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In this paper, we reflect on the use of fictional source material and fictional formats in organization studies in order to explore issues of responsibility in the writing of research. We start by examining how research using fictional narrative methods has worked to radically destabilize distinctions between what is real and what is fictional. In relation to this, we ask the question: if a research account can be regarded as fiction, what are the implications of this insight for the responsibilities of authors? Opposing the view that using fiction necessarily leads to an 'anything goes' relativism, we argue that a recognition of the fictionality of research texts implies a heightened sense of researcher-author responsibility. We see our main contribution as extending existing discussions of reflexivity in research into a consideration of issues of ethics and responsibility as it relates to the textuality of research writing. To do so, we draw on Derrida's theorization of responsibility and undecidability as a way of problematizing and discussing the ethics of research in relation to its textuality. We argue that the explicit borrowing from fictional genres evinces the essentially 'written' and fictional status of research papers, and highlights the ethical dimensions associated with decisions related to representational strategies and authorial subjectivity.

Current approaches to the study of affective relations are over-determined in a way that ignores their radicality, yet abstracted to such an extent that the corporeality and differentially lived experience of power and resistance is neglected. To radicalize the potential of everyday affects, this article calls for an intensification of corporeality in affect research. We do this by exploring the affective trajectory of 'becoming-woman' introduced by Deleuze and Guattari. Becoming-woman is a process of gendered deterritorialization and a specific variation on becoming-minoritarian. Rather than a reference to empirical women, becoming-woman is a necessary force of critique against the phallogocentric powers that shape and constrain working lives in gendered organizations. While extant research on gendered organizations tends to focus on the overwhelming power of oppressive gender structures, engaging with becoming-woman releases affective flows and possibilities that contest and transgress the increasingly subtle and confusing ways in which gendered organization affects people at work. Through becoming-woman, an affective and affirmative politics capable of resisting the effects of gendered organization becomes possible. This serves to further challenge gendered oppression in organizations and to affirm a life beyond the harsh limits that gender can impose.

Current approaches to the study of affective relations are over-determined in a way that ignores their radicality, yet abstracted to such an extent that the corporeality and differentially lived experience of power and resistance is neglected. To radicalize the potential of everyday affects, this article calls for an intensification of corporeality in affect research. We do this by exploring the affective trajectory of 'becoming-woman' introduced by Deleuze and Guattari. Becoming-woman is a process of gendered deterritorialization and a specific variation on becoming-minoritarian. Rather than a reference to empirical women, becoming-woman is a necessary force of critique against the phallogocentric powers that shape and constrain working lives in gendered organizations. While extant research on gendered organizations tends to focus on the overwhelming power of oppressive gender structures, engaging with becoming-woman releases affective flows and possibilities that contest and transgress the increasingly subtle and confusing ways in which gendered organization affects people at work. Through becoming-woman, an affective and affirmative politics capable of resisting the effects of gendered organization becomes possible. This serves to further challenge gendered oppression in organizations and to affirm a life beyond the harsh limits that gender can impose.

While gender very much holds a place in organization studies, this is primarily in relation to being an object of study. Still largely silent and inexplicit is the gendered nature of what organization studies researchers themselves do when they research and write. Our overarching project in this essai is to render the gendered character of organization studies writing open for discussion, to disturb the taken-for-granted gender neutrality of the ways that organization studies is written, as well as to outline how it might be otherwise. The specific contribution we are led to is the setting out of the possibilities for, following Hélène Cixous, a bisexual writing of organization studies. We suggest that organization studies has been dominated by a participation in what Cixous calls a 'masculine libidinal economy'. This is a system of exchange where science, mastery and rigour are not so much an effort in inquiry, but more a form of (rough) trade through which to appease the fear of castration; the fear of not-knowing. In looking for alternatives we review recent developments in narrative methodology in organization studies and extend this through the idea of the feminine libidinal economy and towards a consideration of Cixous's practice of bisexual writing – a writing that challenges masculine orthodoxy by confusing it rather than attempting to replace it with another (feminine) orthodoxy.

This paper examines the relationship between ethics and politics in organizations with a specific focus on ethical subjectivity—that is, how people at work constitute themselves as subjects in relation to both their conduct and their sense of ethical responsibility to others. To investigate this we consider those ethics that were politically mobilized when five clinical partners tendered to buy out the medical practice in which they worked. We provide a detailed reading of a letter of complaint written by one of the partners and sent to their employer—a letter we consider to be a deliberate, political, ethically motivated and overt act of resistance. Drawing on the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas we argue that the practice of ethics is characterized by a tension where ethical commitments and realpolitik come crashing together. The implication we draw from this is that in organizations the ethical subject is always a political subject; the one who takes action in response to the call of the ethical demand. It is answering the call to political action by the ethical subject—a subject prepared to act in response to the experience of injustice while not resting easy on their own ethical righteousness—that provides an affirmative possibility for researching and theorizing ethics within a critical framework.

Central to the critical study of contemporary management practice has been an understanding of the possibilities for worker subjugation framed in terms of the disciplinary practices of surveillance and responses to it in terms of compliance and resistance. In this paper, we explore how the volatility of everyday interaction also leads to a different response — one we call 'observance'. We introduce this term to refer to the process of identity diversification at work, and to create an analytical-conceptual space that is not fully circumscribed by compliance and resistance. To give the concept of observance empirical flesh, we present an account of team meetings held as part of a quality improvement programme in a manufacturing workplace in Sydney, Australia. We use this account to show how the interpersonal dynamics among team workers led to 'emergent' subject positions and conducts. Capturing the effects of the volatility of everyday workplace interaction, the concept of observance is shown to account for such emergent positioning and reflexivity. Observance enables us to highlight this and also how people exceed the parameters of surveillance, compliance and resistance, especially in relation to participativecommunicative or 'immaterial' forms of work.

It is often assumed that leaders serve as focal points around which followers rally when confronted with a coordination problem. This research begins with one component of leadership—its coordinating role—and disentangles how leadership matters for followers. This analysis proceeds as a simple one-sided signaling game from leaders to followers and investigates when a leader's signals are credible. The empirical analysis is based on a series of laboratory experiments in which groups of four actors were involved in a series of one-stage coordination games. The findings show that although leadership is crucial for coordinating followers, it is not a panacea. The introduction of uncertainty about the type of leader markedly decreases the ameliorating impact of leadership.

This introduction to the special section "Does Work Have a Future?" begins by reviewing the main ways work stands at the crossroads today. We identify three core disputes with the potential to disrupt the future of work but which also harbor resources for affirmative futures of work: the precariousness of work and lives under existing economic arrangements; the emergence of care work as a source of social and environmental value; and technological change. We then consider the demands for new meanings and new valuings that the manifold disputed status of work formulates. Finally, we highlight the contributions the four pieces making up this special section give to that momentous question of whether work has a future.