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Introduction

It was August 2017 when during a break from class I heard the following quote from a business student in the hall of the university department, where I teach psychology: ‘Here comes the left-wing professor talking about those boring topics again’. At that moment, I began wondering, whether all the spread of hatred, coming from the Brazilian political situation, was impacting me and my faculty colleagues. I also started to think about it, while I was teaching organizational psychology in a business administration course.

Introduction

This Special Issue’s call for papers reprises critical management studies’ (CMS) ongoing concern about its perceived inability to change the status quo or to improve the world in any meaningful way. That concern is manifest elsewhere, such as in Parker’s (2018a, 2018b) radical suggestion that the business school (b-school) should be shut down and bulldozed[1].

Somehow, in the midst of ruins, we must maintain enough curiosity to notice the strange and wonderful as well as the terrible and terrifying. (Tsing et al., 2017: M3)

Beginnings

I am Sara, born of displacement in a foreign land of unbelonging of all my ancestors, forever weaving threads of fragmented lineages of Colombian Chibcha/Muisca, Eastern European Jewish, and Celtic scattered to the winds of forgetting.

Introduction

Concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere are growing, ice caps are melting, and the climate is changing. Members of the scientific community increasingly agree on the course these developments will take and the role humans have played in causing them (IPCC, 2018). Responses to this scientific consensus and the related questions of sustainability widely vary.

Introduction[1]

The organization of knowledge and ignorance of societies shapes their perception of crises and how they deal w

Introduction

The notion of ‘an order’ as a relatively fixed system within which people and things have their place and move around in predictable ways is, of course, central to the study of organization. An organization is generally understood as an ordered entity with clear goals that forms part of the structure of society. Such an understanding of organization makes sense against the backdrop of the culturally dominant way of valuing order. Something is ‘in order’ when it is deemed correct or appropriate, ‘out of order’ when it is not.

Introduction 

In the wake of the neoliberal reform agenda of the 1980s, public schools in many western countries, have faced reforms at an ever-quickening pace. One effect of this is the increased pace and number of organizational change projects going on in schools. Schools must be adaptable to shifting demands for outcomes, and must be able to take themselves to new modes of organising that are considered to be more goal efficient (OECD, 2013). 

Introduction

We live in an old chaos of the sun.
– Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning

Introduction

Scholars in organization studies have long considered how architecture matters for organization (Borch, 2009; Dale and Burrell, 2008; Kornberger and Clegg, 2004), investigating how physical spaces facilitate and/or inhibit the people and organizational practices they contain (Baldry, 1999; Baldry and Barnes, 2012; Dale, 2005; Halford and Leonard, 2006).