This paper analyzes academic research practice in Management and Organization Research drawing on the concept of reproduction of form. Reproduction of form refers to the continuous repetition of discourse shaped by authoritative ideology. While discourse originates from and is influenced by ideology, its performative meanings become increasingly ambiguous, paradoxical, and ultimately meaningless over time. We analyze the manifestation of reproduction of form by intertwining theory and empirical illustration from four top-tier management journals, and discuss two paradoxes relating to the emergence of reproduction of form. To further understand its functioning, we employ a psychoanalytic reading of reproduction of form and its inherent paradoxical nature. Freud’s repetition compulsion is used to understand why individuals engage in reproduction of form, while Lacan’s notion of the second death provides a framework to understand it from a collective perspective. Finally, we use Žižekian philosophy to understand individual and collective behavior through the notion of the undead . We conclude the paper by identifying how a parallax view, or taking a wholly different perspective, may deliver more constructive ways to convey academic knowledge and insights.

This Speaking Out attends to the opacity and injustice of scientific manuscript evaluation. Its focus is upon the embeddedness of editors, reviewers and authors in a moral order conditioned by an asymmetrical structure of power relations that is sustained by deference and secrecy. Attention is given to the shortcomings of complaints and appeals procedures that currently provide the principal, non-independent means of safeguarding science by interrogating the adequacy of manuscript evaluation processes. To transform the structure of power relations, and thereby strengthen the “gold standard” of peer review, some ways of increasing the openness and accountability of manuscript evaluation are proposed.

While disability inclusion is promoted in many countries, policy reforms in France have shifted the conversation about anti-discrimination laws toward financial concerns by increasing financial penalties for non-compliance and developing various accounting techniques to reduce these penalties. In this article, we explore the unintended consequences of focusing on accounting in the design of disability laws, specifically, the commodification of disability inclusion. Through a qualitative study of disability inclusion in France, we show how state actors designed and interpreted the law to appeal to businesses through creating legal loopholes and strong financial incentives and explain how this encouraged the commodification of disability inclusion. We show how this commodification is detrimental to disabled workers and prevents substantive compliance with an existing quota. While scholarship has explored how companies managerialize the law, this article demonstrates how the state is complicit in this process. This article contributes to the literature at the crossroads of law, organizations, and critical accounting by showing some of the drivers and consequences of the commodification of inclusion at work. We demonstrate how translating legal mandates into accounting tools can be a central mechanism of managerialization, leading to the commodification of legal ideals.

This article aims to understand the employment experiences of neurodivergent employees through the lens of the double empathy problem. We draw on 25 semi-structured interviews with neurodivergent workers in France and used a grounded theory approach to analyze the data. The findings demonstrate that the stigma associated with neurodivergence coupled with the double empathy problem can influence neurodivergent employees to engage in camouflaging as a means of avoiding these negative reactions from others. This, in turn, leads to reduced well-being and a perceived lack of organizational support on behalf of neurodivergent employees. Ultimately, this cycle can diminish the voices of neurodivergent employees as they feel misunderstood, mistreated, and stigmatized, which reduces their confidence and efficacy in voicing their ideas. Additionally, organizations may overlook the unique capabilities and strengths of this population, failing to seek out or encourage their voices to be heard. This study fills gaps in the literature by studying the double empathy problem in a workplace context and by showing that the double empathy problem can be extended beyond individuals with autism to explain (mis)communication between neurotypical and neurodivergent employees. The findings further underscore how it may unintentionally maintain and reinforce neurotypical hegemony and privilege in organizations as it positions neurodivergent individuals as dysfunctional and inferior.

This article examines how organizational accountability creates disabling conditions for speech-impaired workers. While accountability is often assumed to be a neutral principle of recognition and responsibility, we show how it privileges fluency and phononormativity, marginalizing those who communicate differently. Using a combination of sensory ethnography, interviews and analysis of technological devices, we explore how speech-impaired workers navigate accountability through assistive technologies, artificial voices, and human-nonhuman coalitions. Drawing on crip theory and its understanding of the cyborg, we identify three crip challenges to accountability: speech crip time (non-normative temporalities of communication), crip organizational selves (hybrid, interdependent subjectivities), and crip phononormativity (the tension between standardized and customized voice technologies). These challenges expose the ableist assumptions embedded in accountability regimes and open up alternative ways of communicating and being recognized in organizations. We propose three crip-informed tactics to counteract disabling conditions in organizational accountability: challenging speech chrononormativity, listening across identitarian boundaries, and denaturalizing social norms of communication. Our findings contribute to critical accounting and organization studies by rethinking accountability beyond ableist paradigms, embracing opacity, interdependence, and non-conformity as organizational values.

