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As Theunissen and Van Laer ([32]) reveal in this special issue, language and the politics of linguistic difference are key closure mechanism through which native speakers defend job privilege and prevent migrants from entering. " Exploring the Politics of Linguistic Difference: the Construction of Language Requirements for Migrants in Jobs Traditionally Conducted by Local Native Speakers." Prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, nationalist and rightist movements were on the rise in many parts of the world. " Guest Editorial: Unpacking Diversity, Grasping Inequality: Rethinking Difference Through Critical Perspectives.". [Extracted from the article]

In an exercise in social theory, rather than an empirical investigation, we concentrate on the role of gossip - spreading 'news about the affairs of another' - in relation to the dynamics of power in organizations. Gossip has often been seen in functional terms, as both positive and negative for the organization. In this paper we challenge this functionalist approach. Gossip can be associated with what Freud called the narcissism of minor differences: the gossipers tend not to be too dissimilar from those gossiped about in terms of proximity. Propinquity may increase the animosity of gossip. We see formal organization as a self-regulating system that constantly refines its boundaries, and gossip is the dirt that trickles in and out of these boundaries, illegitimate, formally disdained and often destructive. The writer who has done most to encourage and clarify thinking about the nature of dirt is Mary Douglas, the anthropologist, especially her notion of expressive pollution. The paper concludes with some implications for ethics in practice viewed through power relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the concept of belief in contemporary organizations. Most studies tend to envisage belief as something internal to the thinking and feeling person. We argue, however, that belief does not only reside ‘inside’ the individual subject but also in an external economy of objects and rituals. What we call the ‘objectivity of belief’ highlights how various things such as commodities, artefacts, machines and even other people may believe in our place. We develop these ideas by drawing on a rich tradition of social theory that includes Marx and Žižek, and apply it to the study of objects, belief and power in contemporary organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Situationist International (SI) has been one of the main reference points during the past 40 or more years within social movement organizing, cultural studies, social theory and philosophy. While the SI has been understood in many ways as inheritors and elaborators of an unorthodox Marxist politics drawing heavily from the history of the avant-garde, relatively little attention has been paid to the specifically strategic dimension of their thought and practice. This is surprising, especially in Debord's case, given how much his work also draws from the history of military strategy. This paper will particularly examine the strategic aspects of Debord and the SI's thought and politics and how they rethink the nature of strategy through collective forms of aesthetic–political practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]