Theory and politics in organization

Iain Munro, then a lecturer in operations management and now Professor of Leadership and Organisational Change at Newcastle Business School, was a part of this group, and stood out as an awe-inspiring, progressive presence at Warwick in those days. There are four key aspects we think are important to understand, both for the sake of historical understanding and for the theory and politics of organization today: first, the intellectual context from which ephemera was established and took root; second, the importance of institutions that provided the medium and nutrients for the journal's early fermentation; third, the political-economic context of universities, and specifically business schools, in the UK at the turn of the millennium, as well as their sometimes parasitic symbiote, the publishing industry; and fourth, the very idea of organization, as verb and noun, which ephemera has always intended to displace and disorganize, in the hope to reach the shores of a radical new organization of life. Pandemonium offered a radical opening of organization theory to its constitutive yet endlessly silenced outside, its repressed others, and opened to a creative practice of reading and writing that not only tweaked the nose but punched the face of the positivist reactionaries holed up in the business school. The first issues of ephemera were printed and bound in paper at the University's print services, with funding that had been provided by Warwick Business School.