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 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.

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 it uses “ post-diversity” organizational practices that are indifferent to marginal socio-demographic categories, the gig economy provides 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.

Vertical hierarchies of spatial scale—where society in general, and organizations in particular, are differentiated into levels of spatial size—have often been criticized by those encouraging alternatives to capitalist organizing. These vertical scalings are said to promote authoritarianism, a monolithic capitalist economic system, uneven concentrations of social and organizational power and wealth, and ecologically destructive organizational growth. Consequently, so the argument goes, alternative organizing must scale horizontally whereby smaller organizations autonomously associate together into loose networks or federations. The aim of this contribution is to problematize such critiques of vertical hierarchies of scaling for alternative organization. To do so, I combine Management and Organization Studies (MOS) scholarship on scaling alternative organization with two theorizations of the politics of scale in human geography—namely those derived from Neo-Marxist Political Economy and Actor-Network Theories. My argument is that all those looking to understand and encourage the scaling of alternatives to capitalist organizing should engage with and not simply reject vertical scalar hierarchies.