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Exhibiting

Could we imagine an argument that would scrutinize both the organized world and the organization of our discourses about it? Such would be neither empirical nor theoretical (as these terms are conventionally understood), neither comprehensive nor focused on a single source. Each of the exhibits that we have assembled in this issue might go somewhat toward showing how this might be possible. If it is. But this task does not imply an innocent dreaming (perhaps in the warmth of one’s bed). Instead it involves a doing, a taking out of the house. A demonstrating. A showing.

From... to...

It has become clear that many of the traditional places of politics have become ineffective and sometimes simply corrupt. Today the political is on the move again: from Seattle to Prague, from Genoa to Evian, from Porto Allegre to Florence, as well as from and to many other places. We live in potentially exciting times. In many places difference seems to be possible again. But this movement does not simply move, because everything is moving and becoming. There are questions of organisation and strategy that need to be asked.

Local solidarity

This Special Issue of ephemera incorporates a diverse set of case studies: Luhman’s study of the potential of worker cooperatives as a tool for social change, Marens’ account of labor’s pension fund strategies, Poonamallee’s consideration of an Indian town’s struggles to avoid the perils of globalization, and Whalen’s analysis of labor friendly economic development efforts in Western New York State.

Always elsewhere

In the editorial for the ephemera issue 7(2) Spoelstra, O’Shea and Kaulingfreks (2007) reflect upon ephemera’s relation to the wider field of organization studies. Marginality is brought up as a main trademark of ephemera, in effect its core business. We would like to spend this editorial on following up on this theme. This is not only because marginality is a pertinent issue in need of further discussion. Which it is. It is also an attempt to use the editorial space as an arena for transparent dialogue between the members of the editorial collective of ephemera.

Marginal competencies

In the first editorial of this journal, the founding editors expressed their hope that ephemera would not be concerned with what it can do for or with organization studies, but what it can do to organization studies (Böhm, Jones and Land, 2001: 10). Seven years down the road, it is perhaps apposite to pause a moment and ask how to understand ephemera’s relation to organization studies today; perhaps with some risk of reflecting our life away...

Vorsprung durch Technik?

According to Heidegger the modern world is an image, a Gebild, a structured perception, which is put and held in place by the Gestell – TV and computer screens, stock-exchanges, business schools and automobiles, which enframe or emplace the world for us. The goings-on, the hustle, of this emplacement as well as its perception is technology, or maybe better, technics, as Heidegger suggests in his essay ‘Die Frage nach der Technik’ (‘The Question Concerning Technology’, or, ‘Questing After Technics’).

Responding: To Cooper

So how do we respond to Cooper? We are not in the game of hagiography, and we wonder what would be achieved by establishing a new canon of great writers on organisation. Certainly we can be critical enough of certain aspects of his work, and we can let it take us to places which are well outside of it. But we know that in some way any responses we make will jump up from within the very field sown by Cooper (and others). Is it possible to use arms supplied from another against them?

Organizing between a rock and a hard place

And isn’t organization theory itself increasingly stuck between a rock and a hard place? Instead of core competencies, functional units and divisional organization we have fractured identities, outsourcing in and insourcing out, virtual viruses messing up our interfaces and insane project managers desperately looking for that one controllable moment. Let’s just accept that we’re all displaced now, lounging in the airport-lounge (Augé, 1995), left at the station, and stuck in the K-hole of our choice (Warren, 2005). Let’s not mind. Fuck, let’s rejoice in this.

It appears that certain aphasiacs...

There is more than one way to skin a cat, cook an egg, read a text, start a revolution. Particularly so here and now, as we sit down to introduce the pieces in this issue, we are confronted with multiplicity. There is more than one way of speaking about these pieces, more that one way of classifying our ‘content’. Is this more than the fantasy of a heterotopia? Perhaps this is something that happens to the empiricist who takes their object seriously—one encounters the problem of interpretation, of the openness and possibility of reading.

Experience, movement and the creation of new political forms

This collection of essays was born somewhere between Moscow and Beijing. While the ephemera conference on the trans-Siberian train has already inspired an issue of this journal, the experience of that journey would raise, for some who were on the train, a number of issues that go way beyond what that unfolded between these points of departure and arrival. At stake are a series of questions about experience, movement and political life that were neither loaded nor unloaded with the baggage carried by each participant.

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