A Research Agenda for Organization Studies, Feminisms and New Materialisms

Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary. Explaining why contemporary problematic phenomena require a more expansive understanding than what is allowed in conventional organizational studies scholarship, this forward-looking Research Agenda brings insights from recent feminist new materialisms and critical posthumanist theorizing into the field of organization studies. Marta B. Cals and Linda Smircich have assembled herein an international and transdisciplinary community of scholars, whose research in fertile transnational spaces demonstrates the differences this novel scholarship could make in the domain of organization studies. The book serves as a tool and means for questioning fundamental metatheoretical premises and knowledge production practices, focusing particularly on those which, unwittingly, may be contributing to issues of concern across the globe. Chapters further articulate which premises and practices may help in decentering the common sense nature of the field, facilitating engagement with affirmative possibilities for a world that is straying further from conventions. Coining the phrase thinking-saying-doing-otherwise as an ontological shift and a call to action, the book ultimately highlights the importance of transdisciplinary, transnational research collectivities for accomplishing necessary changes. Providing novel critical approaches by intersecting feminist new materialisms with organization studies, this dynamic Research Agenda will prove invaluable to early and more established scholars interested in future-oriented organization and management research and practices in business studies and the sociology of organizations.