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Mary Douglas's cultural theory of grid and group provides a framework for the description of three distinct cultural types corresponding to three logics for the legitimation of collectivity and collective coercion. Each type is distinguished by characteristic structures of classification, power, and moral order operating at the individual cognitive level. In this paper, the theory is used to illuminate some of the major developments in the structuring of business organizations in the late twentieth century, including the introduction of matrix, project and network organizations, the focus on de-layering, downsizing and outsourcing, and the emergence of concerns with cultural control, organizational learning, and core competence. The problems arising from these developments are discussed in terms of an unresolved conflict between the cognitive frameworks of two of Douglas's cultural types, market, and hierarchy.

This introduction charts several of rhythm's various returns as a way of laying out the theoretical and methodological field in which the articles of this special issue find their place. While Henri Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis is perhaps familiar to many, rhythm has appeared in a wide repertoire of guises, in many disciplines over the decades and indeed the centuries. This introduction attends to the particular roles of rhythm in the formation of modernity ranging from the processes of industrialization and the proliferation of new media technologies to film and literary aesthetics as well as conceptualizations of human psychology, social behaviour and physiology. These are some of the historical antecedents to the contemporary understandings of rhythm within body studies to which most of the contributions to this issue are devoted. In this respect, the introduction outlines recent approaches to rhythm as vibration, a force of the virtual, and an intensive excess outside consciousness.