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This paper theorises the role of men and mobilising masculinities in organisational change towards gender equality by investigating how change agents in academia give meaning to their involvement in such change. Via narrative inquiry I compare the working of emotions and affective solidarity in narratives of 15 male and female change agents at nine universities in four countries. The analysis shows that both male and female change agents mobilise different types of masculinities to foster gender equality: chivalrous masculinity, disruptive masculinity and inclusive masculinity. This paper contributes to the gender equality change literature by theorising masculinities as not only hindering but also potentially transforming organisations in the direction of gender equality. The interplay between knowledge and affect in the narratives of gender equality change agents suggests that interventions should aim to move emotions and support affective solidarity through recognising and understanding participants' experiences with systems of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A call for papers on social implications of affect in organizations and relation between affect and organizational culture is presented.

This essay forms part of the 30th Special Issue of the journal and reflects on the role of the anniversarifier and reports on way of escaping the end of Organization to which it leads. Playful, ludic and irreverent this paper poses difficulties to the abstract, which should eventually be excised from the final publication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are plenty of books and articles on research methods, but few discuss the nature and purpose of method sections in academic journals. Based on interviews with critical and interpretivist researchers, this short paper examines the nature and purpose of method sections in management and organization studies. We show how researchers make sense of, and struggle with, positivist expectations about the form and content of method sections. Ultimately, we call for greater openness about what method sections might look like and ask whether all academic articles need method sections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Having been an unofficial archivist of Organization over the last 20 years, in this essay I offer a selection of stories from the archive as a tribute to the journal's 30th anniversary. I draw the stories mainly from the journal's backstage, hidden archive (comprising old documents, interviews, and observation), but also to a lesser extent from its public (i.e. published) facet (comprising editorials and journal papers). The stories concern the journal's relationship with Sage, its efforts to internationalise, the evolution of its archive in relation to the journal community, and the preservation of its critical intellectual mission. Altogether, these stories offer insights for the journal's collective memory and hope for remaking its future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social enterprises play an increasing role in providing employment opportunities for disabled people. This paper examines the implications of social enterprises' market-based approach to disability inclusion, which is characterized by viewing disability as an asset rather than a limitation. Taking our inspiration from critical disability scholars who have pointed out that inclusion agendas produce disability as a distinct social reality, we use a performative lens to examine how social enterprises variously "do disability," for instance, by defining where the potentials of disabled people lie and how best to promote them. Drawing on an ethnographic study of Magic Fingers, a Nepal-based enterprise that employs blind people as massage therapists, we identify entrepreneurial "doings" of disability that were guided by ideals of empowerment but that ultimately produced new and subtle forms of exclusion. By closely examining the case organization's founding phase, as well as its practices of advertising, recruitment, and day-to-day management, we show how Magic Fingers commodified disability in novel ways, reinforced the notion of disability as a negative condition that must be "overcome" through work, and introduced new market-oriented evaluative distinctions between "more able" and "less able" disabled individuals. By exploring and evaluating these effects, this paper draws attention to the ways in which social enterprises, while challenging deficit-oriented representations of disability, can paradoxically solidify disability as something profoundly "other." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the critical role of time in the discursive, communicative constitution of organization under neo-liberal capitalism and its normalization of uncertainty and change. Building on a review of extant time notions in studies of organizational discourse and communicative constitution of organization, we propose a critical approach to temporality inspired by feminist time notions, namely spacetimemattering and politics of time. In doing this, we develop a multimodal and performative concept of temporality that facilitates a double attention to the multiple communication modes of time and their performative powers in organizing work life. We explore the value of this conception of temporality through an empirical illustration, showing how multiple temporalities entangle, differentiate, and compete, and how one time construct may domesticate and devalue other times without, however, eliminating those, thus enabling ongoing, precarious struggles over organizing work practices and subjectivities. The paper expands the scope of temporality