Critical Organization Studies

In the prolonged afermath of the economic crisis begun in 2008, the importance of Housing Rights Movements is gaining a new momentum in metropolises like Rome. Here the spaces they squat for inhabitng purposes represent more than emergency shelters for people in a conditon of severe housing deprivaton within a proft-oriented and individualistc cityscape. Indeed, they enact a “right to stay put” into the city and contrast the socio-spatal marginalizaton of the dispossessed urban dwellers in three main ways. Firstly, they subtract spaces from the speculaton and from the top down model of urban regeneraton. Secondly, they allow marginal people not to be relegated out of the consolidated urban fabric, and to be visible as social and politcal subjects. Thirdly, they provide a set of grassroots actvites that confgure alternatve models of sociability, contentious politcs and communing inside neighborhoods afected by diverse forms of deprivaton. In this respect, housing squats can be interpreted as urban commons that, besides providing emergency housing, contrast gentrifcaton and
artculate a renewed “right to the city”. In order to empirically support this theoretical framework, we will discuss the case of the squat Porto Fluviale, located in the central area of OstIense and occupied since 2003. The alternatve housing paterns it has been developing, and the role it plays in the neighborhood, shows the diverse ways in which Housing Rights Movements conceive and practice the 'right to stay put' in the urban landscape.

Formal organization is often seen as opposed or resistant to change, in theory as well as in practice. Drawing primarily on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze we argue that the reverse is true – that organization is itself a dynamic quality and that change and organization are imbricated in each other. We expand several key concepts of this philosophy in relation to organization (the multiplicity of order and the multiplicity of organization, strata and meshworks, virtuality and multitude) all of which draw attention to the unstable but ever-present forces that subvert and disrupt, escape, exceed and change organization. This enables an understanding of organization as creatively autosubversive – not fixed, but in motion, never resting and constantly trembling.
Keywords: Deleuze, change, order, virtual

Critics lament that corporate social responsibility has failed to significantly change business practices and that it became 'de-radicalized' once embraced by corporate business management. Using historical analysis, this article reevaluates this de-radicalization thesis, questioning whether corporate social responsibility ever was as inherently radical as the thesis assumes. The article demonstrates that early corporate social responsibility was already invested with a strategy of pragmatism, an investment that traces back to a group of late 19th and early 20th century American Christian reformists, also known as the social gospel movement. They promised that industrialism would unify Christian ethics and capitalist production, thereby reconciling the conflict between profitseeking and social solidarity. The discourse they advanced already contained what would later become key corporate social responsibility components, including (1) the notion of ethical businessmen, (2) the corporation as a morally conscious being and (3) collaboration as the pathway to 'industrial peace'. Theoretically, the analysis finds inspiration in Luc Boltanski's and Eve Chiapello's thesis on modern capitalism's capacity to assimilate the critiques it faces, supplemented by Michel Foucault's fine-grained analyses of the transformation and 'tactical polyvalence' of discourse. The two positions complement each other in their assumptions regarding the dialectical relationship between capitalism/critique (Boltanski and Chiapello) and power/resistance (Foucault). Tracing the origins of corporate social responsibility's pragmatism further back in time than the conventional starting point in the 1950s casts new light on the de-radicalization thesis. In particular, corporate social responsibility emphasizes personal ethics as the key to industrial peace, a social gospel legacy that has steered corporate social responsibility away from demands that fundamentally challenge corporate capitalism.

Based on a case study, this paper elaborates on the psychological regimes of truth that organize and regulate male parenting and partly constitute the conditions of possibility for male identity and subjectivity both as fathers and employees. The aim is to contribute to a better understanding of the discursive-cultural constraints that western managers and employees—males in particular—may face when trying to pursue a better work/life balance. Based on an empirical analysis of expert literature on male parenting, the paper argues that prevalent psychological regimes of truth about fathers and fathering do not necessarily render enactable the sorts of identities that enable both men and women to achieve a better work/life balance.

