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Our paper contributes to studies of Indigenous organizing and organizations. We draw on Indigenous knowledge which recognizes that everything is connected within networks of relationships to extend post-colonial theory on hybridity. Our case study research with Australia’s only Indigenous-owned credit union identifies how hybridity is co-constituted through ‘friction’ in the ‘contact zone’ where local kinship relations and audit practices meet and grapple. Focusing on the ‘contact zone’ allows us to better understand the everyday organizing that produces hybridity. We build on existing work on hybridities in organizations which predominately focus on issues of language and knowledge by focusing on the organizational interactions themselves, especially the embedded interactions between humans and objects. Seeing these interactions as ‘friction’ means not trying to solve or dissolve them – but to acknowledge them as lived realities of an Indigenous organization.

This article seeks to situate pharmacological cognitive enhancement as part of a broader relationship between cultural understandings of the body-brain and the political economy. It is the body of the worker that forms the intersection of this relationship and through which it comes to be enacted and experienced. In this article, we investigate the imaginaries that both inform and are reproduced by representations of pharmacological cognitive enhancement, drawing on cultural sources such as newspaper articles and films, policy documents, and pharmaceutical marketing material to illustrate our argument. Through analysis of these diverse cultural sources, we argue that the use of pharmaceuticals has come to be seen not only as a way to manage our brains, but through this as a means to manage our productive selves, and thereby to better manage the economy. We develop three analytical themes. First, we consider the cultural representations of the brain in connection with the idea of plasticity – captured most graphically in images of morphing – and the representation of enhancement as a desirable, inevitable, and almost painless process in which the mind-brain realizes its full potential and asserts its will over matter. Following this, we explore the social value accorded to productive employment and the contemporary (biopolitical) ethos of working on or managing oneself, particularly in respect of improving one’s productive performance through cognitive enhancement. Developing this, we elaborate a third theme by looking at the moulding of the worker’s productive body-brain in relation to the demands of the economic system.

In the introductory paper of this special issue on new ways of working (NWW) the editors first reflect on the meaning of the ‘new’, finding inspiration in Hannes Meyer's essay “The New World” (1926). The ‘new’ is always relative, of course, closely associated with technological innovation, in our case digitalization, and integrates spatiotemporal, technological and socio-cultural dimensions of life and organizing. This SI seeks to offer a reflection on and contribution to deeper understanding of ongoing flexibilization, virtualization and mediation of work practices. The authors go on to contextualize and discuss the contributions of the papers included in this special issue, focussing on significant technological, spatiotemporal, organizational and individual developments associated with new ways of working. Finally, they reflect on the possible relevance of the recent Covid-19 pandemic for the future of work, arguing that this pandemic accelerated NWW in many ways and – given the many paradoxical NWW dynamics and developments – that there could very well be unexpected and adverse consequences, including a turn away from formal ways of working.

This paper considers the politics of how organizations remember their past through commemorative settings and artefacts. Although these may be seen as ‘merely’ a backdrop to organizational activity, they form part of the lived experience of organizational spaces that its members enact on a daily basis as part of their routes and routines. The main concern of the paper is with how commemoration is bound up in the reflection and reproduction of hierarchies of organizational recognition. Illustrated with reference to two commemorative settings, the paper explores how organizations perpetuate a narrow set of symbolic ideals attributing value to particular forms of organizational membership while appearing to devalue others. In doing so, they communicate values that undermine attempts to achieve equality and inclusion. Developing a recognition-based critique of this process, the discussion emphasizes how commemorative settings and practices work to reproduce established patterns of exclusion and marginalization. To this end, traditional forms of commemorative portraiture that tend to close off difference are contrasted with a memorial garden, in order to explore the potential for an alternative, recognition-based ethics of organizational commemoration that is more open to the Other.

Through the focus on organizational space, using the reception and significance of the seminal work on the subject by sociologist Henri Lefebvre, this book demonstrates why and how Lefebvre's work can be used to inform and elaborate organisational studies, especially in view of the current interest in the "socio-material" dimension of organisations.As the "spatial turn" in organisational research exposed the importance of spatial design in inducing power and cultural relations, Lefebvre's perspective has become an inspiring, theoretical framework. However, Organisational Space and Beyond explores how Lefebvre’s work could be of a much wider relevance, especially given his profound theoretical engagement with diverse schools of philosophical and sociological thought, including Nietzsche, Marx, Sartre and Foucault.This book brings together a range of authors that collectively develop a broader understanding of Lefebvre's relevance to organizational studies, including areas of management concern such as strategy and diversity studies, and ultimately draw on Lefebvre’s work to rethink, reimagine and reshape scholarship in organisational studies. It will be of relevance to researchers, academics, students and organizational professionals in the fields of organisation studies, management studies, cultural studies, architecture and sociology.

