In this open issue, we invite readers to consider the relation between fantasy and organization studies. In particular, we wish to draw your attention to the Wonderland of absurdity, unpredictability, irrationality, contradictions, confusion, and ambiguity that we are all inextricably caught-up in - and always trying to escape from - in contemporary society and organizations.

If the political is the constitutive moment of the social, then ignorance is definitely political. Ignorance involves deciding what can be talked about and what cannot be talked about; what should be remembered or forgotten; known or not known; seen or unseen. This special issue investigates the work it takes and the practices that make it possible for organizations to ignore uncomfortable or disturbing information.

In this special issue of ephemera, we place critique at the heart of the discussion about the future of business schools and higher education more generally. The issue reflects on this in a myriad of ways, from debates about the more-than-human entanglements through which business schools have become performative to the monstrosity of the neoliberal capitalist business models that dominate today's academia. Despite the gloomy challenges that the contributions illuminate, the issue helps us to meet these challenges by exploring potential pathways forward.

This issue takes up the role of disorganization and the relations between order and disorder in organization studies and everyday life. Rather than juxtapositioning these features as oppositions, the issue explores how to understand other aspects of the often unwanted and dark sides of disorganization and disorder - by scrutinising how they are entangled and mutually constitutive to organization practice and theory.

Rejecting capitalism is like living out Don Michael Corleone’s famous phrase from The Godfather Part III: ‘Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in’. Traditionally, capitalism has used violence to lay claim to everything that escapes from it. But today this violence is complemented by more insidious forms of coercion that are based as much on seduction and pleasure as they are on cruelty and oppression. We now work for capitalism as much in our free time as we do when we are being paid – not because we have to, but because we want to.

This issue celebrates 20 years of ephemera. We, the editorial collective, feel this anniversary provides the opportunity to debate the pasts, presents and futures of critical publishing. Today, most academic journals are owned by commercial publishing houses and organized according to journal rankings and impact factors. Yet ephemera remains stubbornly independent of these global capitalist forces. In this anniversary issue, we want to raise questions about independence – independent thinking, independent publication, independent organizing.

Most of the work leading to publication of this open issue has taken place during the pandemic’s overlapping phases of lockdown, containment, vaccination and (re)opening. Somewhere along the way, we, the editors of this open issue, came to embrace its diverse contributions through the theme of ‘Modes of organization’, as an oblique return to the perennial question ‘What is organization?’.

The internal dynamics of political parties were a central concern for the founders of both organization theory and political sociology, yet contemporary research tends to neglect the importance and value of studying these electoral machines from a truly organizational point of view. The present issue seeks to remedy this shortcoming by allowing curious and creative scholars to reimagine what it might mean for organization scholars and activists alike to engage actively with political parties.

Standby refers to an operating state in which energy continues to flow despite an apparent shutdown, thus allowing for sudden reactivation. This special issue mobilizes the notion of standby to understand its capacities and conditions as a mode of organizing sociomaterial lifeworlds.

This open issue is published against the background of a major global pandemic. The old ‘normal’ seems far away and undesirable, as a socio-ecological transformation becomes even more urgent. The contributions featured here scrutinize the current trends in the capitalist mode of production and envision the alternative organization of our societies. They examine new configurations of work, to which capital-led digitalization is often key, and ways to resist it. Attention is also paid to a fundamental rethinking of work, economy and care.