In this text, our aim is to outline the scaffolding we believe is needed to build and shape the future role of the University. This scaffolding is an assemblage of three different strategies we have found to be fruitful in our attempt to present narratives for a better future: engagement with the arts, the development of sociological imagination, and the embracement of the Other, specifically in terms of alternative and different ways of organizing.

Inspired by the alternative ethnographic tradition, the aim of this article is to contribute with an approach to organizational ethnography informed by the radical imperative to encounter and understand the Other in his/her complex otherness and difference. The approach is conceptualized in terms of alterethnography and it is outlined as a way of doing research/writing for change at odds with dominant patriarchal scientific writing orders. Illustrated by a study of creativity, written in the form of an academic postmodern detective novel fiction, alterethnography is envisioned as uncontained and disruptive, unpatriarchal and disconformist: it is an approach that transgresses the boundaries of the ego, striving to embrace otherness as togetherness. 

"Det är dags för företagsekonomin att utveckla alternativa tolkningsstrategier som öppnar för alternativa samhällsbyggen"

The chapter by Michał Izak and Monika Kostera, “King Popiel, the Killer Mice and the Story of the Post-Lie Leadership”, retells the legend of old king Popiel and the killer mice and reveals the problems of consequences of disconnecting leadership from the people and the land, while also showing a way out of the seemingly desperate situation this kind of leadership produces. They situate and relate their story to our current context as a time of uncertainty and turbulence, placed in a “Baumanian” interregnum (eroding Capitalism, disintegration of democratic and economic institutions and the eco-crisis). What they show is the importance of using imagination in order to point to natural and social roots and consequences of leadership inviting us to a creative journey to find ways of reclaiming the missing roots, or what we regard as the truth (and practice) of leadership. The morale of their story emphasizes that leadership needs to be in contact with land and people, as otherwise it and its power lose legitimization, turning into usurpation in need of constructed justifications to persevere as their retelling demonstrates revealingly.

Hopplöshet präglar dagens samhällsdebatt. Men det finns vägar ut ur hopplösheten. Att organisera sig och skapa en bild av det samhälle vi vill ha är en sådan väg. Det skriver Daniel Ericsson och Monika Kostera som står bakom forskningsantologin Organizing Hope.

Crumbling social institutions, disintegrating structures, and a profound sense of uncertainty are the signs of our time, stemming from a situation in which traditional systems are dying but the new cannot yet be born. In this timely book, this contemporary crisis is explored and illuminated, providing narratives that suggest how the notion of hope can be leveraged to create powerful methods of organizing for the future, in communities, workplaces and businesses.

In response to the increasing attention being paid to the shocking seriousness of the current state of the world, this innovative book offers a variety of ways of bringing hope into a situation otherwise defined by hopelessness, following a tradition of radical dissent by public intellectuals such as Zygmunt Bauman and Vaclav Havel. Chapters first consider theoretical and philosophical perspectives on hopeful organizing, followed by both empirical discussions about achieving change and more imaginative narratives of alternative and utopian futures, including an exploration of the differing roles of work, creativity, idealism, inclusivity and activism.

Organizing Hope will be a critical and thought-provoking read for researchers and students of organization theory and sociology, as well as other social sciences. Politicians, policy makers and other decision makers in government will also find the book insightful and useful.

The unexpected, if still clichéd, discovery of a body in the library introduces Agatha Christie’s plot starring the genius amateur detective, elderly Miss Marple. We will use the same situation as the starting point of our article and investigation, promising both the unmasking of the culprit and the departure from the currently standard form of an academic text. In a self-consciously rambling and digressive text, we will touch on various issues relevant to writing what we consider good social science, and the difficulties in doing so. Firmly reaffirming the need for writing organization studies and social science in the narrative mode, we trace what we see as the decline in quality and joyousness of contemporary management journal articles, and attempt to demonstrate, both through narrative means and by more traditional academic reasoning, how and why it is important to embrace variety in the ways knowledge in the social sciences is constructed and communicated.

The main body of work of Zygmunt Bauman concerns his home discipline of sociology, but his insights have been influential also in the field of organization studies. In this text, we provide an overview of the extent of this influence, providing some additional context for positioning the other contributions to this special section. Afterwards, we explore in more detail two notions central for Bauman’s late thought: that of liquidity and retrotopia. The former constitutes the root metaphor for theorizing the current global predicament. In this text, we analyse how two modes of interpreting it, using the assumptions behind Kurt Lewin’s CATS model and the alchemical tradition underpinning Carl Gustav Jung’s conception of archetypes respectively, can help us theorize the alternative modes of organizing and managing encountered in a study of contemporary alternative organizations.

These insights form the starting point for our second goal: to explore Bauman’s notion of retrotopia as a potentially fruitful starting point for discussing both the deficiencies of current visions of our future society, and the possibilities and vicissitudes of developing new forms of organizing and managing. Such new forms, both as practice and as theoretical constructs, are urgently needed if we are to face the numerous, and potentially catastrophic global challenges facing our society today.