Organization Studies, feminisms and new materialisms: on thinking-saying-doing otherwise

Abstract

This chapter is an introduction to the volume containing an assemblage of scholarship bringing insights from recent feminist new materialisms and critical posthumanist theorizing into the field of Organization Studies. The works showcased here are future oriented, with authors from Australia, Finland, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United States as part of emerging communities of scholars producing transdisciplinary research in fertile transnational spaces. Collectively these contributions display differences such scholarship could make in our common disciplinary domain of Organization Studies. We orient the volume as a tool and means for questioning fundamental metatheoretical premises and knowledge production practices defining Organization Studies as a disciplinary field, focusing specifically on those premises and practices which, unwittingly, may function as accomplices in fostering contemporary harms in the world such as climate change. At the same time, the volume articulates other premises and practices that may help in decentering the field's "common sense" -i.e., its conventional views- and thus facilitates engagement with affirmative possibilities for a world that could be-coming otherwise. The topics touched upon in this chapter offer a general introduction and background to feminist new materialisms scholarship as well as main notions and lexicon, contrasting their research premises and practices with research premises and practices in conventional Organization Studies scholarship. Concurrently, the chapter draws attention to the following seven chapters, which exemplify the value of these ideas for current and future works in Organization Studies. Two overarching themes appearing in feminist new materialisms and critical feminist posthumanism, emerge and intermingle in these contributions: One theme explores what could be thought/said otherwise if "the human" centered by conventional Organization Studies ontological premises becomes decentered (not replaced) with "the-more-than-human" in feminist new materialisms. The other theme focuses on knowing practices, envisioning and attempting to show what could be done otherwise and how, once those fundamental premises are decentered. The last chapter is written by all the contributors in this collection and focuses on potential obstacles or further possibilities for continuing doing this kind of work in the future.