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Menippean satires (Bakhtin’s ‘spoudo-geloion’) satirize their audience(s) directly. By playfully attacking the sensibility and/or perceptions, Menippean satires seek to reveal readers to themselves enabling them to see themselves and their world(s) more clearly. To date, however, the study of the Menippean tradition has largely been restricted to works of literature and canonical authors such as Lucian, Varro, Rabelais, Swift, Joyce, McLuhan and Pynchon. Relatively little has been said about Menippean theatre or cinema. Here, we seek to explore Menippean satire, beyond the book, through the lens of King Kong (1933). We argue that spectators can come to discover that the meaning of King Kong resides in the audience’s own spectatorship and participation and, therefore, complicity in ritual(s) of consumption and sacrifice. Spectators also, potentially, come to ‘see’ and recognize, through and beyond their individual viewing experience(s), wider patterns of consumption, sacrifice and scapegoating that...

How can organisational studies theory respond to the call of nonhuman animals? This article argues there is ‘too much humanism’ in organisational studies and defines the problem as originating in language practices. The example of factory-farmed pigs is used to illustrate the argument. Derrida’s term carnophallogocentrism is used to suggest that ethical thinking about the animal be moved from face-to-face encounters through the eyes to the mouth and that by adopting methods used in literature and ‘feminist dog-writing’ ways can be found to co-constitute human and nonhuman species in academic writing practices. The term meat-writing is offered as a practice of challenging carnophallogocentrism.

This article introduces a Special Collection of four articles that highlight responses by working women collectively and individually to forces accelerated by the recent global crises. It draws out common themes from accounts of African women’s responses to harassment at work, of the links between union representation and pay equity in Brazil and South Africa and of Australian women’s quest for flexible and fair work/family arrangements. From these perspectives, the article sets out a five-point research agenda to help empower women’s collective and individual agency in response to working conditions shaped by global economic and social forces.

The article extends previous research on the storying practices of service workers, workplace humour as resistance, and workers’ autonomous use of social media. Discussion strings from two hairstylist forum storylines, exemplifying comic and tragic story‐sharing about difficult customers, were analysed using Gabriel's notion of story‐work. Processes of coping, entertainment, identity‐construction and learning are clearly evident in the discussion strings and social media is confirmed as a ‘new’ terrain for the enactment of employee agency. Findings emphasize that service workers are engaged in contradictory and ambiguous relations of resistance and accommodation as they learn how to deal with difficult customers. The article's contribution is to show how service workers share their fears and anxieties about difficult customers through storying and humour in generative dialogical poietic processes in social media. Further research is suggested.

This chapter explores how writing ‘with animals’ can contribute to the development of feminist and queer approaches in Critical Management Studies (CMS). The chapter is theoretically framed with previous work in organisational studies and CMS on gendered writing and introduces the queer practice of ‘dog-writing’ used by feminists in human-animal studies like Donna Haraway and Susan McHugh. Cixous’ essay on ‘On birds, women and writing’ is used to introduce the idea of writing as a ‘difficult joy’. The author then uses writing from her personal journals to ‘write with animals’, especially birds, to show how thought can start. Writing with animals means to be-in-the-world with animals and recognise the ways they are foundational to not only organisational life, but thought itself. By drawing on developments by queer and feminist writers in human-animal studies CMS writers can engage with contemporary creative resistance practices and offer affirmative alternatives.

Social media have become an important avenue through which citizens agitate and advocate for social change. The impetus for protest activity is usually the perception of injustice leading to public anger shared online and which may mobilise people to take further action (e.g. join a protest demonstration or sign a petition). Research on activism using social media is still nascent, and there are as yet no studies examining the gendered dimensions of social activism on the Internet vis-a-vis the world of work. This article discusses two recent social media incidents involving aspects of women’s embodiment – menstruation and sexual attractiveness – in which action through social media arguably influenced organisations to change some aspect of their practice. Our analysis is grounded in feminist theories of embodiment to theorise the expression of anger in Internet social activism. The implications of this article include a deepened appreciation of the potential of social media for women’s collective action ...

Inspired by Helene Cixous's �The laugh of the Medusa�, this paper revisits a public uproar over menstruation in the workplace triggered by a statement from the CEO of New Zealand's largest body of private sector employers, that periods make women take more sick leave than men. The utterance triggered an astonishing outpouring of public discussion and writing about working while menstruating, as well as about productivity and equal pay. We discuss how a comment about women's periods ruptured the status quo of menstrual repression by using selected online posts rendered as poems. Then, drawing on Cixous and the idea of poetic rapture, we discuss women's online writing in tandem with feminist writing on menstruation. In our theoretical reflections we consider how poetry, menstruation and social media can �make trouble� for regimes of power. We argue that menstruation should be a required topic for organizational studies.

