions in the experience of mobile practices. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Munich and its immediate surroundings, together with comparative data from Munich and London, this paper follows on from work by Edensor (2010) in linking a Lefebvrian consideration of rhythm with a concern for the sensory dimensions of mobility. In this case, the central concern shifts towards a greater focus on an exploration of the intertwined physical and emotional sensations imposed on the mobile body by its immediate surroundings and the physical environments of movement. In the sensory world of journey-making by bicycle, a process reliant on repetitive, rhythmic physical motion restricted by the mechanics of the machine itself, stopping and starting has a significantly greater impact than it does for walking. The paper therefore considers the import of the not-moving experience for journey-making by the cycle commuter. By focusing on the sensory dimensions of travel, differentiation can be made between stillness, not moving, pausing and waiting. Consideration is given to how these relate to the sensory environments of non-motorised urban mobility.

2010-talet går mot sitt slut. Så gör även det första decenniet som storinstitution för Institutionen för kulturvetenskaper vid Lunds universitet. Det får oss att vilja stanna upp och reflektera över hur perioden kan förstås. Finns det något specifikt, en "kultur X", för oss kulturvetare att avtäcka och sammanfatta? I den här antologin har forskare från några av institutionens olika ämnen-etnologer, konstvetare, musikvetare, intermedialister, idéhistoriker och modevetare-fått definiera vad de ser som kulturvetenskapligt intressant med 2010-talet, deras kultur X. Några av skribenterna behandlar vad pengar betyder i det kontantlösa samhället, vilka utopier som är möjliga i en post-politisk tid, varför Sverige blivit ledande i att uppmuntra medborgarna till att operera in chip under huden, och varför alla blev så arga när museernas verksamheter blev politik. Andra ställer frågor som: Vilka nya världar öppnar sig för den som lär sig cykla i vuxen ålder? Hur många liv och skepnader har egentligen Sherlock Holmes? Varför är inte människor mer rädda för falska läkemedel? Hur transparanta är de digitala jättarnas verksamheter egentligen? På samma sätt som institutionens ämnen representerar en stor bredd och komplexitet i ämnen och forskningsfält, representerar bidragen till den här antologin en spännvidd av olika forskningsfrågor och empiriska fält. Samtidigt synliggör helheten av bidrag några av de processer som satts i rörelse redan tidigare, men vars betydelse och aktualitet bara ökat under 2010-talet. Det handlar om den kulturella vändningens konsekvenser, såväl för individen som för akademin-en kulturell logik präglad av ökad globalisering, konsumtion, identitetspolitik, historielöshet och estetisk pastisch. Som fördjupning till detta argumenteras för humanioras viktiga roll i vetenskaplig samverkan, och för betydelsen av väntan och eftertanke i den tid som pågår nu. Med den här antologin firar vi vårt 10-årsjubileum.

That a viable life presupposes a form of imaginary mobility, a sense that one is 'going somewhere'—what I have called existential mobility—is something that has strongly emerged in both my research on transnational Lebanese migration as well as my work on ...

