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Beyond measure

This special issue explores questions around measurement in relation to management, organization, and politics - that is, how processes quantification intervene in our lives, sideline other modes of judgement, and lead us astray with a trail of numbers. Numbers reveal, but they also hide; they tell us who we are, but also who we ought to become; they show us how happy and healthy we are, but also urge us to adjust ourselves to the norm. Numbers manage us and we, in turn, manage ourselves through numbers.

Quarantined ideas

The current pandemic is coming to redefine our lives in so many ways, both real and symbolic. It has already changed the way we travel, the way we work, the way we live. And it will continue to have far-reaching effects on all of us for the foreseeable future. In the face of the current re-organization of public and private life on an unprecedented scale, ephemera’s editorial collective has made the decision to cancel one issue and postpone forthcoming issues by three months.

América Latina / Latin America: Again (and again)

In 2006, ephemera published its last special issue dedicated to Latin America. After long 14 years, the publication of this new special issue can be read as a renewal and continuation of the themes addressed in the previous one. Why do we need another special issue? While each moment of organisation and struggle is unique, the turbulence in the current Latin American political context is evidence that there are political, economic, cultural and organisational issues that have been reoccurring on the continent, again and again. Since 2019, the continent is yet again on fire.

The ethico-politics of whistleblowing: Mediated truth-telling in digital cultures

A number of spectacular cases have recently spurred research and public debate on whistleblowing. Portrayals of whistleblowers oscillate between the heroic and courageous ‘truth-teller’ and the morally dubious and dangerous ‘trouble-maker’. Whilst acknowledging the deep ambivalence of whistleblowing, this special issue moves beyond individualising accounts.

Peak neoliberalism

Neoliberalism has become a ubiquitous term in popular and academic debates, used to describe a diverse and varied array of things. As a result, it has come to mean many different things to many different people. It is used as a concept to analyze organizational governance and restructuring, the marketization of organizational thinking and bureaucracy, the social reproduction of corporate managers, and the transformation of corporate governance. And much more besides. Neoliberalism’s increasing conceptual ubiquity has come at a significant price though.

Repair matters

Repair has visibly come to the fore in recent academic and policy debates, to the point that ‘repair studies’ is now emerging as a novel focus of research. Through the lens of repair, scholars with diverse backgrounds are coming together to rethink our relationships with the human-made matters, tools and objects that are the material mesh in which organisational life takes place as a political question.

Ghostly matters in organization

Are organizations haunted places? Oh, yes indeed! Come with us into this ephemera special issue to explore the ghostly matters of organizing. 
This issue sets out to encounter and explore ghosts and ghostly matters in organizations and organizing. The contributions meet, hunt, sight and summon ghosts in various organizational settings: public parks, primary schooling, digital afterlives of scientific controversies, financial capital, old books and in quotas for women in management. 

Forthcoming contributions

Some contributions to the journal are ready before the issues they are part of come out. They are published in this section so that the readers can enjoy them straight away. 

Forthcoming contributions will be assigned to their respective issues in due course, which is when their pdf versions will also become available.

 

Alternative organizing

This Special Issue brings together an eclectic set of papers that each address a central question: how we can build capacity for living and organising in ways that align better with natural systems and imagine ecologically sustainable and socially just alternatives? They look for answers in transformational but micropolitical processes that could be the foundation for ways of being and organising focused on social and environmental flourishing.

Landscapes of political action

It is increasingly evident that organizations and different processes of organizing are not neutral, inevitable or even necessary, but inherently political. As a discipline, Organization Studies is slowly becoming aware of that organizations are not entities that exist separately from material ecosystems or outside chains of exploitation of cheap labour and raw material. Instead, organizations are intimately entangled to, dependent upon and contributing to global forces such as the destruction of eco-systems, climate change, inequality and (neo-) colonialism.

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