Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

In the increasingly complex and heterogeneous social, political, and organizational environment, new and emerging problems require new solutions adapted to specific contexts and capable of confronting intra- and inter-organizational diversity. More artful organizations (Mairesse et al., 2022) as well as life and robustness as key organizational values (Hamant, 2023), are some of the proposed directions for an enlightened more-than-human organizational theory.
 
However, over the last decades, research practices in organization studies (as part of social sciences), have become increasingly standardized across the globe. This includes more attention being paid to research ethics, albeit largely within standardized frameworks. Yet the practice of research and its presentation cannot be divorced from the central issues tackled by academic studies (Flyvbjerg, 2001), and while the dominant epistemological bundle allows comparison and crossfeeding between research studies, it drastically narrows down the range of valid questions, valid methods, and ways of interpreting and presenting research (Izak et al., 2015; Kociatkiewicz & Kostera, 2024).
 
Organizations and organizing are approached with the assumptions of capitalistic values of efficiency and profit motive, which extend to the assumptions of larger is better, in turn assuming that better theories are more generalisable (Parker, 2018; Kociatkiewicz et al., 2022). The dominant perspective foregrounds (post)positivist research practices compliant with the separation of literature review/data capture/analysis/presentation, and skews the centre/periphery exchanges ever further towards the often resource-intensive practices developed and perfected within the dominant research centres. The entry of more-than-human actors like AI tools exert new pressures for conformity to already dominant models.
 
The problem is far from frivolous: in the landscape of ecological collapse, growing inequalities, and rising political instability, the search for organizational and managerial alternatives becomes ever more urgent. The market logic of efficiency and competition, the imperative for growth in organizations, and the demand for generalizability in research hinder the search for novel or currently underrepresented solutions to problems both common and local. Much of the contemporary research on alternatives, framed and performed within the dominant logics of organizing work, offers little potential for constructing new knowledge beyond either defending or critiquing the alternative organizing (Shanahan, 2024).
 
The search for artful and biophiliac organizational knowledge requires research which not only evaluates divergent forms of organizing, but also probes and questions the issues of social and environmental sustainability, differences in experiencing and challenging capitalism. Such work needs to foreground (rather than simply take into account) alternative framings, experiences, and research and organizational environments, and to cast its gaze beyond the dominant anglosphere, towards subaltern perspectives such as those of the global South (de Sousa Santos, 2018; Parker et al., 2014) or, more generally, of non-dominant and marginalized localities and voices. It needs to develop context-sensitive understanding of work and working bodies, one which incorporates the socio-materialistic inequalities stemming from the organizational structures and logics that, like so much of the Euro-American centric organizational research and practices, perpetuate and deepen power imbalance and enable and encourage exploitation.
 
Other urgent issues also require new methodological tools and approaches: the multifaceted and uneven impact of new technologies including AI tools, the ethical and epistemological consequences of their adoption and spread also requires urgent, varied, and sensitive theorization; Increasing institutional pressures necessitate the development of new ways of conceptualizing (Strauß, 2024; Chennangodu & Kandathil, 2024) and problematizing (Dixit, 2025) researcher positionality and its attendant relational, methodological, and onto-epistemological processes. Pedagogical methods and tools for management education are needed to convey the above, ones which allow and promote discussions sensitised towards illuminating the emerging inequalities and the assumed capitalist organizational structures and logics used to sideline values such as art and life or, more broadly, values existing beyond the concept of market value.
 
This is not to claim that no alternatives to the dominant frame exist, in management and organization studies or, broader, in social science. One, increasingly popular, takes momentum in the form of the Writing Differently movement: a reaction against forced uniformity and an attempt to reclaim researcher agency in study design and presentation (Boncori, 2023; Gilmore et al., 2019), with the aim not only to engender stylistic pluralism, but to pursue democratization of knowledge and explore the relationship of writing and research to forms of oppression including gender, class, sexuality, race, caste, and location (Rhodes, 2019). Critical and reflexive ethnographic research, art-based studies, and many forms of citizen science and activist research provide just some additional relevant examples of research transcending, subverting, or rejecting the dominant epistemologies and academic practices. We invite the participants to problematize and discuss these and other methods and consequences of epistemic dissent and resistance to invite a plurality of social actors and living beings into the field.
 