studies in organizations, nurturing critical theorizing of and insights into the multimodal performativity and politics of time at work in neo-liberal capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the political economy of organizing slow and ongoing genocide against the de facto stateless community of Rohingyas. We draw on the method of organizing situated solidarity offered by Richa Nagar and the concept of political society. Basing on that, we explore the ways, methods, and contents of organizing situated solidarity during Myanmar's political transition as a democratic state against Rohingyas' misrecognition and their experience of slow and ongoing genocide. We argue that such organizing urges us to recognize the structural reasons for misrecognizing Rohingyas as internally displaced people (IDP) or stateless people. Thus, our analysis shows that structuring misrecognizing by the militarized state and its interventions was deeply linked to the political economy of slow and ongoing genocide. We argue that the method of organizing situated solidarity has enabled us to constitute our situated understandings and has the capacity to extend the debate by asking what role we should undertake as researchers and business academics in an increasingly militarized racial capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we show how capitalism and feudalism reinforce each other to enable the former's success in the higher education context. In this regard, Polish universities are an interesting case due to Poland's capitalist shock therapy in the 1990s, its Western European membership in the European Union in the 2000s and due to recent reforms intended to modernize Polish academia. Based on 36 interviews with Polish early career academics from urban universities with experience working in watchdogs of higher education, we examine respondents' perspectives on the current capitalist reforms. They treat ongoing changes as a solution for the problems experienced and defined as "feudal": political labeling, abuse of power and discrimination against women. Understanding capitalism and feudalism through their organizing principles, the main contribution of this study is that it demonstrates how capitalist organizing principles fix existing feudalist organizing principles to flourish in Polish university. Hence, it is difficult for early career academics to recognize that capitalist organizing principles are in fact reinforcing rather than eliminating (as the advocates of capitalist reforms often claim) feudal problems in Polish academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite long-standing criticisms of the paradigm, New Public Management (NPM) retains a strong influence over organizations in public administration. Social Impact Bonds (SIB) are an outcomes-oriented investment entity which has emerged from NPM with grand promises of social change. Building on a longitudinal case study of a health-based SIB, this paper identifies how key actors move away from NPM by resisting such management principles and shift toward Public Value Management (PVM). The paper finds that this is possible when the public interest and performance objectives are designed with a public value orientation whilst other NPM principles shift over time through resistance and negotiation. The paper provides insight into how key actors re-organize to embed public value in a financing and public service delivery structure that is often regarded as flawed and inefficient. The paper offers several contributions to public value literature, including the role of the state, as well as the emerging literature on SIBs and outcomes-based contracts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Management and organization studies commentary on how authors experience peer review of journal papers suggests that it can be an overly interventionist process which reduces the originality and coherence of eventual publications. In the literature on co-authorship, this argument is reversed. Here, free riders who do not contribute fully to research collaborations and the practice of gift authorships are problematized, and it is argued that everyone involved in writing a published paper should be rewarded with co-authorship. In this article, qualitative interviews with 12 management and organization studies academics see respondents describing peer review as a transaction during which reviewers – and editors – actually co-author published papers. But their perspectives on this vary with the subject position from which they are speaking. When they speak as reviewers or editors, this co-authorship is depicted as a collegiate gift, a professional obligation or a process where authors might over-rely on reviewers’ generosity. When they speak as authors or their proxies, it is characterized as reproducing disciplinary orthodoxy and ethnocentric exclusion, perpetuating disciplinary cliques, creating disorganized papers and constituting excessive interference with authorial privilege. These various perspectives on peer review deserve more attention in our empirical studies of academic labour. They also suggest we should reflect more on when, how and why we collaborate in our research and on how much we should recognize additional co-authors on (or resist their input into) ‘our’ work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A call for papers on outlining the character of different spaces of commemoration and remembrance which contributes to understanding of the way by which the spaces are organized.

A call for papers for the special issue of the journal "Organization" which will include repositories and architectural narratives, social memory studies, and theoretically empirical studies is presented.