This article focuses on how the categories of ‘normal’ and ‘extreme’ in the context of work might be renegotiated through the development of human enhancement technologies which aim to enable the human body to be pushed beyond its biological limits. The ethical dimensions of human enhancement technologies have been widely considered, but there has been little debate about their role in the broader world of employment—nor, conversely, the recognition that prevailing employment relationships might shape the development and uptake of such technologies. Addressing the organisation of work within ‘advanced’ capitalist economies, this article considers the arguments for the potential use of cognitive enhancers, so-called ‘smart drugs’, in various domains of work such as surgery and transportation. We argue that the development of human enhancement technologies might foster the normalisation of ‘working extremely’—enabling longer working hours, greater effort or increased concentration—and yet at the same time promote the conditions of possibility under which workers are able to work on themselves so as to go beyond the norm, becoming ‘extreme workers’. Looking at human enhancement technologies not only enables us to see how they might facilitate ever greater possibilities for working extremely but also helps us to understand the conditions under which cultures of extreme work become the norm and how workers them/ourselves accept or even embrace such work.

Organisations engage in remembering and commemorative practices, often to produce effects of stability and continuity and to create shared meanings and culture, yet commemoration has been a relatively neglected theme in the study of organisations. The articles in this Special Issue range across diverse examples to provide a rich understanding of the dynamic and complex processes involved in the organisation of commemoration. In particular, they illustrate the importance of paying attention to materialities, spatiality and embodiment in the lived experience of practices of remembering.

This article examines the ethical implications of the growing integration of consumption into the heart of the employment relationship. Human resource management (HRM) practices increasingly draw upon the values and practices of consumption, constructing employees as the ‘consumers’ of ‘cafeteria-style’ benefits and development opportunities. However, at the same time employees are expected to market themselves as items to be consumed on a corporate menu. In relation to this simultaneous position of consumer/consumed, the employee is expected to actively engage in the commodification of themselves, performing an appropriate organizational identity as a necessary part of being a successful employee. This article argues that the relationship between HRM and the simultaneously consuming/consumed employee affects the conditions of possibility for ethical relations within organizational life. It is argued that the underlying ‘ethos’ for the integration of consumption values into HRM practices encourages a self-reflecting, self-absorbed subject, drawing upon a narrow view of individualised autonomy and choice. Referring to Levinas’ perspective that the primary ethical relation is that of responsibility and openness to the Other, it is concluded that these HRM practices affect the possibility for ethical being.

In this paper, we look at buildings from the ‘disturbing’ perspective of ruin and ruination. The relationship between buildings and ruins appears to be an antithesis, one between organisation and disorganisation: a dyad of mutually exclusive opposites. However, we try to show how the relationship between buildings and ruins is more complex and multifaceted so that rather than being the play of opposites, it is one which is mutually enacting and inextricably entwined. We explore three aspects of the relationship of mutuality between building and ruin. The first is a consideration of ruins and their relationship to structuring and de‐structuring. Second, we look into the multiplicity of meanings that ruins engender, their inherent ambivalence. Finally, we argue that ruin and ruination are as related to construction and re‐ordering as they are to destruction, since they are not the absolute annihilation of building and organisation, but are themselves different forms of organisation and organising. Thus, the paper is not so much about ruins themselves, where ruins are seen as obliteration or the absence of form. Rather, it is about what ruins and ruination tell us about buildings, structure and the processes of organising.

We demonstrate, through a single case that neither architectural spaces nor leadership are ‘monolithic’, the form predominantly associated with dictatorial leadership – hard, impervious, unyielding and dominant, reflecting a single figure in a landscape. The case of a new academic building presents the lived and embodied experience of one author as researcher and subject, thus providing an ‘insider’ account that can be compared to the rhetoric produced by architects, consultants and senior management. The architect’s account, given on an architectural tour of ‘his’ building, is supplemented by documents and experiential accounts from colleagues. For those professionally concerned with quasi-participative control systems, the twin thrusts of ‘managerialism’ and ‘leaderism’ are very evident in the case, with the typical academic’s experience of formal leadership being one of distance, dissent and disembodiment.