This paper discusses the impact of the Internet as communication technology and work environment on changing professional relations and work practices. In particular the paper contributes to a better understanding of collaboration processes enabled by the web and hereby draw a field for further research on trust within Open Source Software (OSS) communities. Having two contradictory interpretations of the technical structure of the project development we indicate its ambiguity to make a point about the meaning of trust and distrust in crating the space for cooperation. Neither trust is necessary nor distrust destructive thanks to the boundary object – the source code repository – that serves as a sole meeting point between OSS community and the company.

Contemporary organizations feature absence of boundaries and are increasingly defined by loose couplings, pluri-vocality and network configurations. What Foucault (1995) addressed as a former society of discipline is transformed and replaced into what Deleuze (1995) refines as a society of control that incorporates its subjects into new and ever changing lines of subjectification. This transformation of dispositifs (Deleuze, 1992; Foucault, 1980) and authoritative discourses (Bakhtin, 1982) that compose (and is composed of) a contemporary way of living induces in other words new types of embodied organizational knowledge and ways of organizing, which have consequences for how subject positions are (re)configured in everyday corporate lives. Such identity work is rarely studied in local discursive practices of today’s modern and emergent corporations. The aspiration in the present article is to scrutinize local practices in a dialogue based leadership development forum in university settings. This provides insights into the lived lives and identity work in Aalborg University representing a temporary, polyphonic and cross-disciplinary research project in a modern corporation. The project was an example of a loose-coupled and temporary arrangement/organization that invited a diverse group of participants to engage in the co-production of knowledge in/on leadership communicative practices. The participants were professional leaders from diverse organizations in the North of Jutland together with researchers and candidate students from the study programs of communication and philosophy at Aalborg University.

The present study conceptualizes engagement by following Marifran Mattson’s story—from tragic motorcycle accident to community engagement. The authors advance a fivepart conceptualization of engagement and test its usefulness by exploring it in relation to a stage model approach and by contrasting it to Bourdieu’s theory of timidity and habitus in relation to symbolic violence. The community engagement begins with a motorcycle safety campaign and expands to include the development of support groups and public policy regarding health insurance fairness for amputees (a.k.a. prosthetic parity). The analysis draws on critical ethnography and the interpretation draws on alternative perspectives and reflexivity. The findings suggest that the stage model is less useful than Bourdieu’s theory in explaining discursive practices, the role of professional discourses, and the emergence of heroic activism and heroic discourse in community engagement. Overall, the study paints a picture of what Boyer (1996) called the “scholarship of engagement.”

This paper responds to current interest in the ‘untold’ in organizational storytelling research. In particular the research presented here contributes to studies that consider storytelling in relational terms. In this context, untold is constructed as both a provocation and a pointer to multiplicity: innumerable relationships of story. To develop and illustrate the argument of the paper, the discussion adopts interference as a deliberate methodological device. To illustrate the significance of composition and fabrication in storytelling the study consider fragments from an extensive period of multi-site ethnographic fieldwork with a professional, established and award winning author involved in literary, television drama and other story projects. The developing field of relational storytelling studies is discussed and attention drawn to key research foci: specifically current concerns for intertextuality, heteroglossia, materiality and flux. A fieldwork vignette is used to examine and extend a relational sense of ‘untold stories’. Further vignettes and a selective focus on science and technology studies relational ethnographies extends this discussion by focusing on performance, fabrication and fiction. The paper concludes that a fabrication sensibility that notices and attends to story on the move necessitates a shift in both methodological and representational strategy. In terms of method the paper demonstrates the potential value of extended, multi locational and deep field ethnography. In terms of representation, if stories are innumerable than we require a number of monograph ethnographies that can reveal and attend to varieties of limitless material, mobile and heterogeneous stories. In other words, if stories are lived, we require methods that attend to social life as lived if we are to surface and reframe hitherto untold, unseen and unheard agency at work in organizations.

This article is based on an empirical study of employees’ experience of downsizing at a US air carrier called Vimanas Airline (a pseudonym) and includes forty two semi-structured interviews with captains and co-pilots who worked at that airline. The product of a fruitful collaboration between an experienced researcher and former Vimanas co-pilot, the paper explores how a new regime of corporeal power and panoptic organizational discourses produced commercial pilots’ subjectivity by first creating loyal company employees who actively participated in their own acculturation. Later, after airline restructuring, pilots modified their thinking and behaviour in an effort to maintain some sense of power, dignity, agency, and identity, resisting managerial efforts at further colonization. It became clear that complex and partly competing reality construction processes were at play. Contrary to previous research finding employees to often be complicit rather than resistant to managerial control efforts, particularly during times of corporate crisis, this study reports airline employees both participated in, yet later resisted managerial control efforts. Prompted by one of our respondents we refer to this colonization process as ‘bodysnatching’ with reference to the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