Austerity measures and neoliberal policies have deeply affected the UK cultural sector. In particular they have been central to cementing the idea that contemporary cultural institutions should henceforth be regarded as commercial operations. As the language of business and management (B&M language) increasingly frames how organisations of the cultural sector are described, this paper defines the main discursive practices motivating this performative repositioning. Drawing theoretically from the concept of performativity, and building empirically on in-depth interviews with senior staff across the UK museum sector, we argue that the incursion of B&M language has reshaped the 'reality' of the sector by materialising new relations. Signally, we advance a concept of performative hegemonic language to describe a range of manifestations of linguistic re-labelling in the world of the museum. Our paper illustrates what happens when an organisation starts to classify activities through B&M language, considering the implications of framing this etymology as transcendent to its cultural counterpart. Relabelling, we contend, re-orients meaning, and this translates into the ascent of what we call the 'neoliberal museum'. Overall, our paper unpacks the linguistic-material processes underpinning the ideological transformations affecting the cultural sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the Market Basket upheaval of 2013–2014 from the perspective of patriarchy, breach, workplace dignity, and social drama. It draws on Lingo and Elmes original data and analytic approach to their study of food workers in a family-owned, New England, supermarket chain who, after an unexpected change to the board, rose up to restore their patriarch and paternalistic institutional practices. It reimagines the Market Basket case through the lens of Victor Turner's social drama with a focus on key phases of the upheaval which included breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration. The paper considers the power of paternalism to unify and activate loyal, working class followers who benefit greatly from paternalistic practices and feel threatened by their removal. It also considers the risks of paternalism particularly under conditions where a charismatic patriarch has less benign intentions and workers follow with unquestioned loyalty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wellbeing has emerged as an important discourse of management and organisation. Practices of wellbeing are located in concrete organisational arrangements and shaped by power relations built upon embedded, intersecting inequalities and therefore require critical evaluation. Critical evaluation is essential if we are to reorganise wellbeing to move beyond critique and actively contest dominant wellbeing narratives in order to reshape the contexts in which wellbeing can be fulfilled. The COVID-19 pandemic under which this special issue took shape, provides various examples of how practices continue to be shaped by existing narratives of wellbeing. The pandemic also constituted a far-reaching shock that gave collective pause to consider to the extent to which work is really organised to realise wellbeing and opened up potential to think differently. The seven papers included in the special issue reveal the problematic and uneven way in which wellbeing is pursued and examine possibilities to imagine and realise more radical practices of wellbeing that can counter the way in which ill-being is produced by the organisation of labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A call for papers on involvement of animals in organization is presented.

This editorial introduces eight papers included in this special issue on COVID-19. Together, these papers draw key theoretical and political insights for critical organization studies from the pandemic along three main lines. First, they examine how COVID-19 has denaturalized global capitalism, leading to a broad interrogation of the organization of the economy and our societies. Second, they point to how COVID-19 has unveiled the close relation between capital and the state in producing inequalities old and new, a relation that neoliberalism tends to hide from view. Third, they leverage COVID-19 to give voice to the largely female disposable workforce in the Global South on whose work global commodity flows, consumption and capital accumulation rest. We conclude by pointing to the need to address constitutive interdependencies, such as those between wage work and reproductive work, the global North and the global South, the market and the state, to name only a few. We further call for expanding traditional understandings of struggle to include a broader range of social antagonisms (e.g. for sufficient time to care, education, healthcare, housing, safe public spaces, accessible to all) as part of a theoretically and politically renewed organizational research agenda fostering solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pornography organizes bodies in ways that reproduce, challenge, or possibly even change norms of gender and sexuality. In this paper, we explore the gendered organization of pornography, responding to a lack of research on this issue. The study engages in rhetorical and queer listening to investigate feminist pornography, analyzing audio stories produced by an all-female sex-tech company that creates pornography for women through a female gaze. Drawing on literature on gendered organizing, the study shows how the female gaze in feminist pornography organizes bodies in sexual scripts. Furthermore, an application