Historical research now has a relatively high profile in organization studies, and organization theories are better represented in business history, thanks to increased interdisciplinary dialogue over the last decade. It might therefore be that the ‘historic turn’ has materialized in organization studies, and that business history has become significantly more conceptual in nature. We argue, however, that in terms of the original definition of the historic turn, as a rejection of scientism, acceptance of more heterogeneous forms of history, and reflexive accounts of the social construction of historicized narratives, there has been little progress. We revisit the idea of the turn in depth here, to examine the ways of doing history that might encourage a more substantial turn towards theory and towards history as a means of developing it. In particular, we suggest that an approach we term ‘critical organizational history’ remains underdeveloped, as a theoretically informed historicized approach to understanding how and why we come to be where we are in contemporary organized societies. Our aim is to take stock of the historic turn’s progress, reminding critically oriented organizational scholars and practitioners of organizational history of the importance of completing the turn with the underlying purpose of critique. To do this, we surface seven aspects of practice and three implications of them that demonstrate the underside of theorizing historically that we suggest are central to critical analysis. Understood and practised collectively, these could provoke considerable more critical organizational history to the benefit of all.

Presenting findings from our global evidence review of menopause transition and economic participation emboldened us to establish a menopause policy at the university where we all worked at the time. Our report was published in July 2017 and the policy was in place by November that year. Our critical reflection on this activism focuses on issues that are not commonly recognized around such interventions, and which we ourselves have only been able to acknowledge through engaged action. Challenges remain in normalizing menopause in organizations, specifically around gendered ageism and performance management. In drawing on Meyerson and Kolb’s framework for understanding gender in organizations, we highlight how policies are both vital and yet insufficient in and of themselves in revising the dominant discourse around menopause at work. At the same time, we highlight the importance and shortcomings of academic activism within these processes.

Digital media are pervasive, ubiquitous and mundane constituents of organization. Organized life relies on, and is propelled by, technologies that store, transmit and process data and are based on networked computation. How can we understand and explore the fundamental mediatedness of organization? This article contextualizes and introduces the special issue on ‘The organizational powers of (digital) media’ by staging an encounter between organization theory and media theory. In provoking investigations of the power and effects of technological mediation in its many guises, not least in regard to digital or computational media, this encounter ushers in a ‘medial thought’ of organization.

We argue technology and organization are inherently spatial phenomenon. We conceptualize this conjunction as atmosphere: a gathering of mood, human practice, material and environmental conditions, and values that has sufficient coherence and distinction to constitute a distinct interior. Atmospheres, however, are not entirely stable and present: the interior is porous to outside influence, and the interior is never wholly ordered. We show this through the study of digitally mediated architectural design practice. We find the technological mediation of atmospheres is constituted in sensory and affective spatial arrangements, and not in rationally calculated configurations of assets and goals. An atmosphere is inherently aesthetic. This allows us to gesture toward a definition of organization as technologically mediated spatial struggle to reconcile interior coherence with outward exposure.

Through a study of the so-called GamerGate controversy, this article argues that a new dynamic of affective intensification is currently instating itself in the digital organization of not only highly collaborative industries, such as that of gaming, but of society as such. This dynamic may best be understood and conceptualized through reconsiderations of the notions of affective economies and affective labour. The affective constitution of digital organization is a process of affective intensification that not only works like an economy but is directly productive of economic value, and not only involves human emotionality but technological affectivity as well. Guided by the notions of assemblage, affordance and agency, the article offers a conceptual framework for studying affective intensification in and as socio-technical processes of value production.

While scholars have examined how micro-textual argumentative strategies are used to (de)legitimize contested corporate practices, less attention has been given to the role of ideologies or broader belief systems, underlying discursive (de)legitimation. Analyzing newspaper articles published after the announcement of two highly debated corporate restructurings in Belgium during the Great Recession, we identify the ideologies underlying (de)legitimizing statements and examine the discursive strategies through which social actors reproduce elements of these ideologies in legitimacy struggles. We show how the ideologies of ‘neoliberal capitalism’ and ‘humanistic capitalism’ shape framings of the restructurings, identity constructions of actors involved and propositions for government measures to prevent future restructurings from happening. Apart from predictable patterns of reproduction, we discern four creative reproduction strategies: ‘refutation of elements of ideological representations’, ‘appropriation of key vocabularies’, ‘hybridization of ideological representations’, and ‘ideological pioneering’. Our study contributes by (1) providing novel insights into how ideologies function as discursive resources for (de)legitimation of contested corporate undertakings, (2) reconsidering the political nature of (de)legitimizing statements, and (3) reflecting on the (im)possibility of resistance against globalization-driven restructurings in multinational corporations and the neoliberal ideological project in general.

Drawing on a recent ethnographic enquiry, this article reports on a series of encounters with organization at a British shopping centre that can shed light on the ways in which time is understood by organizational scholars. This article argues that research on time has a tendency to reproduce certain images and metaphors which indicate an unquestioned set of metaphysical assumptions about the nature of time that dictate how it can be understood. These habits of thinking time render organization studies unable to conceptualize or adequately describe the encounters that characterize ethnography as a mode of research inquiry. As such, following in the tradition of Gilles Deleuze, this article advances the idea of a ‘conceptual entanglement’ and suggests thereby that the problem of time is an aesthetic one which is part of a complex and almost ineffable series of sensoria and connections; describable only by saying that the shopping centre keeps time with a rubato waltz. This work of unthinking time will be presented as a part of an account of ethnography as the tracing and parsing of the entanglements of many different concepts and field encounters.