ABSTRACT The last fifteen years have seen a rise in interest in alternative organising within CMS. Although this work covers a diverse world of organisational forms, this academic interest is commonly connected to the prefigurative turn in social movements. Yet the momentum of such movements has recently stalled, and academics and activists are increasingly rejecting prefiguration. This shift in the radical imaginary is hugely important, but CMS scholars appear to have overlooked it. Here, I argue that CMS has too often followed a case-study approach, and that as a discipline it should pay closer attention to the wider landscape of radical praxis. I suggestStuart Hall’′ use of conjunctural analysis is useful for understanding alternative organisations and their possible futures. I offer my own conjunctural perspective on the state of prefiguration, and suggest some ways in which we might develop work which can help inform debates about the future direction of radical politics.

ABSTRACT A group of feminist scholars met and collectively read feminist texts aloud. As an alternative to hegemonic modes of theorizing dominant in Management and Organization Studies (MOS), we propose ‘readinglistening’ as a feminist intervention: a practice in which collective reading aloud and embodied listening are re-conceived as acts of curiosity, joy, and relationality. Refusing the instrumentalization of reading and its privileging of theoretical abstraction, knowledge can emerge not only in words but in resonant voices and affective, communal presence. We conceptualize readinglistening as a practice that resists the normative pursuit of universal clarity, privileging theorization grounded in lived experience and enabling the emergence of theory through heterogeneous media and collaborative engagement. Readinglistening is offered as both inquiry and an invitation: for feminist theory to make sense in new ways, sustaining political and creative engagement with the world.

ABSTRACT This article proposes integrating the concepts of energy depletion and recharging as key elements in the struggle over labour indeterminacy at Amazon. To this end, it draws on empirical data collected from two Amazon warehouses and analyses worker narratives related to energy management at work. The findings illustrate how, in digital warehousing, diverse worker bodies are treated as homogeneous, disposable, and replaceable due to their short-term energy capacity. This helps explain why such companies often organise for permanent turnover rather than ensuring sustainable energy management. Conceptually, centring energy extends existing debates on work surveillance and the labour process towards embodiment and social reproduction; empirically, it identifies energy governance as a distinct locus of the indeterminacy struggle. The article argues for transparency in algorithmic assessment, enforceable restorative time and ergonomic standards, and incentives aligned with sustainable, health-preserving work.

ABSTRACT Fascination, as an affective, material and non-rational force, creates a particular bond between human beings, nature, and the materialization of space in an extreme context. This article, in relation to the ‘Darwin Expedition’ in Patagonia, explores affect as a poetic reverie under the dreamscape influence of Gaston Bachelard. This poetic reverie, quilts together multiple voices, multiple writings and photographs, bringing to mind and to text, the unspeakable and the silenced absence–presence of fascination in an extreme context. Darwin’s Reverie is performed as a composition of heterogeneous elements that stage an encounter between the human and the more-than-human, where human exceptionalism is unsettled and the anthropocentric fantasy of mastery over nature is undone. This experimenting-with-writing enriches how we think, how we feel, and how our feelings affect us and the world around us. A poetic approach allows us to consider and enact the materiality of language, while experimenting with writing differently.

ABSTRACT Emotions and paradoxes permeate organizational life. The former shape how individuals interpret, respond to, and cope with the tensions that arise from the latter. While paradox theory has extensively explored the handling of these tensions through cognitive and structural mechanisms, the emotional dimensions remain largely underexplored. We discuss saudade, a paradoxical, culturally grounded emotion in Portuguese, an evocative state of being characterized by simultaneous longing for the past and aspiration for the future. Saudade serves a conceptual lens for understanding how paradoxical emotions shape organizational life. Drawing on linguistic relativism, we propose that rather than merely naming a universal experience, inscribing the word saudade in the organizational lexicon serves as a linguistic-emotional tool for connecting past and future and navigating organizational tensions.

ABSTRACT This paper draws on in-depth interviews to explore whether work is metaphysically meaningful to ‘Nones’: those who do not have faith in religious traditions or spiritual movements. In particular, it asks how this meaning is a reflection of their beliefs, and why work is metaphysically meaningful if they deny religious and/or spiritual conceptualisations of existence. It argues that although the beliefs held by ‘Nones’ vary considerably, work remains an inherently metaphysical endeavour that provides a means of mediating, alleviating or obscuring their unresolved existential anxieties provoked by finitude. These arguments are theoretically framed through Becker’s notion of ‘symbolic immortality’ (1973) to suggest that regardless of the relationship ‘Nones’ have with finitude, work enables ‘Nones’ to reimagine their existence as infinite. In doing so, it considers the ethicality of ‘life-affirming’ contemporary managerial approaches and corporate cultures that sustain fantasies of symbolic immortality.

ABSTRACT This paper confronts a dual failure in management and organization studies, which includes the inability of typical academic prose to articulate ‘undefined’ experiences of disability and the systemic silencing of racial-colonial debilitation. Through autobiographical cri(p)oetry, I explore the uneasiness of my partial hearing impairment while witnessing ongoing mass debilitation of faraway ‘others’. I develop cri(p)oetry as a crippled, critical, and creative method, weaving Southern poetic forms (mushaira) with feminist hysteric and collage writing. This exploration unfolds through five cri(p)oems that trace a journey from the internal borderlands of a body that escapes categorization, through the ableist frenzy of academia, to the violent, mass production of dis/ability. By knitting Lal Ded’s ontology of ‘generative nothingness’ to Puar’s critique of debilitation, this inquiry works towards an epistemic undoing as a practice of making something of the ‘undefined’, and a call to breathe in the borderlands of solidarity.

ABSTRACT In UK universities, racism and microaggressions experienced by minoritised employees and their inclinations to raise informal and/or formal complaints, warrants further scrutiny due to the persistence of racism within society and Higher Education settings. Drawing from Critical Race Theory and adopting an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis methodology, semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 30 minoritised employees from ten UK universities. Our findings demonstrate that participants’ experiences ranged from othering to unequal access to professional advancement, leading to perceptions of systemic racism. Fear of reprisals, being misperceived as problematic employees, and anticipated negative consequences for employment security, generated reluctance to take recourse in complaint procedures. Individuals who escalated concerns found that they were not believed, exacerbating their marginalisation. The proclivity for organisations to prioritise institutional reputation elicited feelings of pessimism that anything would change. We propose co-constructed recommendations for improvement, calling for scholars to further probe their potential for facilitating anti-racism within universities.

ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to examine the processes of sense-making around wages among working-class employees in a factory setting. Based on long-term participant observation and semi-structured interviews, the study finds a ‘culture of reconciliation’ characterized by wage inequalities, which are considered functional and structured around work specialization or gender. Workers accept personal responsibility for their wages, while management views market forces as decisive and immutable. I draw on research regarding silence in organizations and conceptualizations of working-class habitus. I use these concepts to shed light on the nature of contemporary labor markets, focusing on the intersection of their global and situational specificities. I argue that meaning-making about wages is a multilayered process that involves – explicitly, but predominantly implicitly – actors occupying markedly different positions of power, as well as the structural processes that shape the settings these actors inhabit. I argue that recognition, respect, and remuneration are closely interconnected.