of the concept of happy objects illuminates the complex embodied and entangled relations between sexual subjects and objects of desire. Finally, we demonstrate how, despite a shift from a male to a female gaze, feminist pornography is still prone to the reproduction of heteronormative gender stereotypes. The paper thereby outlines potentials as well as challenges for the (re)organization of bodies in feminist pornography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organization and management research has largely ignored the pornography industry. In many ways this is understandable; production often takes place under disturbing conditions, and the dissemination and consumption of porn is considered taboo. Nonetheless, we cannot neglect the fact that it is a multi-billion-dollar industry with significant economic, social and cultural impact. We believe scholars have an obligation to study and understand not only the talk-of-the-town organizations, but the shush-and-move-on ones too, drawing out their ethical and cultural significance. The collection of papers in this special section aptly demonstrates that pornography can be studied as an organizational phenomenon. The section includes an editorial as well as three individual papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper situates organisational transparency in an agonistic space that is shaped by the interplay of 'mechanisms of power that adhere to a truth' and critical practices that come from below in a movement of 'not being governed like that and at that cost' (Foucault, 2003: 265). This positioning involves an understanding of transparency as a practice that is historically contingent and multiple, and thus negotiable and contested. By illustrating the entanglement of 'power through transparency' and 'counter-transparency' with reference to the example of Edward Snowden's whistleblowing, the paper contributes to the critique of transparency and to debates on the use of Foucauldian concepts in post-panoptic contexts of organising. By introducing the notion of 'counter-transparency', the paper expands the conceptual vocabulary for understanding the politics and ethics of managing and organising visibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to address the dark side perspective on digital control and surveillance by emphasizing the affective grip of ideological control, namely the process that silently ensures the subjugation of digital labour, and which keeps the 'unexpectedness' of algorithmic practices at bay: that is, the propensity of users to contest digital prescriptions. In particular, the theoretical contribution of this paper is to combine Labour Process with psychoanalytically-informed, post-structuralist theory, in order to connect to, and further our understanding of, how and why digital workers assent to, or oppose, the interpellations of algorithmic ideology at work. To illustrate the operation of affective control in the Platform Economy, the emblematic example of ride-hailing platforms, such as Uber, and their algorithmic management, is revisited. Thus, the empirical section describes the way drivers are glued to the algorithm (e.g. for one more fare, or for the next surge pricing) in a way that prevents them, although not always, from considering genuine resistance to management. Finally, the paper discusses the central place of ideological fantasy and cynical enjoyment in the Platform Economy, as well as the ethical implications of the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Organization celebrates its 30th Anniversary, this paper asks: what might it mean to be a good business school? The paper reviews research published in this journal to assess the current state of business schools, revealing a somewhat dismal picture of institutions beholden to instrumental managerialism, top-down hierarchical control, obsession with metrics, and narrow and elitist research agendas. This state of affairs is re-assessed though Raewyn Connell's idea of The Good University. Through this analysis, we are able to identify the good business school as one serves society by educating citizens and creating knowledge that leads to shared prosperity, social equality and human flourishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this short piece, I want to reflect on the status, relevance and future of the academic journal. They emerged at a point when middle class European men were beginning to produce a cumulative body of knowledge using paper technologies, editorial boards and professional associations to legitimate their discoveries. Three hundred years later, the global university system, the financial interests of global knowledge corporations, and the occupational interests of university workers has supported a huge explosion of journals as markers of status, providers of data about who writes and who cites, and profitable ways of extracting value from university library budgets. This journal, though it has published much which is critical about such a system, is entirely parasitic on this set of financial and occupational interests. As Organization enters its fourth decade, might it be possible to be clearer concerning what services it provides and for who? If we think of it, as my mother-in-law once presciently suggested, as a magazine, can we be more explicit about what stories and features we are selling, and who our readers are? In other words, should we try to be more magazine? