New Sites/Sights: Exploring the White Spaces of Organization

Abstract

Contemporary organization is increasingly understood as contingent and improvisational - and immersed in complex and shadowy realities where customary assumptions about the space and time of organization no longer hold. This Special Issue invites organization studies into an ambivalent space of sites/sights in organization, the double-play of this modest conceptual proposal necessary in order to open up the complex folding of the epistemological and the ontological in organization today. In this introduction we seek to establish and position a distinctive approach to what we claim to be ‘white spaces’ in organization. We show that any adequate treatment of these white spaces compels a significant breaching of the disciplinary norms of organization studies. Our argument derives from a consideration of a range of recently emerging concepts and analyses in the study of organization, all of which are suggestive of crisis and of emerging (anti-)forms of organization. This edition of Organization Studies publishes six papers and three originally commissioned book reviews that help advance this emerging problematic in organization, and which in their various ways extend our understanding of possible organizing futures.