While the nature, character and function of stories are variously theorized in organizational storytelling literature, little research has tried to unpack how organizational narrative domain may transform over time. Attending to the contextual transformation of organizational story space can reveal how popular stories at one epoch could be reformulated, ignored, or forgotten all together during another epoch. Drawing on ethnographic data of a children’s charity in UK, which experienced a stage of rapid professionalization, specialization, and bureaucratization, I examine the influence of this restructuring initiative on the organizational narrative domain. It was shown that the professionalization of the charity starved the old stories of the oxygen of relevance. The memories of the old pioneers, from the days of stress and violence, became less welcome as the organization turned increasingly managerial in character. The notion of ‘irrelevancy’ is further developed drawing on the work of Maurice Halbwachs, and its implications are elaborated building on storytelling research.

This paper proposes an alternative approach towards ethical leadership. Recent research tells us that socioeconomic and cultural differences affect moral intuition, making it difficult to locate a guiding organizational principle. Nevertheless, in this paper I attempt to open an alternative path towards an ethics that might serve as a guide for leaders – especially leaders who are leading a highly professionalized workforce. Using the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño and the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze as points of reference, I develop an ethical form of leadership that is based on a continuous ‘poetic’ dialogue between creation and affirmation. The nature of this dialogue requires a leadership approach that plays both a courageous and imaginative role in liberating its workforce. Last, I develop a frame which provides the constituent principles of leading in the direction of an ethical organization.

A significant aspect of learning how to be a lawyer includes the acquisition—through trial and error—of a way of speaking, reading and writing that is unique to the work of doing law. Embodying this professional role requires the ability to parse and produce large amounts of complex, jargon-rich language known as ‘legalese:’ a learned communicative skill which produces a craftbound discourse (Maley 1987). The law school graduate, moreover, typically enters the workforce with little experience in legal practice. A three year education must therefore provide sufficient training for their immediate professional future. Words must fulfill the role that experience cannot.

In conjunction with ethnographic observation of first year classes at a major law school, I analyzed classroom interaction for patterns in talk that foster a sense of professional identity. Hypothetical situations emerged as a striking unit of analysis. Professors presented brief, improvised descriptions of potential legal quandaries, while positioning students as characters in the narratives. Using pronouns such as in “you, the plaintiff,” “you, the defendant,” and asking questions such as “why would you pass a statute allowing these lawsuits?” rather than “why would lawyers/legislators/they pass a statute,” the professor positions students within the legal system, and allows them to cognitively role play with their professional identity. Hypothetical situations as a unit of analysis inform our understanding of law school curriculum, as well as other types of training situations where students must develop the critical thinking skills of the real world within the walls of a classroom.

Habitus, whether it is labeled as such or as managerial/organizational socialization or culture, acts as the principle means of control among white collar professional workers within organizations. Others have argued that the principle task of the business school curriculum is to instill anticipatory socialization of trans-organizational regimes in traditional age undergraduate students. This paper takes a Bourdieusian perspective on both the issues of governmentality and the inculcation of appropriate habitus in traditional age undergraduates, and examines in particular how that part of the undergraduate curriculum that consists of textbooks, lectures and management case studies focus on one particular element of this general managerial habitus, specifically, the inculcation of a new linguistic habitus that both shapes how these proto-managers both speak about and begin to view the world.

Dairy Farming is Big Business in New Zealand. The New Zealand Dairy Industry contributes significantly to the manufacture, trade, and consumption of dairy products the world over. This industry is deeply implicated in the intensifying trajectory of globalization, a form of order euphemistically referred to as ‘global development’. Critics attribute significant social and environmental degradation to this trajectory. Stories about corporate responsibility are attractive to those business students willing to include ethical standpoints in their considerations. Through a [re]telling of the influence of dairy-farming on the wellbeing of New Zealanders we suggest that such stories may be better read as channels of influence that perpetuate elite interests. Our analysis is generated from our schooling in Critical Management Studies. From this orientation, dominant stories are often presented as almost totally closed and hegemonic. But they can never be fully so. Paradox and contradictions can always be located within and across such stories. Our essay is a story about dairying that illuminates such paradox and contradiction. It is written to draw our gaze to the dangerous degradations of systemic outcomes on the quality of life for diverse stakeholders. We call for change. Our professional realms of influence include the spheres of management education. It is here we are placing our focus. We invite the telling of more diverse stories that may engender more generative futures than the seemingly entrenched trajectory that intensifies systemic benefits to an elite at the expense to others and exacerbates environmental degradation to the detriment of all. We invite engagement with stories that might place a different bet on the future (Boje, 2014).