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This e-book brings together a variety of papers concerning organizations and organizing that are primarily discursive in emphasis, but which nevertheless attempt to address the intersection and interpenetration of discourse with aspects of policy and practice. In doing so, they make a collective contribution to understanding the nature and complexity of the relationship between these intertwined and mutually implicated domains of social activity

Digital media are pervasive, ubiquitous and mundane constituents of organization. Organized life relies on, and is propelled by, technologies that store, transmit and process data and are based on networked computation. How can we understand and explore the fundamental mediatedness of organization? This article contextualizes and introduces the special issue on 'The organizational powers of (digital) media' by staging an encounter between organization theory and media theory. In provoking investigations of the power and effects of technological mediation in its many guises, not least in regard to digital or computational media, this encounter ushers in a 'medial thought' of organization.

In this paper we explore how so-called 'social media' such as Facebook challenge Marxist organization studies. We argue that understanding the role of user activity in web 2.0 business models requires a focus on 'work', understood as value productive activity, that takes place beyond waged labour in the firm. A reading of Marx on the socialization of labour highlights the emerging figure of 'free labour', which is both unpaid and uncoerced. Marxist work on the production of the 'audience commodity' provides one avenue for understanding the production of content and data by users as free labour, but this raises questions concerning the distinction between productive and unproductive labour, which is central to Marx's labour theory of value. The Marxist literature on 'the becoming rent of profit' allows for a partial understanding of how the value produced by free labour is captured, thereby developing the understanding of the economic dimension of 'free labour' as unpaid. It overstates, however, the 'uncontrolled' side of free labour, and neglects the ways in which this work is managed so as to ensure that it is productive. We therefore call for a return to Marxist labour process analysis, albeit with an expanded focus on labour and a revised understanding of control associated with digital protocols. On this basis, a Marxist organization studies can contribute to an understanding of the political economy of digital capitalism.

The article opens with a critical analysis of the dominant business model of for-profit, academic publishing, arguing that the extraordinarily high profits of the big publishers are dependent upon a double appropriation that exploits both academic labour and universities' financial resources. Against this model, we outline four possible responses: the further development of open access repositories, a fair trade model of publishing regulation, a renaissance of the university presses, and, finally, a move away from private, for-profit publishing companies toward autonomous journal publishing by editorial boards and academic associations.

Markets abound in media - but a media theory of markets is still emerging. Anthropology offers media archaeologies of markets, and the sociology of markets and finance unravels how contemporary financial markets have witnessed a media technological arms race. Building on such work, this volume brings together key thinkers of economic studies with German media theory, describes the central role of the media specificity of markets in new detail and inflects them in three distinct ways. Nik-Khah and Mirowski show how the denigration of human cognition and the concomitant faith in computation prevalent in contemporary market-design practices rely on neoliberal conceptions of information in markets. Schröter confronts the asymmetries and abstractions that characterize money as a medium and explores the absence of money in media. Beverungen situates these inflections and gathers further elements for a politically and historically attuned media theory of markets concerned with contemporary phenomena such as high-frequency trading and cryptocurrencies.

One symptom of individualism in liquid modernity is the search for `identity'. Using the five theoretically discrete articles in this special issue as both a `rich' discursive resource and a point of departure, we develop a supplementary reading of the narratives which appear to inform identity research. We suggest that, while social agents in pursuit of `identity' draw on a cacophony of discursive sources, it is the varieties of `self—other' talk which emerge as the critical ingredient in processes of identity formation. The dualities that all such self—other talk articulate can be seen as discursive reflections of the more fundamental relationship between the individual and sociality. In turn, this is seen to refract one of the persistent problems of organizational analysis: the agency—structure issue. In addition, while we argue that deploying a discursive perspective to analyze identity work offers distinctive insights, such an approach carries with it an epistemological consequence. For what the articles also indicate is that in any attempt to delineate the `identity of identities', researchers need to be aware of not only the reflexivity displayed by social actors constructing `identity' but also of their own role in `re-authoring' such scripts. We briefly explore the implications of this for identity theory and organizational analysis more generally.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to consider the interplay between discourse, policy and practice in relation to aspects of organization and processes of organizing.Design/methodology/approachProvides an introduction to the six contributions contained in this special issue and discusses how they relate to the core theme.FindingsHighlights the need for an approach which treats discourses, policies and practices as connected and mutually implicated, rather than discrete, phenomena.Originality/valuePresents an approach to discourse analysis which promotes an engagement with wider aspects of social activity.