Preface

The Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) and Organization Studies (OS) held an essay competition on the topic ‘Autonomy and Organisation’ with an award CHF 7,000 for the best essay. Authors were free to choose an essay title within this field.

The essays were judged on their originality and independence of thought, their scholarly quality and their potential to challenge received ideas, both conceptually and within the confines of ‘an essay’ structure. In this sense a successful essay was one we felt to be intellectually experimental, orthogonal to existing debates, address social, economic and political experience and problems, and provide critique across the field of organisation studies.

To this end we eventually chose two essays we felt exemplified these characteristics, in different ways. One by Simon Stevens we chose as an outright winner and so recipient of the 2016 ISRF prize, and another, by Peter Fleming, as a very strong runner up. We believe both to make provocative forays into the experience of organising and being organized, one considering homelessness and the other the emerging world of work. Despite the different subjects and approaches, we felt it striking that both revealed similar organizational forces in play, for in both worlds autonomy was becoming a disorienting condition of mobility and transience in which the only help on offer was that which we offered to ourselves.

We wish to express our gratitude to the ISRF for promoting and supporting the competition, to Marilyn Strathern and Hugh Willmott as the external members of the judging panel who went through the submissions with us, and to all the entrants who took up the call.