In recent years, an increased emphasis on promoting ‘biodiversity’ in organisational spaces has emerged through initiatives such as ‘green roofs’, ‘living walls’, bird boxes, and at a larger scale, wildlife reserves. The human and organisational costs and benefits of these initiatives have been well documented, but there has been scant consideration of the long-term challenges involved in managing the competing interests of the human and nonhuman actors that come into contact through these biodiversity projects. As this article outlines, more than just simply marking out a ‘wildlife friendly’ area, biodiversity initiatives unavoidably require organisations to – consciously or unconsciously – make politically-charged choices about the parameters of acceptable human intervention, the privileging of certain species over others, and the meaning of biodiversity itself. We argue here that biodiversity should be conceived of as a process infused by politics arising from the different capacities and intentions of humans and animals which come into contact along spatial borderlines. Drawing on qualitative and archival data, and utilising relational perspectives within organisational human-animal studies, this study explores multispecies negotiations within a research framework for organisational studies of biodiversity initiatives in workplace settings.

Building on organization study’s nascent interest in the organizational potential of liminal urban spaces beyond the confines of traditional firms, this article chronicles how Google draws on participatory urban practices to appropriate and simulate urban commons as an extension of the tech campus. Weaving together ethnographic fieldwork from San Francisco and Silicon Valley, I show how the city serves as a laboratory for prototyping new organizational paradigms that blend workplace gamification with urban activation strategies, by focusing on the spaces “in-between.” That is, areas of everyday urban life that are not (yet) fully enclosed as formal production sites, while providing important avenues for market expansion and commodification in a digital age. By staging a holistic ecology of work and life under the corporate canopy, Google’s urban-style platforms aim to extract sociability as an economic fuel, while curtailing the unruly potential of the street as the dwelling place of the collective.

This study investigates how organisational professional boundary drawing affects the ability of Māori home-based carers (HBCs) in Aotearoa New Zealand to provide culturally grounded care. As in many caring professions, this home-based sector relies on the fulfilment that caring is assumed to bring to workers in order to attract and retain good staff. Such meaningfulness is tied to the close relationships and rapport needed to undertake intimate cares. Paradoxically, these relationships are discouraged through organisational and professional boundary drawing that is designed to maintain distance between care workers and their clients. Through a community-based participatory research (CBPR) methodology, it was found that Māori HBCs experienced significant tensions when navigating the drawing of professional boundaries. These boundaries, while deemed necessary for legal, client and worker safety, are underpinned by Western cultural values and social norms, legitimised in Western models of care. These can conflict with Māori ethics of care, which emphasise relationality and belonging through whānau (extended family) roles and responsibilities. These insights call for a re-evaluation of professional boundary drawing to better align with culturally grounded care models, advocating for policies that support the integration of tikanga Māori in home-based care.

Imaginaries are shared visions that reflect how people perceive social reality and guide ways of thinking and acting. As interest in “seeing the future” grows, imaginaries are gaining more attention in organizational studies, especially in relation to societal challenges. Yet, we still know little about how they originate within contested fields. To address this gap, we build upon the Cultural Political Economy approach to advance a processual framework involving three dynamics—structural interruption, discursive interaction, and material resonance—that facilitate the emergence of new imaginaries. We interweave examples from the social impact field to illustrate how the framework operates in real-world contexts. This paper contributes to imaginaries research by theorizing the constitutive dynamics through which imaginaries emerge. It also advances broader organizational scholarship by deepening understanding of organizational future-making and offering critical insights into how organizations engage with grand challenges.

