Two influential perspectives in organizational studies that focus on different aspects of enabling, constraining, and forming organizational action are the notion of sensemaking and the influence of material objects on organizational functioning. This paper explores the coupling of these two perspectives, which often are seen as opposite. Based on evidence from two case studies, we argue that these perspectives, taken together, unlock a deeper understanding of the processes that unfold in organizations and call attention to the materiality of sensemaking as important to understanding organizations.

Time has become increasingly utilized as a tool for organizations to increase productivity and control workers. Since the advent of the mechanical clock in the fourteenth century, time has structured organizational experience. This increased precision has lead to the standardization of efficiency. The struggle for greater efficiency creates an organizational environment where the worker is dissociated and dehumanized-subsumed by the machine. Time and technology work in concert to improve efficiency In addition to the mechanical clock, computers and the Internet have also contnbuted to the conquering of time in the organizational sense. It is the instantaneousness of communication that has lead to the initial feeling of time being conquered. Social interaction is one of the fundamental drives of humanity, and this interaction is threatened by the standardization of efficiency. Implications for organizations are discussed, followed by an exemplar involving the changing nature of investing. Finally, ideas for reclaiming the pre-modern conceptualization of organizing are suggested.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the senses that people give to the machines used in their daily work with special emphasis on new technoiogies. The present essay is based on the constructionist methodological theoretical referential, which considers knowledge - the product ofinteractions between people - as the analysis object and tries to understand the senses that are constructed by people through the discursive practices of daily life.

This work is focused on the connection that people establish with technologies - especially, the computer - at work. Since the computer is a machine that allows velocity at work, our interest also turns to the meanings that people attribute to rhythm, to the velocity and to the acceleration resulting from the use ofmachines in daiiy professional activities. In this way, more specifically, this essay tries to interpret the senses that people attribute to the velocity and to the acceleration of daily life, from the connections that they establish with new technologies.

The Enron collapse highlights the need to study how corporations implement strategy. How was Enron so successful in this age of free information? Our thesis is that Enron dramaturgically implemented strategy through associative delusion. Enron used theatre in three ways we term "Metatheatrical": (1) as a technology to persuade, or associate, (2) a fagade to deceive, or delude, and (3) a metaphor in the important sense of Shakespeare's Life is Theatre. Their use of theatrical tools has implications for agency and transaction cost theories in how organizations can reduce transaction and production costs. Our synthesis contributes to the understanding of organizational boundaries through the development of winning scripts.

Digital technology and software networks enable large numbers of knowledge workers to incorporate themselves wherever and whenever they wish and to choose between a sedentary or nomadic lifestyle. One way of configuring these new circumstances is as the extensive power of people, products and markets to speedily overcome obstacles and span distances. However, we increasingly see nonrepresentative corporations accelerating human pace and swallowing open spaces within the rational administrative control of a new supranational “Empire”. Intensive movement, on the other hand, reconfigures the human condition in ways that politically and ethically engage with universalizing global processes. Like the traditional nomads of the steppe or the desert, for example, the movement in question is a complex, dynamic relation characterized by its immediacy and continuous variation of alliance and resistance, that remains difficult to locate, difficult to control, and even more difficult to defeat. The paper argues that nomadism can be a starting point for an opposing strategy to the global knowledge economy.

Recent theories of technology have argued that in order to take constructivism seriously we need to understand technologies as organizational texts, replacing the study of technological artefacts with an appreciation of the ways in which these ‘texts’ are read, or interpreted, in specific situations. Whilst such approaches offer an effective critique of determinism in explanations of technological change, they also raise some interesting questions around the nature of the human subject which have been given a less comprehensive treatment in the literature. This paper contributes to the development of a thoroughgoing antiessentialism in theories of technology and organization by considering Deleuze and Guattari’s radical constructionist critique of the subject. Placing the technocentric metaphor of ‘the machine’ at the heart of subjectivization, Deleuze and Guattari’s decentring of the human subject offers a fully symmetrical anti-essentialism, capable of accounting for the non-human forces at work in the constitution of human subjectivity.