Perché studiare l’attesa? Perché l’attesa la fa da padrona nella maggior parte del tempo, nei momenti più ordinari e meno ordinari dell’esistenza, attraverso le forme aspettualizzate del vissuto (il compiuto e l’incompiuto, il perfettivo e l’imperfettivo, etc.): di fatto, aspettiamo al panificio e dal dottore, al supermercato e dal meccanico, al pronto soccorso e in parrocchia, davanti un ascensore e dietro un semaforo, al cospetto di un tizio e alle spalle di un altro, al botteghino di un teatro e aspettano pure, molte volte, i migranti dopo lo sbarco, infreddoliti, scampati alla traversata in mare aperto. Aspettiamo noi, aspettano gli altri. La domanda che rivolgo a me stesso e al lettore, allora, è la seguente: che vuol dire, oggigiorno, in un’epoca pensata da molti studiosi come estremamente mobile, indugiare nell’attesa e nell’ascolto? Prendendo piede da questa osservazione, a partire da un vissuto in parte autoetnografico, prendo in conto congiuntamente la nozione di attesa e di aspettualizzazione al fine di mostrarne una valenza talvolta inaspettatamente positiva, comunque fondativa dal punto di vista antropologico. Parlo dunque concretamente dell’attesa e dell’aspettualizzazione della temporalità mettendole in scena nell’intreccio prodotto con l’intersecarsi di alcuni miei spaccati di vita (al bar, dopo un convegno; nella sala d’attesa di un medico) e ricorrendo al contempo ad alcuni usi dell’attesa praticati da parte di due antropologi: Malinowski e Clifford. Se per Malinowski la ricerca sul campo si svolge all’insegna del perfettivo, del concluso e puntuale che annulla il valore positivo dell’attesa, per Clifford al contrario la ricerca è dell’ordine dell’imperfettivo e del non concluso, durativo e iterativo; se per Malinowski la ricerca è aspettualizzata dall’ordine della programmazione che annulla il valore del caso e dall’ostentazione dell’azione che offuscherebbe il valore dell’attesa, per Clifford la ricerca è aspettualizzata dal caso e dai processi polifonici in atto. Su questa base comparativa, il mio saggio è volutamente costruito in modo da tenere il lettore – man mano che vengono esposti alcuni principi di base dell’attesa e dell’aspettualizzazione – sul filo della narrazione e dell’attendere. Alcune strategie retoriche da me utilizzate allo scopo sono la digressione e l’intercalare dell’enunciazione, l’indugiare e l’esitazione, il ‘pensiero che si pensa’ (Lotman) e il ‘pensiero al di fuori di sé’ (Foucault): in questo modo, l’attesa è introdotta praticamente nel meccanismo stesso di produzione e ricezione del saggio che il lettore legge. Per quanto riguarda l’attesa stessa intesa dal punto di vista esistenziale, propongo di assaporarne il valore di ‘azione in sé che tende a risolversi in un suo compimento che indugia invece nel suo stesso darsi’. A questo fine, vengono da me discussi alcuni studiosi dell’attesa che ne prospettano definizioni ‘politiche’ e ‘retoriche’: Greimas (l’attesa come fondamento della sintassi emotiva), Barthes (l’attesa come scenografia del luogo in cui si attende l’amato), Bourdieu (l’attesa come forma di imposizione del proprio potere sull’altro), Van Gennep (l’attesa come componente fondamentale dell’agire nella sua forma ritualizzata), Crapanzano (l’attesa come forma di anticipazione cristallizzata dalla speranza). Infine, proponendo il neologismo concettuale di ‘aspettatività’, indico alcune vie da perseguire al fine di meglio cogliere la dimensione temporale e agentiva implicita nell’agire e non-agire umano. L’essere umano, per gradi diversi, è infatti dotato di aspettatività: cioè di una qualche competenza ad aspettare che ingloba il sapere sull’azione. Di conseguenza, nella mia ipotesi, l’attesa va pensata in potenza e in atto: come un preliminare pratico del grado di agentività individuale e sociale. Questo affondo teorico mi serve, inoltre, a mettere a fronte una nozione di vita intesa linearmente e una nozione di vita più magmatica – quella che io prediligo – in cui si mostra tutto il valore della torsione zigzagante del tempo e del caso. Ma non è tutto. Oltre che per riflettere sul valore dell’attesa in antropologia e nell’esistenza, ho scritto questo saggio con un altro intento meno evidente: fare riferimento a quelle citazioni d’altri autori che, in passato, nei miei scritti, avevo già utilizzato per meglio spiegare il mio pensiero. Questo mio espediente mi apparenta al modo di concepire la scrittura da parte dei membri dell’Oulipo i quali si imponevano di redigere i loro testi a partire da una o più costrizioni testuali e letterarie. Nel mio caso, la costrizione a cui ho fatto capo è la citazione d’altri autori già da me stesso utilizzati in altri miei scritti. A che può valere in antropologia, ci si può chiedere, questo espediente apparentemente letterario? Direi che le costrizioni testuali sono sovente anche costrizioni d’ordine cognitivo. Redigere un testo a partire da ‘invarianti legate’ obbliga, infatti, a pensare/pensarsi per decentramenti. Dal mio punto di vista, questo principio è essenziale: la forza dell’antropologia risiede proprio nella capacità di continuo decentramento teorico ed esistenziale. E, concettualmente e operativamente, recuperare il valore dell’attesa negli studi antropologici significa rivedere innovativamente, nel bene e nel male, il modo in cui la dimensione cognitiva si intreccia con quella agentiva ed emotiva nel mondo odierno.

Image from the #lasfronterasmatan campaign. Image from Twitter user @fanetin.] [This article is the first in a series that addresses the present sociopolitical landscape of migration in Morocco.] "Despite a year marked by successive tragedies as a result of the recrudescence of repression, institutional violence and racism, will 2013 mark a historical turn for politics of migration in Morocco? Will foreigners and migrants be recognized into society?" These questions headed an article by Micheline Bochet Milon, a member of the Groupe anti-raciste d'accompagnement et de défense des étrangers et des migrants (GADEM), in the last issue of the Louna-Tounkaranké network"s newsletter. At the time, migrants" associations and NGOs were wedged between hope and caution as several important changes unravelled in Morocco. The most important of these was the unprecedented announcement of an "exceptional" regularization process for "irregular" migrants (e.g. those who lacked appropriate residency documents). Alas, distressing events in Morocco and at the Spanish border, including the very recent death of at least fifteen migrants outside Ceuta, have rendered even more salient migrants" yearning for the respect of their rights.