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All ranking journals, including critical ones such as Organization, regard a contribution to theory as the Holy Grail of academic writing. But it is a long way to a better world through theory alone. In this article, we discuss the challenges of making action and activism a feature of academic work and we introduce a new space in Organization, entitled Acting Up, for short papers that take up such a challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue (SI) editorial contributes to ongoing efforts worldwide to decolonise management and organisational knowledge (MOK). A robust pluriversal discussion on the how and why of decolonisation is vital. Yet to date, most business and management schools are on the periphery of debates about decolonising higher education, even as Business Schools in diverse locations function as contested sites of neocolonialism and expansion of Western neoliberal perspectives. This editorial and special issue is the outcome of a unique set of relationships and processes that saw Organization host its first paper development workshop in Africa in 2019. This editorial speaks to a radical ontological plurality that up-ends the classical division between theory and praxis. It advocates praxistical theorising that moves beyond this binary and embraces decolonising knowledge by moving into the realm of affect and embodied, other-oriented reflexive, communicative praxis. It underscores the simultaneous, contested and unfinished decolonising-recolonising doubleness of praxis and the potential of borderlands locations to work with these dynamics. This special issue brings together a set of papers which advance different decolonising projects and grapple with the nuances of what it means to 'do' decolonising in a diversity of empirical and epistemic settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short paper explores the gamification of an online academic conference. At the conference, digital gamification was meant to stimulate increased levels of participation among attendees. Instead, it resulted in a series of unintended consequences. Precisely because it was all too easy to score points and ascend the virtual leaderboard by means of machine-like grinding, the "Conference Challenge" posed a moral dilemma for its players: each participant had to determine for themselves where the border lay between playing the game and gaming the system. We use this case to raise questions about the ethics of game-playing in an academic context. In particular, we suggest that the Conference Challenge is a distorted reflection of what's already happening in the broader "publication game" in the university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper unpacks the notion of racial capitalism and highlights its salience for Management and Organization Studies. Racial capitalism is a process of systematically deriving socio-economic value from non-white racial identity groups, and has shaped the contours and trajectories of capitalism for over 500 years. Drawing on the contributions of W.E.B. Du Bois, Bourdieu, and a number of labor historians, we argue that whiteness operates as symbolic capital and status property in market conditions, and is therefore responsible for perpetuating economic inequalities along color lines all over the world. We demonstrate how the extra value placed on whiteness can create a shadowland of split labor markets, colorism, and transnational patterns of expropriation that systematically disadvantage populations of color. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the current phase of Black resistance exemplified by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which urges us to recognize and reckon with the differential racial impact of student debt in the U.S. and calls for the cancelation of student debt as an explicit part of its demand for reparations. Using the concept of racial capitalism, the paper examines the structure of student debt and its consequences for Black borrowers, analyzes the structural reasons behind the disproportionate debt burden borne by Black students, and highlights movements such as the Debt Collective and BLM, which not only offer a critique of the debt regime but also suggest ways of organizing against it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2008, just as the movement of the precarious seemed to be winning one political battle after the next, the fight against precarization suddenly dwindled. The cycle of struggles of the precarious that began in 2000 had seemingly come to an end. Ironically this was also the moment that precarity as a concept became widely known in popular opinion, media commentary and academia. This paper focuses on the movement of the precarious from its inception in the early 2000s to its decline in 2008 and its reappearance in response to the economic crisis through the widespread mobilizations for "real democracy" between 2008 and 2014. Drawing from our experience as participants in the movement of the precarious, and theoretical discussions that have shaped the politics of the movement, the paper adopts a retrospective approach to investigate the metamorphoses of a consciousness of precarity and of the underlying organizing practices that lead to its demise and subsequent incarnations. It reconstructs precarity as theory in action that lives through the organizational ontologies of the movement of the precarious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A call for papers on agencies of organized destruction such as military, terrorists, spaces of organized destruction and their role in the 21st Century.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A call for papers on the challenges faced by higher education is presented.

