Special Issues

To build the profile of research into organisational discourse, strategy and change, ICRODSC members have contributed to special issues of leading international publications.

2020

**Special Issue of Gender, Work and Organization on Emotion, aesthetics and sexuality at work: Theoretical challenges and future directions (Vol. 27, 1, 2020)**

Guest Editors:

Leanne Cutcher, University of Sydney
Karen Dale, Lancaster University
Melissa Tyler, Essex Business School

The aim of this special issue is to develop new theoretical directions and approaches to the analysis of emotion, aesthetics and sexuality at work. With this in mind, the papers in the special draw on a range of cross- or trans-disciplinary perspectives as they take the study of gender and work in new directions. In different ways, they each grapple with the many challenges posed by the changing nature of organizational life, by evolving ways of perceiving, experiencing and organizing gender, and by the established theoretical ideas and conceptual insights on which organizational researchers, practitioners and activists draw in making sense of these shifts. Deriving and adapting insights from approaches that include feminist philosophy, phenomenology, actor network theory, multispecies and more-than-human perspectives, and queer theory, they each push the boundaries of current discussions and debates in new and exciting directions, borrowing ideas from, and contributing to, the cross-fertilization of concepts or perspectives from a range discipline.

2016

**Special Issue of Organization on Spaces and Places of Remembering and Commemoration (Vol.23, 1, 2016)**

Guest Editors:

Leanne Cutcher, University of Sydney
Karen Dale, Lancaster University
Philip Hancock, Essex Business School
Melissa Tyler, Essex Business School

Exploring the spaces and places in which we remember and commemorate the past can tell us much about power, identity and material relations within organizations. This special issue invited authors the myriad ways in which we live in and through spaces and places of recognition and recollection, thereby contributing to an understanding of these spaces as embodied and embedded, and as fundamentally organized.

Papers covered a range of themes:

The relationship between spaces of organizational commemoration and remembrance and the production of memory and place.
The spatial organization of commemoration and its relationship to reflection and agency.
Socio-materiality and artefacts of commemoration.
Embodiment and the production of memory within/through spaces.
Identity, belonging and commemoration.
Relations of remembrance to place and placelessness.
Organized spaces and places of tradition and ritual in the social construction of collective national, local or regional identity.
The art and aesthetics of commemorating and remembering.
Visual representations of collective memory and semiotic analyses of commemoration.
Metaphors and narrations of death, loss, grief and commemoration.
History, place and collective guilt.
Gendered and/or racialized spaces and places of commemoration and remembering.

2014

**Special Issue of Organization Studies on: What’s Age Got to do With it? On The Critical Analysis of Age and Organisations (Vol 35, 11, 2014)**

Authors:

Susan Ainsworth, University of Melbourne
Leanne Cutcher, Sydney University
Cynthia Hardy, University of Melbourne
Robyn Thomas, Cardiff University

In this special issue, the co-editors argue for the importance of adopting a critical lens to question the meanings of age and to explore how and when age matters in organisations.

Articles in the special issue included:

a study of ‘day-parting’ in television broadcasting, which legitimizes bio-essential understandings of age, as well as the ideology of youthfulness, in ways that are both ageist and sexist,
a study of ‘Baby Boomers’ and the ‘Lost Generation’, showing intergenerational tensions,
a study of moves to encourage older women into self-employment as a means to extend their working lives,
the changing retirement income system in Canada, tracing how it has evolved over the 20th century,
how the intersections of discourses of age, gender and sexuality are experienced in organisations, and
the experience of embodied aging of individuals in aged care homes.

The articles in this special issue offer rich empirical accounts that both enhance and challenge what we know about age in organisations and the aged nature of organising, as well as insights into the potential of taking a critical lens to age and organisation studies to stimulate nuanced and innovative understandings.

2013

**Special Issue of Human Relations on Reinventing Retirement: New Pathways, New Arrangements, New Meanings (Vol. 66, 1, 2013)**

Authors:

Leisa Sargent, University of Melbourne
Mary Dean Lee, McGill University
Bill Martin, University of Queensland
Jelena Zikic, York University

Retirement involves a set of institutional arrangements combined with socio-cultural meanings to sustain a distinct retirement phase in life course and career pathways.

The articles in this special issue illustrate how the challenges of understanding retirement will require the full range of research strategies and techniques the social sciences have to offer.

The editors’ belief is that researchers will need to adapt their research strategies, and remain open to those they are unfamiliar with (possibly even unsympathetic to), if the dynamic and critical approaches needed to investigate retirement are to emerge.

Read together, the articles in this special issue demonstrate the capacity of research – using approaches ranging from critical discursive, grounded qualitative, and middle range survey to sophisticated large scale statistical analysis – to illuminate and to suggest the next interesting and uncomfortable research questions.

**Special Issue of Organization on Future Imaginings: Organising in Response to Climate Change (Vol. 20, 5, 2013)**

Authors:

Christopher Wright, University of Sydney
Daniel Nyberg, Nottingham University Business School
Christian De Cock, University of Essex
Gail Whiteman, Erasmus University

Climate change has rapidly emerged as a major threat to our future. Indeed, the increasingly dire projections of increasing global average temperatures and escalating extreme weather events highlight the existential challenge that climate change presents for humanity.

In this editorial article, the authors outline how climate change not only presents real, physical threats but also challenges the way in which the broader economic, political and social order is conceived, asking questions about alternatives to our current path of ever-escalating greenhouse gas emissions and economic growth.

Through reference to the contributions that make up this special issue, the authors suggest that critically engaging with the concept of social, economic and political imaginaries can assist in tackling the conceptual and organisational challenges climate change poses and, only by questioning current sanitized and market-oriented interpretations of the environment, and embracing the catharsis and loss that climate change will bring, can we open up space for new future imaginings.

Special Issue of The Journal of Strategic Information on Systems Realizing the Strategic Potential of e-HRM (Vol. 22, 3, 2013)

Authors:

David Grant, formerly University of Sydney
Sue Newell, Bentley University

This special issue examines attempts by organisations to realise the strategic potential of e-HRM systems and seeks to explain the various outcomes associated with e-HRM systems - both intended and unintended - as well as the implications of their findings for theory and/or practice.

Papers are theoretical or empirical in focus and based on quantitative or qualitative approaches.

**Special Issue of Journal of Change Management on Discourse, Translation and Change (Vol. 13, 3, 2013)**

Authors:

David Grant, formerly University of Sydney
Bill Doolin, Auckland University of Technology
Robyn Thomas, Cardiff Business School

This special issue invited empirical, theoretical and reflexive contributions that approached organisational change from the perspectives of discourse and translation.

In doing so, the editors of this special issue highlight six different ways in which change-as-translation has been conceptualized using discourse theory within organisation and management studies and suggest it is helpful in understanding the processes whereby change is actually accomplished.

Furthermore, the editors compare and contrast the different approaches to translation and their relationship with discourse and organisation. They conclude by arguing for greater consideration of translation processes and their significance within discursive studies of organisational change, suggesting the need for greater reflexivity over the research process and the knowledge produced.

Special Issues prior to 2013