ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a specific phenomenological approach in a suggestion to sense organizing as a productive encounter between a place and its potential futures. In particular, it draws on the work of the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart to propose a ‘sensing' approach to tune in to the role of place in the emergence of an alternative urban community of entrepreneurs and activists. While the field of management and organization studies (MOS) has been experiencing a very vibrant spatial turn, so far scholarship in this area has been focusing mostly on the ‘here and now' of spaces and places. This has a lot to do with the specific epistemological commitments of MOS, including a realist focus in the field of organizational ethnography. This chapter suggests that a focus on what can be seen only goes so far, and that research on new or emergent organizations needs tools in order to sense the not-yet-there, and that this requires an affective attention that moves beyond the visual. The case presented, based on a field visit to an alternative urban community in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, offers insights into how such early-stage organizing can be seen sensed through an attention to things in a certain place, and how they are named and cared for. © Oxford University Press 2023. All rights reserved.