Three decades of discourse on rising emerging nations have failed to produce a theory of emerging multinational-led emancipation. This paper draws on the case of Huawei in China and the European Union (1987–2020) to theorize multinationals' role in writing back an emancipating imaginary from the Global South to the Global North. Combining postcolonial theory of the multinational as a hybrid space, and a post-Gramscian lens on the multinational as a counter-hegemonic agent, I theorize the multinational as a "writing-back myth-prince." The lens of a multinational as a writing-back agent and space from the global south radically broadens the emancipatory potential of the key postcolonial concept mimicry. It also affords a view on emancipation beyond the opposites and distincts of very different subject positions in the Global South and North. I identify four writing back phases, each of which involves the political and fantasmatic articulation of an emancipating imaginary from the Global South. I develop critical explanations of the four writing back phases, insofar as they reproduce inequality, disenfranchisement and oppression, and weaken the multinational as a space and agent of hybridity rather than essentialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings together two separate fields—inclusion and alternative organizations—to study the relational aspects of inclusion and exclusion both within and beyond organizations. By analyzing reports and websites of organizations committed to the network "Economy for the Common Good," we empirically explore, first, how these organizations represent their "alternativeness" and how this relates to inclusion and exclusion; and second, we address the question of who is included in these alternative ventures by examining both their inclusionary and exclusionary potential in terms of diversity. Introducing a conceptual framework to distinguish between internal and external perspectives on inclusion and exclusion, our qualitative analysis reveals the simultaneity of two contradictory phenomena: On the one hand, these alternative organizations offer a new inclusionary potential that encompasses both the social and natural environments; on the other, they tend to ignore internal and external inclusion along diversity dimensions. Hence, we conclude that while there exists the potential to link inclusion with alternative organizations, a commitment to an alternative economy does not automatically lead to an engagement with issues of diversity and inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The games industry has seen a burst of new interest in the prospect of unionization. The efforts of organizations like Game Workers Unite have attracted much favorable coverage in the enthusiast and trade industry press, increasing awareness amongst videogame audiences of the difficult working conditions facing professional game developers. However, often missing from these discussions is an articulation of what unionization would look like for the significant number of game developers working in precarious conditions in small, often informal teams. The fragmented nature of contemporary gamework presents challenges in aggregating worker power similar to those found in other fields of creative or precarious work and entrepreneurial careers, where contingent work is typically organized around piecemeal, project–based funding arrangements. In this paper we draw from empirical research with Australian game developers to identify a number of barriers to unionization posed by small-scale game production. We also identify how within these same circumstances, novel and alternative forms of solidarity and collective action are beginning to emerge. The article ultimately argues that any successful attempt to unionize videogame workers will need to both account for, and take advantage of, the complex situation of small-scale videogame production in local contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the concept of ordinary entrepreneurial psychosis. This concept was discovered in the analysis of a case study of a tech entrepreneur in Colombia and elaborated with the aid of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Specifically, we draw on Jacques Lacan's conception of the discourse of the capitalist and his distinction between repression and foreclosure (Verwerfung). The practice of entrepreneurship, we argue, is the most perfect instantiation of what Lacan called the discourse of the capitalist. This is a discourse without limits characterised by denial of castration and lack, a discourse that at is most radical promises liberation through a break with the symbolic order, the relation to the other, and indeed with the world as such. In this particular case study, such a break is materialised in a literal belief in magic, a specifically modern and non-occult magic of deception and misdirection that promises great results from nothing. Such magical thinking, we argue, is at the heart of the entrepreneurial fantasy. To explain this broken relation to symbolic order that is characteristic of entrepreneurship, we draw on Lacanian theory and in particular Jacques-Alain Miller's concept of 'ordinary psychosis' to explain the structural homology between entrepreneurship discourse and the analytic category of psychosis. The structure of this discourse, we argue, brings with it not only magical and hallucinatory thinking, but moreover what we propose here to call ordinary entrepreneurial psychosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances a Marxist approach to the critical study of innovation. Such an approach offers alternative analytical tools for understanding the social and political aspects of innovation that are increasingly coming into focus within academic and practitioner fields. After outlining the emerging field of critical innovation studies and its key concerns, I turn to the question of how a Marxist critique differs from other forms of critical scholarship. I then