This age of austerity comes on the back of a lengthened period of apparently rampant consumer excess: that was a party for which we are all now having to pay. A spectacular period of unsustainably funded over-indulgence, it seems, has now given rise to a sobering period of barely fundable mere-subsistence. Consumption, narrated along such lines, is a sin which has to be paid for. Beyond the deceptive theology of consumption, however, lies actual politics.

The relationship between freedom and work is a complex one. For some, they are considered opposites: ‘true’ freedom is possible only once the necessity of work is removed, and a life of luxury attained. For others, work itself provides an opportunity to achieve a sense of freedom and authenticity. In recent years for example, advances in human resource management have promoted hard work, a deep sense of commitment to one’s job, and the acceptance of working conditions that are ostensibly exploitative, as offering the promise of freedom.

Today we live in a vastly transformed state of things: the artifice of artefacts is evident all around us. A parliament of communicationtechnologies, from RFIDS to Bluetooth devices, constantly exchange information and network all around and through us. Wireless networks of communication, control, and cooperation proliferate in mysterious ways, all speaking an infra-language of organization, inscribing new techniques of governance.

We often understand institutions as some kind of durable structure that transcends human lives and their intentions. The walls of the institution protect its inhabitants from the dangers of the outside world, but at the price of immobility of body and mind.

While self-management has emerged as a robust way of getting things done in present-day work life and organizations, it also presents itself as a conception of considerable multivalency and ambiguity. Self-management has been called upon both, to intensify capitalist work practices and to overturning their exploitation, thus expressing at the very same time our fears of subordination and our hopes for emancipation. The aim of this special issue is to scrutinize this ambiguity and the multivalence pertaining to self-management.

The papers in this issue of ephemera have their origins in a conference, ‘Digital Labour: Workers, Authors, Citizens’, held at the University of Western Ontario on October 16-18, 2009. Joining academics from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and New Zealand were activists from unions in Canada and the United States representing journalists, screen actors, screenwriters, library workers and university faculty. Yet while the papers at the conference converged around the shared problematic of digital labour, what made the event interesting was not only commo

In a world of increasing artifice, instrumentalisation and manipulation, authenticity has become a premier cultural value sought by individuals and organisations alike. This slippery concept has emerged as the apparent cure-all for many a contemporary predicament. With a search for authenticity as a part of many everyday activities, organisations, and capitalist businesses in particular, endeavour to align their interests with personal pursuits for truth, meaning and solid grounds to stand on.

We mark this web – this publication, this project – with crossing lines, a chiasma. The Greek letter chi (χ) marks a decussation, a crossing of tracts. With it we wish to point to the nature of this project as a diagonal arrangement, a connection and crossing of heterogeneous domains and their codings.

We live in a time of packages. Everything comes in set, glossed, and ‘just so’. This also seems true of scientific journal issues: either they are deliberately ‘special issues’ where the theming is the very organizing principle, or they are apparently ‘open issues’ where an editorial constructs a thematic line through the various papers in the issue. Within poststructuralist organization studies, with its especially elastic and, well, ephemeral, concepts and theories, the temptation of thematizing is, as history teaches us, very hard to resist.

From debates about the contribution of labour process analysis to the understanding of emancipatory struggles in organization, through to a treatise on the England national football team as a maternal ‘breast’ that turns spectators into consumers who begin to resemble new forms of labour, ephemera 5.1 assembles a series of apparently disconnected studies.