This paper argues that efforts to assess the outcomes of social care delivery ought to emphasise the generation of affective value . This value derives from the affective labour of caregiving – and the novel subjectivities that are the principal expressions of this labour – as it is organised in the delivery of social support. We ground this claim in analysis of qualitative data collected within housing assistance, community mental health, and substance use treatment services in New South Wales and Victoria. In presenting our findings, we highlight links between the affective labour of caregiving, the embodied and relational experiences of care in organisational settings, and the ways participants spoke of the outcomes of this work. We argue that these findings offer important new insights into the value of social care during a period of profound transition in the Australian care economy. Shaped by the ongoing marketisation of service delivery across this economy, efforts to formally assess the impact of social care in Australia are increasingly cast in terms of measurable service outcomes. Our analysis highlights what these measures often miss. Beyond the transactional service outcomes common to existing evaluation frameworks, we seek to highlight the affective value of care by indicating what else the labour of caring for vulnerable individuals may be shown to afford. Social care yields affective value to the extent that it facilitates the emergence of subjects with the sensitivities, capacities and ‘self-awareness’ necessary for the realisation of service goals like wellbeing, belonging, security, hope and recovery. We close by assessing the implications of this analysis for thinking about the value of social care delivery, and how it comes to matter.

In their essay ‘Indefinite Detention’, Judith Butler (p. 100) made the point that ‘the question of who will be treated humanely presupposes that we have first settled the question of who does and does not count ’ (Butler: 91, emphasis added ). This paper considers this vital issue in the format of a discussion between us as co-authors whose work speaks to the concerns of this special issue – precarity, mattering and marginalization. The paper formed in response to a series of questions put to us by the guest editors inviting us to share our respective insights from our different perspectives and backgrounds, drawing from critical management and organization studies, critical accounting, post-colonial and feminist thinking, which we provide below.

In this paper I use the recent UK Supreme Court ruling to surface and to examine the liminality of trans lives. I develop liminality as a way to make sense of trans experiences ‘betwixt and between’ understood gender and sexed body, how bodies are read and how they are wished to be read. In this context of liminality, I theorise gender identity as the dynamic interplay between identity work, body work and gender boundary work, and gendered self-identity as constituting the ongoing embodied experience and response to differently gendered spaces and regulatory regimes. I adopt this liminal reading and theorisation of gender identity to study my own trans body moment by moment across multiple situated contexts. My aim is to widen the possibilities of organising by offering an account of trans experience which broadly aligns with the Supreme Court judgement, and its implications for the liveable lives of trans people.

Amid the expansion of digital delivery platforms to urban centers globally, organizational scholars have critically examined their role in reshaping labor dynamics. This critique has, in turn, opened space to explore how digitalized labor might be organized differently, beyond the confines of digital capitalism. This article contributes to this emerging conversation by presenting findings from a 15-month ethnographic study of cooperative platform labor in Berlin, Germany. Drawing on assemblage thinking and affect theory; the study foregrounds the materialized and embodied practices of delivery riders navigating the unruliness of urban space. By focusing on riders’ affective encounters, the study reveals not only the inherent precarity of urban delivery work but also the potential for mundane acts of resistance within and against digital capitalism. This article contributes to the extant literature in three ways. First, conceptualizing digital delivery platforms as assemblages reveals them as fragile, emergent and more-than-digital entities. Second, the article introduces the notion of “patching” to describe how riders’ affective encounters with urban space compensate for what the platform’s algorithm fails to address. Third, it uncovers how cooperative riders reconfigure patching into a “patchwork”—from an individualized survival strategy into a collectivized, solidaristic practice, creating pockets of freedom.