In this article we argue that a component of structuration theory—the duality of structure—is a valuable heuristic for an integrative framework seeking to explain the role of communication in how membership is negotiated over time. The membership negotiations (MNs) perspective detailed here considers structural features of negotiation processes, while accounting for how active participation of newcomers and incumbents sustains and alters them. We offer a model of MNs and 18 propositions concerning how role expectations, group/organizational norms, formal structure, external and indirect sources of socialization, identification, power relationships, and member interaction are media for ongoing organizational MNs. Through these media, incumbents and newcomers interactively rely upon, sustain, and occasionally alter focal structures, practices, and the meanings of membership.

En este número especial recogemos cuatro artículos que pretenden instalar una mirada alternativa a la racionalidad individualista, paternalista, masculinista y eficientista que imponen los modelos managerialistas tradicionales. Durante las últimas décadas la práctica profesional y académica del management ha venido sufriendo una serie de cuestionamientos. Dentro del ámbito profesional, los cuestionamientos se han centrado en la falta a la ética, el cuestionamiento del modelo de negocio (ganancias sin límites), las relaciones laborales intra empresa (trabajo flexible, derechos laborales, sueldo decente, equidad de género) y las relaciones de las empresas con la ciudadanía y el medio ambiente (desconfianza, bajas expectativas, polución, etc.). En el ámbito de la academia, se ha cuestionado la supuesta neutralidad del management e introducido el análisis del poder y las implicancias que tienen variables tales como género y etnia en el desarrollo Organizacional....

As recent events and political developments around the world have shown, race in its various incarnations is still one of the key organizing principles for action. Why then do we persistently fail to think about race in organizations and the study of them? And, perhaps most urgently, what does this mean for those whose life and work always already evidences the expectedness of racial power?

We invite theoretical and empirical papers addressing, but not limited to, such themes as:

-Conceptualizing race and coloniality in work and organization studies
-De-naturalizing and de-ontologizing race and gender as categories of difference
-Entangled architectures of race and gender
-Operations of coloniality in the global south
-Race and coloniality in the global distribution of work
-The role of coloniality in the emergence of new forms of work
-Lived experiences of racial difference in organizations
-Material, psychic and epistemic violence of racial difference
-Conceptual and ethical limits of representation and ‘body-counts’
-Critical race theory and postcolonial critique in work and organization studies

In this paper we draw upon “After-ANT” scholarship to generate openings for a shift from purely deconstructive studies of object organization to a more straightforward generation of concrete and specific alternative trajectories towards the future by way of ontological experimentation. Through careful empirical investigation of a mine and a landfill, and how these are enacted in practice in different topological registers, we show how mines and landfills are intertwined; enacted sometimes as similar and in other cases as different types of object, thus shaping the paths of becoming for those bundles of relations that become enacted as either a “mine object” or a “landfill object.” Mapping these practices generates openings for interventions suggesting how things could be made different in some specificity; in this case e.g. the appreciation of what constitutes “natural resources.” The overarching purpose of the paper is to intervene in current debates regarding the potential merits of drawing upon Object-Oriented Philosophy (OOP) as an inspiration in critical organizational studies. While we are highly sympathetic to calls for more experimental object studies, we are hesitant towards OOP as a source of inspiration due to its specific metaphysical underpinnings. To clarify what we find to be at stake here, we conclude the paper by situating After-ANT in a wider landscape of thought, discussing the contrast between broadly pragmatist research approaches, such as After-ANT, and OOP. Finally we try to spell out how we believe this contrast reverberates upon how we understand the purpose and potential of critical social science.

According to Morgan (1986) the emergence of the organism metaphor and the idea that organizations are more like organisms has saved organization theory from its once so predominant mechanistic precepts. We argue that it has not. Rather, the mechanistic underpinnings of organization merely found a new medium of expression in the organism metaphor. And, as we attempt to show, this has a lot to do with the particular legacy that first informed so-called organic thinking about organizations in the 20th century. The paper is two-fold: First, we investigate the history of the words organization and organism and ask how it became possible for one to be used as a metaphor for the other. Second, we examine the way that the organism is brought into the fold of organization so as to reinforce the mechanistic underpinnings of the field. We conclude that if the mechanistic ghost in the organism is to be exorcised organisation studies needs to recognize and rethink its underlying premises.