1. Bob Cooper, Hermes and the cult of information?
- Author
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O'Doherty, Damian
- Subjects
ANTHROPOCENE Epoch ,CULTS ,PRECARITY - Abstract
This paper takes its departure from Cooper's paper 'The culture of information', written in 2006 but first published in this issue of ephemera. This is an exemplary text that calls out to current organization studies with passion and urgency, in part because it has no obvious evidence of commercial journal publishers over-zealous editorial or reviewer lobotomising. In this paper, we follow in unadulterated form a writing that invites its readers to experience what Cooper calls unformation which he shows shadows and subverts our attempts to order the world with information. We carefully trace the textual work of Cooper's paper and discover the work of a contemporary Hermes, a trickster who deploys secret meanings and erratic signs that demand something close to an apprenticeship in what we call here the cult of information. Via an 'ontological turn' he borrows from contemporary anthropology, we show how Cooper takes us to the brink of what is possible to think or say in organization studies, a point where originary thinking might begin again and in ways vital and responsive to the precarity of our existential condition in the epoch of the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2023