Organization

This qualitative case study examines food-delivery platforms in France in order to reveal how gig workers, lacking traditional employment protections and collective bargaining, rely on informal community mechanisms to develop collective agency that is closely linked to the materiality of platforms. Drawing upon sociomaterial theory and the concept of affordance, our results show that religious affiliation plays a crucial role in the actualization of algorithmic management artifacts by Muslim migrant workers and leads to a sense of emancipation and reconciliation between their religious and work identities. Religious communities, often overlooked or avoided by traditional organizations, act as mediators in the gig economy. Because the gig economy uses “post-diversity” organizational practices that are indifferent to marginal socio-demographic categories, it enables religious communities to provide workers with material, emotional, and informational resources that facilitate identity agency and prioritize it over algorithmic management. The present study contributes to the literature on platform work by illuminating the intricate duality of agency experienced by Muslim migrant workers in the food-delivery sector and developed through community-built resources. It highlights the prioritization of freedom from religious oppression in the labor market over economic considerations, which leads to the acceptance of exploitative working conditions and peer control.

This paper argues the military are a central force in creating industrial-capitalist organisational order. It suggests that in the interests of preparedness for organised violence, the military come to see work organisation as a problem and so develop an ‘organising logic’ built on surveillance, control, and hierarchy. Using Foucault on discipline, security and population, and Marxist understandings of modes of production, it demonstrates how the military ensured productive workforces. In so doing, it developed a production network – a security apparatus – located in the real subsumption of labour, technical and bureaucratic controls, deskilling, and separating strategy and operations to ensure control, productivity, and state security. These processes and organisational forms were then diffused to the private sphere to reshape organisational order.

Scientific Management is usually studied for what it brought to factories, production and the organization of work: yet, it did much more. Our contribution focuses on how Taylor’s ideas were adapted to domestic occupation by overlapping with another forgotten movement promoting household efficiency and primarily led by women: Home Economics and its sanitary science. Drawing on the methodology of intellectual history, we examine the pioneering writings of Ellen Richards, Mary Talbot, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Christine Frederick and see how they promoted female vindications and emancipation. If Scientific Management is criticized for its alienating effects, its spillovers were also partially positive during the Progressive Era. Indeed, Scientific Management was envisioned as a normative guide to a new model of society and, surprisingly, as a tool for emancipation and empowerment, meant to provide women with a mean of social liberation and legitimization. Furthermore, the social movements that characterized the Progressive Era became crucial to tackling democratic issues through an empirical lens. Engaging in some of Critical Management Studies major themes, this contribution to management history aims to produce novel insight on Scientific Management and its contribution to domestic work and women’ identity in the early 20th century.

This article scrutinizes the role of rhythms in perpetuating and transforming business as usual in the Anthropocene. The focus is on understanding how some rhythms become authoritative and repeat business as usual while others prompt radically different temporal imaginaries in and beyond organizations. Empirically, we examine how diverse organizational and natural rhythms come together in the context of the alpine winter tourism industry. By analyzing the constitution of rhythms in materialities, practices, and voices through multimodal vignettes, we trace the development of dominant rhythms with eurhythmic harmony and arrhythmic disturbance emerging as key configurations. This study contributes to a temporal understanding of how business remains locked in its repetition, pointing to eurhythmia as a chronopathic organizational experience when crises in the Anthropocene demand immediate action. Further, we highlight the potential of understanding arrhythmia as an invitation to transform business-as-usual by attuning to neglected, more-than-human temporalities. Overall, this paper draws attention to the power of rhythms in shaping predominant yet unseen configurations of authority in organizational temporality in the Anthropocene.

This paper addresses the problematisation of the ‘left behind’ in right wing populist governmental strategies in the aftermath of Brexit. As diverse political actors, journalists and commentators questioned and sought to account for the outcome of the vote, we explore Theresa May’s particular contribution, as the left behind came into view as a problem for state rule. We reveal May’s shifting and often ambiguous ontology of the left behind, highlighting the manner in which she deploys discourses of globalisation, as she challenges an avaricious and culturally detached business elite, and the state, for their failure to hold business in check and to advance the interests of the left behind. Nonetheless, we argue for the continuing relevance of neoliberal discourse for the way May questions the predicament of the left behind, and reimagines their government. Brexit’s wake, we suggest, marks not a radical break with the logic of neoliberal reason that Foucauldians in MOS have explored, but a compromised mutation that brings the state to the fore. Crucially, May’s intervention also portends the government of what came to be known as ‘culture wars’. On the one hand, the left behind were to be the target object of haphazard schemes for the remediation of the inequalities they experience. On the other, their cultural marginalisation was to be addressed by enrolment in countless cultural wars mobilised by elite political actors. Our paper contributes to the literature by offering a Foucauldian analysis addressing the consequences of Brexit for the marginalised and economically vulnerable.

Collective representation is traditionally associated with employees, while solo self-employed (SSE) workers, in both regulated and unregulated professions, are usually considered to be autonomous and therefore not in need of representation. However, in recent years, the SSE have increasingly represented their interests collectively, although often outside traditional representative organisations such as trade unions, employer organisations, and professional and business associations. By drawing on two case studies conducted within associations of unregulated SSE based in Germany and Italy, this article introduces the concept of ‘relational representation’. In particular, our findings show how a relational representation acts to support workers’ autonomy by promoting the building of relationships, and at the same time by mobilising both prefigurative and conflictual ways of doing politics, traditionally considered as alternatives. Drawing on feminist relational approaches to (inter)dependence and autonomy, the article discusses three organisational practices that allow for relational representation: engaging with welfare institutions on common professional conditions; redefining relations between representatives and represented; and promoting the exchange of experiences and interests among members.

Reviewing is critical to advancing scholarly knowledge by assuring research standards and contouring what counts as novel. Yet, our system of reviewing submissions to journals is in crisis. With growing submission numbers, editors struggle to match these with qualified review capacities, unwillingly adding extra, often uneven, workloads on some reviewers, without equally distributing pressures or finding the “ideal” expert match. We propose to redress this issue in terms of care. Inspired by feminist care theory, we discuss how the current review system invisibilizes, underappreciates, and exploits the care invested in it. Furthermore, we suggest reconsidering the very organizing of the review system along the lines of care to reinvigorate the nurturing, knowledge-enhancing practices of reviewing. Specifically, we recommend (1) increasing the visibility of reviewing across journals, (2) recognizing reviewing as an inherent part of paid scholarly work, and (3) introducing cross-journal review limits. Together, we argue that such moves enable a more visibly appreciative and less easily exploitative organizing of reviewing as a scholarly practice of care that we and all science indeed rely on.