We read Blake's poem ‘London’ aimed at sensitising readers to the early nineteenth century plight of London's most vulnerable citizens. Our reading surfaces several issues relevant to organisational theorising: the role of ‘diabolical reading’ strategies in creating mental flux through textual flux; the use of visual and poetic symbolism to contest the language systems implicated in the psychic effects of institutional domination; and Blake's narrative voice as wandering Bard, which places the poetic body at the centre of responding to spatial practices of the city. We argue Blake's art still inspires because it haunts the reader as it continually renews itself in re-reading and so both inscribes and incorporates, making the word, flesh. Blake's philosophy also highlights the creative poetic subject ‘placed’ in their city-landscape and so provides a pathway through inscription and incorporation. Implications for organisational theory are explained.

The management of “wisdom” has been mooted in knowledge management (KM) theory mostly in relation to what is known as the “knowledge hierarchy”. We argue that there are unquestioned assumptions inherent in KM leading to wisdom being included in KM theory because of rhetorical “urges” more than theoretical ones. These rhetorical urges impel a drive towards perfection that excludes more than is included. Our interrogation of the KM literature uncovers some of the questionable implications in understanding knowledge as a resource and an asset and of understanding wisdom as a pinnacle to a knowledge hierarchy. We urge caution regarding theorising of wisdom at the top of a hierarchy, as it should not be mooted as a perfect final solution to Knowledge Management. We suggest the theorising of wisdom be opened out to its fullest “poetic possibilities”, and that attempts to close off its meaning be resisted.

This article reports on a qualitative study which investigates the role of time in the emotions experienced during organizational change. Whereas much empirical research on emotions and time has been conducted in highly controlled experimental settings, this study discusses subjects’ emotional experiences during real-life change events related to three temporal dimensions: speed, frequency and timing. Three themes emerge from our findings: the relationship between time, major change and negative emotion; the relationship between time and perception of control; and other factors such as fairness, disposition and emotional intelligence. This study’s contribution is to focus specifically on time, emotion and change in real-world contexts, and to derive implications for managing change and for future research based on social theories recognizing time’s subjective nature.

This paper discusses the significance of HBB to metropolitan areas by drawing on recent developments in economic and human geography concerned with relationships between people, place and cyberspace in cities, and previous research examining HBB in Auckland, New Zealand. This paper argues that although urban HBB have distinct characteristics, they should be conceptualised relationally to other places of business conduct, including the Internet, third places such as cafes, and business precincts. HBB types and owner characteristics are highly differentiated in cities and so HBB ‘pathways’ is suggested as a useful concept to frame further research and policy development.

Change triggers emotions as employees experience the processes and outcomes of organizational transformation. An organization's affective culture, which shapes the way emotions are experienced and expressed, plays a particularly important part during changes to the culture and other aspects of organizational life. This article contributes to the literature by illustrating the relationships between culture, change and emotions and presents the results of a qualitative study. The study found that when participants’ values were congruent with those of the organization, they tended to react to change more positively. Cultural change provoked emotional reactions, often of an intense nature. When emotions were acknowledged and treated with respect, people became more engaged with the change. Attitudes to existing culture also produced emotional responses to aspects of change.

In this article we present and discuss a novel approach to research using photographic juxtaposition. This method uses dual images of subjects (at work and at home), and subject involvement in the process of self-presentation, to create a 'doubting frame' for research. We discuss the issue of doubt in research and suggest researchers take doubt more seriously, and deliberately construct research to allow and encourage re-description by research's final arbiters - its readers and its subjects. We illustrate our argument with some photographic sets, and describe the project, which was a collaborative effort between management researchers and an artist. We show how the simple architecture (or research design) of this project was built from doubt and encourages doubt, and we discuss why this should be viewed as a positive rather than a negative feature of research.

Artists derive inspiration from daily life. According to John Dewey (1934), common experiences are transformed into works of art through a process of compression and expression. Our paper adopts Dewey's frame to demonstrate that experience in the artful classroom plays a valuable role in management education. We asked students to reflect on their work experience and then to provide an artful expression of their reflections. For this exercise we defined artfulness as a process which relies on the discursive practices of satire, and in particular irony and parody. Offering a service management class as an exemplar we demonstrate the use of these rhetorical techniques as reflective learning tools. A class of students were first prompted to consider their common experiences as both customers and service providers, and were then asked to create an ironic artefact. Our paper, which analyses a cartoon sequence produced by students in response to this assignment and in which they parody the fast-food service experience, illustrates how a business studies classroom can be transformed into an artful space.