Organization Studies

Recent trends have seen a move from ‘welfare’ to ‘workfare’ in Europe to increase labour flexibility and reduce state expenditure on sickness absence. This shift in healthcare logics has meant an increasing role for individuals to take an active part in the political process of managing their health and sickness absence. This paper draws upon empirical cases of observations of status meetings, in which the employee’s medical situation and work capacity are evaluated, as well as interviews with participating actors. The study finds that governmental standards are, at times, incompatible with each other and this complexity allows for local strategies in managing the sickness absence process. These findings are discussed in relation to employment and it is concluded that local actors’ translations of policies have important material consequences for employees’ health, rehabilitation opportunities and access to sickness benefits. This contributes to our understanding of how political interventions to govern the population are appropriated locally to govern individual bodies.

Statistics and stories are often equated with different types of knowledge in contemporary western societies: statistics are associated more with the authority of objective, disinterested experts while stories are able to encapsulate subjective, personal experience. In this paper, we explore how both genres were used to produce knowledge in the context of a public inquiry on the problems facing older workers in securing and maintaining employment. Drawing on the concept of power/knowledge relations we examine how statistics and stories were used in different inquiry texts and trace their use across texts over time. Our findings show that to establish their authority as a valid form of knowledge representing the subject of inquiry, statistics and stories both had to be embedded in the appropriate discursive conventions. In the case of statistics, knowledge had to be expressed through discursive conventions that conveyed distance from the subject of inquiry, i.e. independent, objective research. In contrast, stories produced knowledge through discursive conventions that established proximity to the older worker – by being or knowing an older worker. The study shows the effects of these discursive conventions on how knowledge is institutionalized through processes of textual re-inscription, as well as the way in which they constructed a marginalized older worker subject.

This essay reviews research at the nexus of organizational and social movement studies. It begins by surveying research drawing on social movement theories to explain some organizational process, then surveys research drawing on organizational theories to explain some social movement process. The essay concludes with several suggestions for future research.

Genocide has been a constant presence in the history of humanity throughout the ages. Recently, calls to study the organization of genocide and genocidal organizations have been increasing. In this paper we study the functioning of the S-21 extermination camp, an instrument of Ângkar, ‘The Organization’, which imposed genocide on the Cambodian people in the 1970s. We analyse the conditions that enable the organization of genocide, showing that three pillars seem to play essential roles: a utopian vision; support of this vision by total institutional spaces, and the control commitments of the people caught in the utopian vortex. Genocide appears as a potential outcome of the particular type of organization combining these three processes.

Despite more than fifteen years of high level efforts led by the United Nations to broker a binding agreement on emissions reduction, negotiations at every annual meeting have failed to establish a global agreement, mainly due to significant disagreements between industrialized and developing countries over differentiated responsibilities in reducing emissions. In this paper I describe my experiences as a participant-observer at the 17th United Nations Climate Change summit held in Durban, South Africa, during December 2011. I provide a critical analysis of the political economy of climate change and discuss power dynamics between market, state and civil society actors as well as the shifting geopolitics that mark the emergence of China and India as major players in the climate change arena.