This paper investigates sensemaking by rural community residents concerning a large scale, broad band computer network - the Alberta SuperNet. Our goal is to understand the impacts of this broad band network on rural communities and to use critical theory to understand these impacts. Data were collected during 9 town hall meetings held in rural communities. Discussions during the meetings were recorded, transcribed and digitized. We identified key themes in the discussions and focused on opportunities and risks rural residents conceived as emerging from SuperNet. We investigate the personal and collective identities constructed during the town hall meetings. We then interpret the data in terms of Habermasian critical theory and the risk society thesis of Ulrich Beck.

Democracy needs to defend itself from the many immediate threats - technology, imperialism, global economic powers, human passivity and reactionary religion. Reactionary religion has taken the lead worldwide in rejecting pluralism and democracy, viewing both values as gateways to secularism and decadence. Both modernism and postmodernism have failed to fully address the success of the continued political advances of the religious right worldwide. A new, postmodern politics of meaning is needed to address basic human needs currently served by the cosmology of traditional religious orthodoxy. Progressive thinkers in philosophy, religion and in critical theory must work dialectically to retain the good of religion and spirituality, the need for ultimate meaning, and the challenge of reducing negative, anti-democratic impulses. These impulses are embodied in theocracy and a fear of life. Until religion is totally reinvented or evolves to a higher level we will have to defend many democratic values from religious extremists. A live and let live political philosophy is a good defense of democracy.

This article expands the hypothesis proposed by Peter F. Drücker and Dirk Baecker, that is, how the evolution of computer communication manifests and presses ahead the detemporization and poly-contextuality of information and therefore is said to be the driver for an unmanageable complexity within modern organizations. In order to do so, the article uses an illustrative case of Management by Objectives as it appears within the governmental programmes in Denmark associated with New Public Management. This case shows how this technology enables the production of a diversity of antagonistic images of the organization relative to its environment (polycontextuality) and in particular how these effects emerge due to different timebindings within organizations (organized temporality). As such the hypothesis is expanded in three ways: first of all, the hypothesis is expanded as polycontextuality is comprehended within the temporal dimension, that is, as the differences between timebindings. Second of all, the article renders probable these identity-problems of modern organizations but due to another technology which mediates communication: Management by Objectives. Thus, identity problems should be associated with other media of communication too, than the one of the computer communication. Third of all, the implications of identity problems of modern organizations are often associated with the impossibility of management or with a need for more complex ways of managing. The article is an attempt to specify this approach suggesting 2. order management as a matter of observing the observations enabled by management technologies. To these ends the article draws upon Luhmann´s system theory in order to direct attention to these organizational identity problems. This contribution is not conclusive. It is an attempt to expand a strong hypothesis in the need of further investigation

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.

The paper explores two recent social movements that show signs of global resistance to the ideology of neoliberal polices and values; the Indignados uprisings that took place in Spain, Greece and Mexico, and the Occupy Wall Street protests that broke out across many parts of the United States. It argues that to understand contemporary social movement activity and protest politics, it is crucial to update social movment theories to include analyses of how the digital revolution has categorically changed the way that activists express grievances and share information, strategize and for on-the-street forms of contentious politics, and challenge the narratives put forth by authorities and the mainstream media when there are confrontations between peaceful protesters and the police force.

This article reports the author's experience of working in telesales. Through a call center, the case study company sells home improvements. The article describes the everyday organizational life of the telesales unit. Using this autoethnographic experience, the article analyses the organization of work-time in call centers. In particular, the article probes how commission constitutes a form of piece-wage. This piece-wage assists the manipulation of working hours. It does so by masking their extension. To understand this, the article appliesthe conceptual tools of Marx’sCapital. Marx directs attention to how
capitalists organise time in the pursuit of surplus-value. The autoethnographic account explores the application of this to call-center work. Flexible working arrangements and zero-hour contracts extend work-time. A pay framework based around commission and performance-linked piece-wages conceals this.In the case study, there is an absence of technology as productivity-raising measure or means of control. This challenges existing Foucauldian approaches to call-center work. It suggests that traditional forms of capitalist domination-the contract, the wage, time organization- are highly relevant to the call-center context.

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.