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This article explores the political differences between academic activism and the recently emerged research impact agenda. While both claim that academic work can and should engage with and influence the world beyond the academic 'ivory tower', their political meaning and practice are radically different. Following the distinction made by Jacques Rancière, we argue that research impact performs a policing function which, despite its own rhetoric, is arranged as an attempt to ensure that academic work maintains a neoliberal status quo by actually having no real political impact. Academic activism, in contrast, serves to politicize scholarly work by democratically disrupting political consensus in the name of equality. Being an academic activist in an era of research impact rests in a twofold movement: that of both acting in the name of equality in an effort (using Marx's terms) to 'change the world' and resisting and contesting an academic administration whose police actions have attempted to eliminate such forms of democratic practice from the political consensus. The argument is illustrated with examples from the Australia Research Council's statements on research impact and the practice of climate change activism.

The nature and extent of changes in management remain subject to debate, especially around the notion of post-bureaucracy. Most research concedes that there has been some change, but towards hybrid or neo-bureaucratic practices. However, the mechanisms through which these changes have occurred, and their precise forms and outcomes have received less attention. This article addresses these issues by focusing on an emerging group of managers that closely resembles images of new management (e.g. project-based, change focused, externally oriented and advisory in style). Drawing on interview-based research in the United Kingdom and Australia, it examines consulting practices and orientations adopted within management roles. It first constructs an ideal type of neo-bureaucracy and then explores different elements of management as consultancy empirically. It shows how they are inspired by anti-bureaucratic rationales but assume a hybrid neo-bureaucratic form. We also show that, far from resolving tensions between rational and post-bureaucratic forms, management as consultancy both reproduces and changes the tensions of management and organisation. Thus, rather than denying or heralding changes in management towards a 'new spirit of capitalism', we focus on a context in which such changes are occurring and demonstrate their wider implications for both management and consultancy.

Studies of corporate citizenship have considered how corporations shape the delivery of basic rights. While liberal commentators argue that corporations can act as protectors of citizenship rights where state regulation is lacking, more radical commentators claim that corporations seek to obstruct the rights of citizens. In this article we build on theories of hegemony to argue that corporate citizenship can be more fruitfully understood as an attempt to incorporate citizenship activities in order to benefit corporate agendas. To explore how this process plays out, we examine how companies have sought to influence the political debate over climate change in Australia. Through analysis of corporate documents, media coverage and interviews with senior managers, we identify how corporations use practices of campaigning and exemplifying to build a common identity with citizens and synchronize corporate and citizen interests. This involves the recasting of citizens as active constituents, responsible consumers, ethical employees and ecopreneurs. Through this process, citizenship becomes increasingly incorporated within the value creating activities of corporations.

Climate change discourse permeates political and popular consciousness, challenging the ecological sustainability of our economic system and the business models that underpin it. Not surprisingly climate change has become an increasingly divisive and partisan political issue. While a growing literature has sought to address how business organizations are responding to climate change, the subjective perceptions of managers on this issue have received less attention. In this article we contribute to an understanding of the dynamic interaction between identities and organizations, by showing how sustainability managers and consultants balance tensions and contradictions between their own sense of self and the various work and non-work contexts in which they find themselves. Based on a qualitative, social constructivist method, we examine how these individuals develop different identities in negotiating between conflicting discourses and their sense of self. We explore how these different identities arise, interact and inform responses to climate change in different settings, and then demonstrate how individuals seek to overcome conflicts between identities in constructing a coherent narrative of themselves and their careers. In doing so, the article highlights how identity work is central to the micro-political enactment of business responses to climate change, and how, for some, the climate crisis provides an impetus for personal reinvention as a moral agent of change.

Previous research into Japanese owned and managed enterprises in western countries has been alert to problems in cross-cultural communication but there has been little research into the linguistic patterns accompanying these activities. This study of seven such plants in Scotland illustrates key features of the linguistic patterns evident in them. Forms of pidgin develop in co-operative working environments but unusually they are based on the language of the formal subordinates, local English speaking managers and workers. In contrast, and more in line with expectations from socio-linguistic theory, the local dialect is used as a device to promote local workforce solidarity against expatriate management. The former discrepancy between material and cultural power, which is not expected on the basis of Bourdieu's and related theories of cultural behaviour, is explained in terms of the differing career paths of Japanese and non-Japanese personnel, the marginal involvement of Japanese management in the local society and their reticence in asserting cultural power commensurate with their economic power. However, these lingusitic developments were local phenomena that did not challenge Japanese managerial control, both local and corporate, of decisions on development and investment. Hence, the opposition between cultural and material power may be permitted to persist because of these limited effects.

Considering the worsening climate crisis, we argue that our present conditions require a particular approach to the past in order to disrupt current intellectual trajectories. We enrol Walter Benjamin's concept of history, via the writings of Svetlana Alexievich and Margaret Atwood, with the aim of bringing a criticality to the present to make us reconsider the ways we think about and act in our present world. Based on Alexievich and Atwood's work, we develop research conceptualizations of forgotten and alternative histories to open up a space to consider a future climate-changed world beyond the dominant tropes of inevitable dystopian apocalypse and clever technological adaptation. We offer the concept of 'hope without optimism' in encouraging management and organization studies scholars to develop a discipline fit for the Anthropocene.