organization
‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’
Damian O’Doherty’s Reconstructing organization is a wild tale of bob cuts and cats and talking chairs, set within the confines of Manchester airport. Rarely has a steel and concrete waiting room (for that is what airports are to its visitors, if not its employees) seemed more vivacious and colourful. Think Alice’s Wonderland with its strange and curious creatures, the author its likeable, excitable, Mad Hatter.
A pre-individual perspective to organizational action
Introduction
A newspaper headline reads ‘Canadian army heading for Africa’, but the photograph that accompanies it shows that it is men and women who are being deployed, leaving their families behind. The slip from individual to organizational action is common, and has preoccupied organization studies and sociology alike. Both disciplines have kept busy attempting to connect the two levels and understand the passage from individual to organizational action ‒ and the other way around (Eisenhardt, 1989; Emirbayer and Mische, 1998).
The disjointedness of time: Ghostly matters in organization
This ephemera workshop aims to discuss how the study of ghosts and ghostly matters in organizations can contribute to an understanding of what organization and organizing is. It will explore the disorderly, the unexplainable, the uncanny qualities of organizational life and attends to all the different sorts of ‘absent-presences’ that haunt, disrupt, distort, trouble, and bother the smooth functioning of work life. Additionally, it aims to learn about fissures between shiny futures and inadequate pasts and entanglements of hopes and fears in organizational life.
Rethinking organizational hierarchy, management, and the nature of work with Peter Drucker and Colin Ward
Philosophical anarchism is a defensible position in theory. The only trouble with it is it never works. (Drucker, 2010: 40)
We have to build networks instead of pyramids. (Ward, 2008: 33)
Logistics of soft control: SAP, labour, organization
Outline
SAP is one of the largest developers of software that drives global economies, offering leading enterprise software solutions, specifically logistics software that makes possible movements of people, finance and things that make up global trade. SAP specialises in software development and web-based services associated with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) in the logistics industries among many others, including mining, health, finance, medical, insurance, oil and gas, retail and higher education.
Castles made of sand
How does one begin? How does one begin something like this - this introduction, this journal – but also how does one begin in general? Should we start from scratch? Set out a profile, dig the foundations, lay them in concrete and steel? Starting with the cornerstone, lay bricks on top of a stable foundation then layer by layer build our construction, our edifice, our monument – an abode where weary travellers on the road to critical enlightenment can lay their heads to rest?