introduce Marx's application of the concept of subsumption to account for the relation between innovation and capital and to demonstrate the strength of a Marxist approach to the critical study of innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction, performance, and regulation of identities in the online world have deep implications for individuals, organizations, and society, particularly as digital technologies become increasingly omnipresent in our daily lives. In the last decades, analyses of online identities' processes have moved from the exploration of identity play, through identity performance, toward a growing identity regulation through algorithmic management and the monetization of personal data. Despite a significant tradition of critical management and organization studies literature on identity, online identities have to date received only scant attention. This Special Issue explores what critical management and organization studies can contribute to research on online identities. Drawing on empirical analysis of virtual forums, social media, and platforms, the six papers included here highlight the struggles that accompany identity processes in the online environment and their implications for workers, activists, and other organized selves. In this introduction, we contextualize these contributions with reference to online identities studies and metaphors of the internet as a place, a tool, and a way of being. We comment on the contributions they make relating to the role of the body, and individual and collective dynamics in online identities processes. Following this, we propose critical ways forward concerning new forms of digital work, multiphrenic context collapse, and online references and sources of identity. We invite researchers to not only critically explore but also to engage with this brave new world that increasingly shapes our individual and collective selves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local actors can defend public value by mobilizing resistance coalitions against threats from higher spatial scales. Drawing on existing scholarship on resistance movements and public value creation, this paper proposes a theoretical framework for understanding how local actors can protect public value from threats of rescaling driven solely by hegemonic discourses and presents a strategy that we call "playing the scales." Our case study analyzes a Local Action Group's resistance to a state-imposed and EU-framed regulation that threatened local forms of value creation on the Croatian peninsula of Pelješac. Employing a longitudinal participatory approach, our findings outline the strategy of playing the scales, which involved three key tactics: gathering relevant knowledge from various scales; crafting an alternative narrative; and leveraging this narrative across scales to reshape the dominant organizational logic. The study contributes to the understanding of public value creation by showing how it can be defended by resistance coalitions that are capable of playing the scales. It also sheds light on alternative dynamics of rescaling that, rather than oppositional resistance to higher scales or attempts to scale up micro-practices can also be driven by trans-scalar alliances that inscribe the interests of local communities into dominant discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Could the everyday affective relationships that we share with our animal companions inspire us to think, write and even care 'differently' in the field of organisation studies? In this paper, I suggest that organisational scholars have plenty to learn from post-qualitative writing and the posthumanist practice of feminist dog-writing. Drawing from literature on posthumanism, humanimal relations and post-qualitative methodology, I first frame feminist dog-writing as a practice that relies on post-qualitative writing and discuss what this framing potentially involves, in concrete terms. Second, I experiment with 'writing with the bitches' to illustrate how this kind of writing 'differently' – in ways in which the entangled co-becoming of the humanimal is highlighted in its multiplicity – could contribute to discussions of humanimal relations in the field of organisation studies and more disruptive, post-qualitative forms of writing in our scholarly field. Despite the many challenges of anthropocentric language and representation, I argue that feminist dog-writing has the capability to creatively confuse, disrupt, and transform more 'conventional', mechanical, and hu man -centred forms of academic writing. Finally, I suggest that feminist dog-writing invites human animals to engage differently with the sensate, more-than-human life-worlds that human-centred accounts of organisational life have typically sentimentalised, trivialised, or overlooked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a call for papers on the topics including sexual harassment, sexuality, and sex work, to be included in the"Sexuality and Organizational Analysis: 30 years on," special issue of "Organization," with deadline on October 31, 2012.

This paper explores how automation efforts with the intent to control work in modern work places can unfold. Building on a longitudinal study of a governmental agency's efforts to implement automated work delivery technology to enforce work guidelines, I show how aspects of work might become more automated but the rationale of automation might fail to manifest as originally intended. Technology and the formal structure inscribed into it to control work might conflict with the demands of work practice. Moreover, the findings show how automated control can be resisted by workers through subversive organizing in teams to reacquire work discretion. Through an analysis of automated control in practice, this paper contributes to discussions of technologies of control and how pragmatic resistance can emerge to counteract such technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]