Consistent with the call for papers, this study adds to the body of work on processes of precaritization using a micro-historical/biographical approach to examine the subjective, embodied experiences of two female authors who lived through a dramatic transformation in institutionalized conditions, i.e., the partial dismantling of institutionalized patriarchy in the UK in the early 20th century precipitated by first wave feminists. By moving beyond the focus on the “standard employment model” to include institutional structures that affect marriage, women’s control over their bodies and care and guardianship of children, this study examines how this transformation of the male breadwinner model precaritized middle class women who had previously been actively discouraged, both legally and culturally, from working. While Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers were two women born into the same conditions of legal patriarchy in Britain in the 1890s, differences in their embodied correspondence with patriarchal notions of female attractiveness produced very different expectations and life experiences. The availability of letters and autobiography offers a rare window into the subjective, embodied experiences of these two women as they struggled to navigate this sudden “emancipation” and the new expectation that they should be economically independent as it unfolded over their lifetimes. Finally, the body of writing they left as authors of detective fiction offers some insight into how, even though they distanced themselves from the feminist movement of the time, they also subtly resisted by ventriloquizing alternatives to patriarchal gender regimes in their fiction.

The article explores how essential workers in health, social care, education and logistics in Poland coped with precarity during the COVID- 19 pandemic in relation to their intersectional identities and experiences of inequality. Inspired by Fritz Schütze’s biographical sociology and intersectional research on work organisations, it develops a concept of biographical resources, understood as the tacit knowledge and skills that individuals use to pursue their life strategies. Based on the narrative sequential analysis of a collection of biographical narrative interviews with precarious essential workers, a typology of life strategies is proposed that reflects the biographical relevance of social ties and the types of worker agency. The in-depth analysis of four exemplary cases illustrates how workers have coped with precarity, taking into account both individual (biographical resources) and social factors (work organisation, intersecting inequalities and social crises). Even though the pandemic has not reversed the trend towards individualised coping, in some cases it has stimulated a shift towards solidaristic strategies, reflecting the combination of workers’ biographical resources (including those related to intersectional identities), organisational resources (workplace ties) and the intervention of social and labour movements. Overall, the theoretical, methodological and empirical considerations presented in the article provide novel arguments for combining biographical and intersectional approaches to the study of precarity in organisations.

Algorithmic persuasion is a mode of organizing that happens through inducing experiences that covertly seek to influence behavior by presenting an ongoing stream of affective recommendations. This essay advances the thesis that this mode of algorithmic organizing has the capacity to affect individuals’ sense of their self and explores how and why this may happen. It suggests that individuals may be susceptible to experiencing AI recommendation systems as sublime. Their sublime qualities give normative force to their recommendations and, through them, appeal to one’s affective drives, fears, and hopes, revealing who or what one is or may become. This subjecting of one’s self to these recommendations warrants two critical observations: a behavioral preference we call “people-like-you” and the emergence of “algorithm conformity” as an organizing force. Yet, there can be epistemic corruption in the recommendations. This epistemic corruption is the else , whose experience can evoke uncanny feelings and carries with it the possibility to break the spell of the sublime and to escape and resist algorithm conformity. But can such experiences, individual and dispersed, give rise to actions of collective resistance in a world of algorithmic capitalism?

This conceptual paper addresses the critical issue of anti-Black racism within organizations and aims to spark a discussion on action-oriented Black liberation beyond the workplace. Drawing inspiration from African anticolonial thought, particularly Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness (BC) political framework, we propose a praxis to tackle anti-Black racial violence at societal, organizational, and interpersonal levels in Southern Africa and beyond. Our goal is to invigorate scholarly engagement with Black liberation in Management and Organization Studies (MOS). By leveraging the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), we seek to encourage decolonization and enrich management knowledge systems by highlighting diverse sources that contribute to organizational knowledge. We (re)imagine political means to confront anti-Black racism and foster Black liberation in (post)colonial workspaces, contributing to the enrichment of MOS, a field that has been relatively apolitical and silent on anti-Black racism and the lived experiences of marginalized Black people. We propose BC-inspired political praxis that includes initiatives at the societal (macro), organizational (meso), and interpersonal/personal (micro) levels, involving employees as insider activists and Black scholar-activists, Black community social activists, and allies as outsider activists working collaboratively to confront anti-Black racism and decolonize organizations and society. We conclude by calling for more theorizing on Black liberation in MOS to develop strategies to resist and dismantle anti-Black racism within academia, organizations and society.