Animal activism in the business school: Using fierce compassion for teaching critical and positive perspectives

This article explores a practical approach to teaching animal ethics in food systems as part of a business course. We argue that tackling such complex and emotionally charged topics is vital to shifting unsustainable and hurtful behaviours towards more positive futures. Our teaching example outlines a pedagogy of courageously witnessing, inquiring with empathy and prompting positive action; an activist approach we term fierce compassion. These three layers blend positive and critical perspectives in a classroom to address contentious issues of large-scale industrial animal production hitherto largely neglected in a traditional business curriculum. While acknowledging that academic activism is controversial, we argue that fierce compassion – noticing the suffering that is remote and often systemically hidden – can inform and structure education towards more post-anthropocentric and just futures for all living beings – human and nonhuman alike.

Fear and Violence as Organizational Strategies: The Possibility of a Derridean Lens to Analyze Extra-judicial Police Violence

Governments and majoritarian political formations often present police violence as nationalist media spectacles, which marginalize the rights of the accused and normalize the discourse of majoritarian nationalism. In this study, we explore the public discourse of how the State and political actors repeatedly labeled a college-going student Ishrat Jahan, who died in a stage-managed police killing in India in 2004, as a terrorist. We draw from Derrida's ethics of unconditional hospitality to show that while police violence is aimed at constructing safety for the cultural majority, in reality, it reveals discourses of anxiety and precariousness. The unethicality of police violence lies in the enlargement of recognition in vicariously blaming the person who has been killed for being involved in several terror attacks. We show that police violence is premised on the temporal structure of majoritarian nationalism, the prevalence of gender inequity, and the call to breach the secular framework of law.

Writing with the bitches

Could the everyday affective relationships that we share with our animal companions inspire us to think, write and even care ‘differently’ in the field of organisation studies? In this paper, I suggest that organisational scholars have plenty to learn from post-qualitative writing and the posthumanist practice of feminist dog-writing. Drawing from literature on posthumanism, humanimal relations and post-qualitative methodology, I first frame feminist dog-writing as a practice that relies on post-qualitative writing and discuss what this framing potentially involves, in concrete terms. Second, I experiment with ‘writing with the bitches’ to illustrate how this kind of writing ‘differently’ – in ways in which the entangled co-becoming of the humanimal is highlighted in its multiplicity – could contribute to discussions of humanimal relations in the field of organisation studies and more disruptive, post-qualitative forms of writing in our scholarly field. Despite the many challenges of anthropocentric language and representation, I argue that feminist dog-writing has the capability to creatively confuse, disrupt, and transform more ‘conventional’, mechanical, and hu man-centred forms of academic writing. Finally, I suggest that feminist dog-writing invites human animals to engage differently with the sensate, more-than-human life-worlds that human-centred accounts of organisational life have typically sentimentalised, trivialised, or overlooked.

Novel Thought: Towards a Literary Study of Organization

Novels espouse an epistemological freedom that is beyond even experimental forms of scholarly research and writing. Precisely this freedom makes novels so conducive to thought. Their enduring presence in organization studies demonstrates literary fiction’s power of conveying how things are, might be, or can be thought of; of inventing new ways of seeing; of enabling different vocabularies as well as staging and transmitting specific affects. In this paper, we trace the mutual ‘contamination’ between the novel and organization studies as well as discuss different modes of engaging prose fiction, drawing on Rancière’s ethical, representative and aesthetic regimes of art. With a special nod to Kafka’s novels and stories and also McCarthy’s Satin Island, we outline the contours of a literary study of organization and introduce the special themed section on ‘The Novel and Organization Studies’.

Waste as scats: For an organizational engagement with waste

This article coins the term ‘scatolic’ to suggest a new way for organizations to think about and engage with waste. Scatolic engagement draws on Reno’s analogy of waste as scats and of scats as signs for enabling interspecies communication. This analogy stresses the impossibility for waste producers to dissociate themselves from their waste and emphasizes the contingent, multiple, and transient value of waste. Correspondingly, the article suggests that organizations grow a semiotic competence at reading waste and develop a sense of responsibility for materials. Adopting a scatolic approach to waste is featured as a way for organizations to deal with waste in the Anthropocene.

Sense-ational organization theory! Practices of democratic scriptology

This article critically reviews the use of non-conventional writing in organization studies from the 1980s to the present day as it relates to the relationship between freedom, politics and theory. Just as research justifies itself through an elaboration of methodology, it is suggested that we can consider ‘scriptology’ – the reflexively aware articulation of the relationship between writing and knowledge – as a means to liberate knowledge production in organization studies from its self-imposed conservatism. While there are numerous actual examples of non-conventional scriptologies in use, it is argued the most politically radical and emancipatory of them can be found in contemporary feminine and feminist writing. Such writing provides a new textual aesthetic for organization studies that promises a democratic and egalitarian practice where expression seeks to defy the rules that would inhibit it rather than adhere to the ones that would authorize it. Such scriptologies can provide a way that knowledge can try, in its way, to be free.