We invite scholars who believe it is imperative to discuss the possibilities and difficulties of alternative ways of scholarly engagement with regard to the – also increasingly popular – research area of alternative organization and management (Parker et al., 2014; Łapniewska, 2017). The choice of how to engage with the field is an issue of ethics and epistemology as well as methodology and so, studying alternative organizations in alternative ways may bring visibility to a variety of themes and fields of research. Ultimately, it can revive a deeper research ethos, eroded by the years of triumphal march of neoliberal agenda in social sciences. Further, we invite participation in the area of developing alternative ways of studying alternative organization, inviting more-than-human actors such as art and living creatures including ecosystems. Such an extension calls for the replacement of the logic of individualisation and competition by the logic of collectivisation , thus demanding new ways of building research, research methods, methodologies and rigour while studying and theorizing organization of work.
 
We welcome papers engaging with any of the issues mentioned above, including (but not limited to) the following questions which have emerged in preparing this sub-theme call for papers:

• Can researching the artful and living alternatives be done in alternative ways?

• How can the emerging and established pathways of studying alternatives be developed into an epistemological path?

• In which ways is studying alternative organizations different from studying any other ways of organizing?

• How to claim rigour in studying alternatives and developing alternative research methodologies?

• Can reknitting links between philosophy and organization studies help tackle the complex issues of contemporary management?

• How can developments in other social sciences like anthropology help reframe research into the organizing processes of today?

We equally invite submissions that add to these questions and broaden our reflection on alternative epistemologies in management and organization studies suitable for the study of more-than-human organizations that encompass diverse living beings, but also art, values, and materialities.

• Boncori, I. (2022): Researching and Writing Differently. Bristol: Bristol University Press.
• Chennangodu, R., & Kandathil, G. (2024): “Rhythmanalysis of a café: (in)visibilising foodwork in an ‘open’ kitchen.” In: J. Kociatkiewicz & M. Kostera (eds.): How to do Social Science that Matters. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 75–87.
• de Sousa Santos, B. (2018): The End of the Cognitive Empire. The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Dixit, A. (2025): “Caste(d) knowledges: (Self-)problematising epistemic impunity and caste-privilege in academia.” Organization, 32 (3), 377–394.
• Flyvbjerg, B. (2001): Making Social Science Matter. Why Social Inquiry Fails and How it Can Succeed Again. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Gilmore, S., Harding, N., Helin, J. & Pullen, A. (2019): “Writing differently.” Management Learning, 50 (1), 3–10.
• Hamant, O. (2023): Antidote au culte de la performance. La robustesse du vivant. Paris: Gallimard.
• Izak, M., Hitchin, L., & Anderson, D. (2015): Untold Stories in Organizations. New York: Routledge.
• Kociatkiewicz, J., & Kostera, M. (2024): “Writing differently: On the constraints and possibilities of presenting research rooted in feminist epistemologies.” Gender, Work & Organization, 31 (1), 284–304.
• Kociatkiewicz, J., Kostera, M., & Zueva, A. (2022): “The ghost of capitalism: A guide to seeing, naming and exorcising the spectre haunting the business school.” Management Learning, 53 (2), 310–330.
• Łapniewska, Z. (2017): “(Re)claiming space by urban commons.” Review of Radical Political Economics, 49 (1), 54–66.
• Mairesse, P., Schmidt, G., & Bazin, Y. (2022): “Arts and organizations: From individuals to structures, the inseparable aesthetic dimension of politics.” Revue internationale de psychosociologie et de gestion des comportements organisationnels, XXVIII (71), 7–12.
• Parker, M., Cheney, G., Fournier, V., & Land, C. (2014): The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization. Oxon: Routledge.
• Parker, M. (2018): Shut Down the Business School: What’s Wrong with Management Education. London: Pluto Press.
• Rhodes, C. (2019): Disturbing Business Ethics: Emmanuel Levinas and the Politics of Organization. London: Routledge.
• Shanahan, G. (2024): “Two routes to degeneration, two routes to utopia: The impure critical performativity of alternative organizing.” Organization, 32 (4), 489–507.
• Strauß, A. (2024): “Performing intimate publics in academia: speak-writing as affective politics for sustainability transformation.” Culture and Organization, https://doi.org/10.1080/14759551.2024.2425.