Special Issue: The City: Regenerating Management and Organization?

What happens when we take ‘the city’ as a site of organization? The implications of posing this question perhaps explain why it has not formed part of the traditional epistemic apparatus of the organization studies community with its disciplinary claim to distinction and expertise. Analysts have a tendency to get lost in the city: the traditional modes of classification and organization that posit an object/subject, or structure/agent, tend to flounder when trying to come to terms with organizational features of the city. This editorial paper sets out a case for treating the city not as another object of attention for organization theorists in that all too familiar additive mode that recites ‘Organization Studies and ….’ (in this case ‘The City’). Rather we want to think about how cities and urban forces could be the site for an ongoing re-evaluation of the way in which organization theorists can engage with questions of social and cultural transformation. Collectively, these papers challenge us to go beyond seeing cities as simply the outcome of a will to order and the excess that this produces. Instead they ask us to open ourselves up to new forms of organization which, in this special issue, we have just begun to sense and imagine.