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Foucault

Critical ambiguities - ambiguities of critique: Technologies of the self in entrepreneurial activism

Introduction

In Foucauldian organization studies, a shift of emphasis has taken place from the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Ricoeur, 2008) – uncovering modes of subjugation behind the smokescreen of individual freedom – towards the task of discovering potentials of agency, change and resistance (Raffnsøe et al., 2022; Randall and Munro, 2010; McKinlay and Taylor, 2014; Paulsson, 2011).

Diagrammatics of organization

In this open issue of ephemera, we bring together a series of papers that engage with the diagrammatics of organization in various ways. Specifically, each contribution examines the production of a particular subject within a network of power relations: the entrepreneur within enterprise culture (Hanlon), the compulsive buyer within consumer society (Presskorn-Thygesen and Bjerg), the spectator within the world of art (Rodda), the cognitive labourer within the knowledge economy (Armano) and the good citizen within advanced liberalism (Barratt).

Diagrammatics of organization

This open issue brings together a series of papers that engage with the diagrammatics of organization. This involves an examination of how particular subjects are produced within networks of power relations: the entrepreneur within enterprise culture, the compulsive buyer within consumer society, the spectator within the world of art, the cognitive labourer within the knowledge economy, and the good citizen within advanced liberalism.

Symptoms of organization

The contributions to this issue, which were all written by PhD students, reflect upon the meaning of a symptomatology of organization and explore its possible practice. The idea of symptomatology itself originates from medicine and refers to the study of the signs of a disease. In medicine, the general task of the symptomatologist is to interpret and organize different symptoms in such a way that they designate a more or less coherent disease.

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