In the globalised ‘network economy’ mobility has developed as an imperative as well as an attractive possibility. Drawing inspiration from the field of mobility studies, this special issue of ephemera discusses mobility as a complex modern phenomenon. It creates a space for investigating different forms and dimensions of mobility, such as physical, temporal, social, economic and symbolic. The issue seeks to problematise simplistic assessments of mobility, and moves the discussion beyond the either/or opposition of choice and necessity.

This issue of ephemera explores the role of humour and laughter in society and organization. Joking practices – such as clowning, bantering, horseplay, pranks and lampooning – are a part of all workplaces, not to mention everyday life. But the meaning and significance of humour at work is by no means uncontested: humour serves variously as a coping mechanism, a subversive strategy and a management tool in contemporary organizations. Starting from this basis, the special issue seeks to explore the inherent ambiguity of humour in a range of empirical and theoretical sites.

The world is waging war on corruption. Accompanying this war, there is also a growing academic interest in corruption. This research, however, has tended to operate with a nearly undisputed understanding of what corruption is and how to fight it. It has refrained from theorizing corruption, possibly as a consequence of the perceived urgency involved in identifying, raising awareness about and fighting corruption. This special issue of ephemera seeks to re-emphasize the relevance and importance of theorizing corruption.

This special issue of ephemera maps social practices of collective organizing on a low budget in cities today. ‘"Saving" the city’ expresses the imperative to economize while at the same time harbouring the desire to ‘rescue’ – recollecting an urban civil society via mobilising the public, helping neighbourhoods, creating public spaces, and heterogeneous possibilities of living to cope with today’s and future challenges.

Management, business, anarchism. Can these three terms, that come with so much baggage, be fruitfully brought together? This special issue brings together contributions that range from discussions of anarchist political economy and anarchism as a theory of organisation to the practices of anarchist alternatives and the radical imagination. Scholars from anarchist studies as well as critical management studies highlight the various ways the connections between the two fields can be articulated.

This issue brings together a series of commentaries, interventions and projects centred on the theme of workers’ inquiry. Workers’ inquiry is a practice of knowledge production that seeks to understand the changing composition of labour and its potential for revolutionary social transformation. It is a practice of turning the tools of the social sciences into weapons of class struggle. It also seeks to map the continuing imposition of the class relation, not as a disinterested investigation, but rather to deepen and intensify social and political antagonisms.

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.

Ethical brands have risen to prominence in recent years as a market solution to a diverse range of political, social and, in this case most interestingly, ethical problems. By signifying the ethical beliefs of the firm behind them, ethical brands offer an apparently simple solution to ethical consumers: buy into the brands that represent the value systems that they believe in and avoid buying into those with value-systems that they do not believe in.

The neoliberal notion of employability has risen to prominence over the past 20 years, having been positioned as the crux of national, organizational and individual prosperity.

The communism of capital? What could this awkward turn of phrase mean, and what might it signify with regards to the state of the world today? Does it merely describe a reality in which communist demands are twisted to become productive of capital, a capitalist realism supplemented by a disarmed communist ideology? Or does the death of the capitalist utopia mean that capital cannot contain the antagonism expressed by Occupy and other movements anymore, and therefore must confront communism upfront?