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In the context of an apparent crisis of grand narratives and continuing reference to the postmodern condition, this article considers aspects of the development of theory in organization studies over the past decade and offers some reflections on prospects for the future. These issues are presented via a reading of Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition and the way that this book has been received in organization studies. This `paralogical' reading contests a number of widespread assumptions in organization studies about Lyotard and French theory, and provides the opening for a discussion of the future of theory in organization studies. This involves asking questions about (1) the consumption of theory in organization studies; (2) the concepts in currency in organization studies today; and (3) the shifting divisions of organization studies.

This paper takes up some of Jacques Derrida's work on ethics, responsibility and justice in order to ask if business ethics is possible within the limits in which it currently finds itself. We begin by discussing the `ethical turn' in Derrida's recent work and then, after setting this in context with a brief discussion of Emmanuel Levinas, survey a selection of Derrida's `ethical' works. This provides the basis for a discussion of the limits of calculative and legalistic business ethics, and the broader problem of the ethics of knowing what to do. Although in this paper we do not pretend to `deconstruct' business ethics, we conclude with a discussion of the prospects of a possible future deconstruction of business ethics.

This paper engages with debates on enterprise culture and one of its key subjects—the entrepreneur. Enlisting the work of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, we attempt to explain the continuing failure of entrepreneurship discourse to assign the character of the entrepreneur a positive identity. Shifting away from stable categories such as 'the entrepreneur', we describe entrepreneurship in terms of Lacan's concept of the Real and Žižek's concept of the sublime object. This allows us to critically scrutinize the operation of the phantasmic category of the entrepreneur. In addition to indicating some prospects for the future of psychoanalytic cultural criticism in organization studies, we make a case for a continual questioning of the subject, a questioning that is today being foreclosed by those critics who were first to call the subject into question.