Whither critical Management and Organization Studies? For a performative critique of capitalist flows in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic

Over the last few months, COVID-19 has entered our own consciousness as a moment of profound disruption, leading in too many cases to misery and death, but also, forcing us more mundanely to reorganize our lives, work and social relations. The disruption of capitalist flows by the pandemic has exacerbated the cleavages and power inequalities. Addressing them can help critical MOS to reconnect the places and times of production and paid work to the circulation and consumption of goods and services and, more broadly, to social reproduction. This is necessary to identify the contradictions at the heart of capitalism, denaturalize it as a mode of organizing the economy and society, and envision more just flows and novel subjectivities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

COVID-19: Interrogating the capitalist organization of the economy and society through the pandemic.

This editorial introduces eight papers included in this special issue on COVID-19. Together, these papers draw key theoretical and political insights for critical organization studies from the pandemic along three main lines. First, they examine how COVID-19 has denaturalized global capitalism, leading to a broad interrogation of the organization of the economy and our societies. Second, they point to how COVID-19 has unveiled the close relation between capital and the state in producing inequalities old and new, a relation that neoliberalism tends to hide from view. Third, they leverage COVID-19 to give voice to the largely female disposable workforce in the Global South on whose work global commodity flows, consumption and capital accumulation rest. We conclude by pointing to the need to address constitutive interdependencies, such as those between wage work and reproductive work, the global North and the global South, the market and the state, to name only a few. We further call for expanding traditional understandings of struggle to include a broader range of social antagonisms (e.g. for sufficient time to care, education, healthcare, housing, safe public spaces, accessible to all) as part of a theoretically and politically renewed organizational research agenda fostering solidarity.

Whither Critical Management and Organization Studies? For a performative critique of capitalist flows in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract Over the last few months, COVID-19 has entered our own consciousness as a moment of profound disruption, leading in too many cases to misery and death, but also, forcing us more mundanely to reorganize our lives, work and social relations. This unexpected dis-organization of life has revealed our mutual dependency to exist, as one people, literally: pan-demic.