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Organization has published 569 papers in its 20 years. Of these 44% have been cited less than four times, and just on 9%, or 48 papers, have never been cited at all—not even by their own authors. What might we make of these lonely and seemingly neglected papers? Are they the Eleanor Rigbys and the Father McKenzies of the academic world? As a contribution to the Journal’s 20th Anniversary issue this paper offers a discussion of Organization’s uncited 48.

Publication in the top journals of management studies is highly skewed. Very few authors publish in these top journals. They are said to be the best few, on the assumption that skew indicates quality. Yet, skew is natural in any distribution and would occur in the absence of all quality. Peer review is supposed to ensure that this cannot happen, but pressure to publish in top journals puts demands on the peer review system it was never intended to bear. One result is that the skewed few tend to be the same few. We look at how this is arranged. We investigate the citation of the skewed few. We find much self citation, mutual citation and group citation. This behaviour is encouraged by the paramount importance of the journal impact factor. The article looks at how this indicator has been contrived for commercial rather than academic reasons, and considers some of the consequences.

Various researchers have called for an 'opening up' of Luhmann's systems theory. We take this short paper as an occasion for a critical reflection on the necessity, existence and possibilities of such an opening. We start by pointing out the inherent openness of Luhmann's theory, and, based on this, discuss three kinds of openings: the international opening, the theoretical opening and the empirical opening. With regard to the latter, we distinguish three general options of using Luhmann's theory for empirical research. Copyright © 2007 SAGE.

This paper explores how individuals living within high-stakes precarious categories navigate their identity within online spaces. Using Membership Categorisation Analysis, we investigate how categorical inferences are indexed by those individuals within online biosocial communities in everyday speech, as part of their construction of identities. More specifically, we analyse online interactions of women who have been identified as carrying a BRCA gene mutation in an online biosocial community. Our findings show how (1) the online spaces participate in constituting and sustaining a form of collective responsibility, where those who are within a high-stakes precarious identity category are expected to not only support and educate each other, but also monitor the compliance to category predicates, and (2) the tensions and conflict in making sense of, belonging to, resisting and sustaining a category membership often occur when there are clashes with the socio-moral order. Overall, this paper’s contributions are twofold, first, methodologically, the use of Membership Categorisation Analysis provides an insightful analytic approach to identities, online communities and their organisation. Second, the emerging tensions identified provide insight into the complex ways in which online communities offer a forum in managing precarious identity as individual and collective life intersect.

This paper seeks to contribute to the rethinking of wellbeing in organisation studies. First, it contributes to critiques of corporate wellness by drawing on social reproduction theory to show how the wellbeing of every individual worker is dependent on the efforts of many, often unacknowledged, others. Corporate wellness initiatives epitomise the dominant, neoliberal narrative of wellbeing in which individuals are posited as responsible for the maintenance of their own wellbeing. Against this, social reproduction theory highlights the relational, socially distributed and materially grounded character of wellbeing. Second, the COVID-19 pandemic opened an opportunity to radically rethink wellbeing. A social reproduction reading of the category of the essential worker allows us to analyse some of the tensions and contradictions involved in the work of producing wellbeing today. It shows the unequal distribution of both the work involved and of its rewards. In sum, this paper helps extend debates over wellbeing in organisation studies beyond, on the one hand, individualised accounts of wellbeing and, on the other, accounts that ultimately confine understandings of wellbeing to the traditional workplace. It argues for the need for organisational studies of wellbeing to take the wider social reproduction of wellbeing as its starting point.

In the wake of the financial crisis, Danish retail bankers have experienced a marked increase in mundane administrative tasks, which do not conform to what they expect their work lives to be. Seeking to understand how the bankers cope with this, the paper conducts a qualitative inquiry into the identity work of Danish retail bankers, focusing on the ways in which they reconcile experiences of boredom with their work-identity. Drawing on pragmatic sociology, this reconciliation is conceptualized as individual justifications of boredom through different orders of worth. The paper identifies three justifications of boredom: (1) Projective boredom posits boring administrative tasks as unwanted and problematic. This justification is generally in line with currently dominant empirical and theoretical accounts of the financial sector and finds no justification for boredom, seeking, instead, to eliminate it. (2) Domestic boredom justifies the boring tasks as a duty performed by the humble and respectable banker, who is concerned with their status in the local community and whose sense of pride has been damaged by the many scandals in the sector. Finally, (3) civic boredom justifies boredom as a sacrifice made by the selfless banker who acts in the interest of the common good, understood as a more responsible, and less greedy, financial sector. Here, the meaninglessness of specific tasks is transcended in the service of a higher purpose, which helps the individual sustain an identity as a solidary professional.