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This article considers the implications of Latour's notions of durability and delegation for theorizing the relationship between technology and organization. Two central themes are the heterogeneous character of the fabric of organizational life which interweaves both humans and non-humans (including machines and inscriptions); and the question of power/domination in matters technological. To contextualize the discussion, the paper reflects on some of the recent developments in the UK National Health Service (the NHS) which centre on the development and use of information systems for purposes of management control, decision-making, contracting and the search for greater efficiency and organizational rationality through the operation of an internal market.

This paper explores the connection between language and our thought and beliefs about computers. In particular it considers how certain features of language - such as verbal habits, or the traces in language due to social interests and power - help to shape particular reports and interpretations of the behaviour of computer programs and thereby sustain or reinforce beliefs about the organisational role of computers and even their status vis-a-vis human beings. It is contended that when computers and computer-related practices are introduced into an organisation users become members of computer cultures where new or reshaped ways of thinking and speaking are acquired in order subsequently to discuss or operate the technology. It is suggested that these cultures and their language be made the focus of sociological scrutiny.

This article seeks to situate pharmacological cognitive enhancement as part of a broader relationship between cultural understandings of the body-brain and the political economy. It is the body of the worker that forms the intersection of this relationship and through which it comes to be enacted and experienced. In this article, we investigate the imaginaries that both inform and are reproduced by representations of pharmacological cognitive enhancement, drawing on cultural sources such as newspaper articles and films, policy documents, and pharmaceutical marketing material to illustrate our argument. Through analysis of these diverse cultural sources, we argue that the use of pharmaceuticals has come to be seen not only as a way to manage our brains, but through this as a means to manage our productive selves, and thereby to better manage the economy. We develop three analytical themes. First, we consider the cultural representations of the brain in connection with the idea of plasticity – captured most graphically in images of morphing - and the representation of enhancement as a desirable, inevitable, and almost painless process in which the mind-brain realizes its full potential and asserts its will over matter. Following this, we explore the social value accorded to productive employment and the contemporary (biopolitical) ethos of working on or managing oneself, particularly in respect of improving one's productive performance through cognitive enhancement. Developing this, we elaborate a third theme by looking at the moulding of the worker's productive body-brain in relation to the demands of the economic system.

This article focuses on how the categories of 'normal' and 'extreme' in the context of work might be renegotiated through the development of human enhancement technologies which aim to enable the human body to be pushed beyond its biological limits. The ethical dimensions of human enhancement technologies have been widely considered, but there has been little debate about their role in the broader world of employment—nor, conversely, the recognition that prevailing employment relationships might shape the development and uptake of such technologies. Addressing the organisation of work within 'advanced' capitalist economies, this article considers the arguments for the potential use of cognitive enhancers, so-called 'smart drugs', in various domains of work such as surgery and transportation. We argue that the development of human enhancement technologies might foster the normalisation of 'working extremely'—enabling longer working hours, greater effort or increased concentration—and yet at the same time promote the conditions of possibility under which workers are able to work on themselves so as to go beyond the norm, becoming 'extreme workers'. Looking at human enhancement technologies not only enables us to see how they might facilitate ever greater possibilities for working extremely but also helps us to understand the conditions under which cultures of extreme work become the norm and how workers them/ourselves accept or even embrace such work.

The extraction of unconventional hydrocarbons, particularly through hydraulic fracturing ('fracking'), has generated both support and opposition in many countries around the globe. Along with arguments about economic benefits, decarbonisation, transition fuels and groundwater contamination etc., the rapid expansion of this industry presents a pressing problem as regards the disposal of the resultant waste – including drilling and cutting material, oil and gas residues, various chemicals used in the process, salts and produced water. One putative solution – 'landfarming' – is a disposal process that involves spreading oil and gas waste on to land and mixing it with topsoil to allow bioremediation of the hydrocarbons. This paper examines the case of landfarming in New Zealand where the practice has proved controversial due to its association with fracking, fears about the contamination of agricultural land and potential danger to milk supplies. Drawing upon Gieryn's notion of cultural cartography and boundary work as well as the literature on the politics of scale it analyses the struggles for epistemic authority regarding the safety of landfarming. The case has wider implications in terms of the management of waste from non-conventional hydrocarbons as well as other environmental issues in which the politics of scale figure in contested knowledge claims.

This article focuses on science fiction and actor network theory as ways of writing displacement which are relevant to organization studies. Recent work within organizational theory and related (sub)disciplines has suggested that the articulation of organization as a privileged site of presence is made possible by that which is Othered and excluded (or rather deferred) as representing disorganization and disorder. Organizations in this view constitute `incomplete and transient' accomplishments always under threat from various forms of intrusion and displacement. By way of illustration, two examples of displacement! intrusion and their associated organizational `dramas of proof' are examined as a way of exploring how the Other, the alien and out of place, is realized in representation.

This paper examines the reports produced by management consultants as exercises in textual reality construction. Concentrating on a particular variant of this genre - namely, the information technology (IT) strategy report - its focus is on the ways in which `reality' and the forms of knowledge appropriate to it are constituted in the course of certain communicative practices. More specifically, we look at the practices that aim to control technology for organisational purposes; and we illustrate our case with a discussion on the textual practices through which the boundary between the `technical' and the `social' is constructed and sustained. In this connection it is worth noting that consultancy reports on IT reflect a concern central to social scientific inquiry - namely, the analytical relationship between the `social' and `technical' domains. Our starting point is to situate such reports within the broader category of textual and graphical constructs - inscriptions - which in various fields of enquiry and application, discipline and practice, are used to represent reality in order to act on it, control or dominate it, as well as to secure the compliance of others in that domination.

Discusses the problematic nature of the boundary between the
"technical" and the "social" and its consequences in respect of
understanding the relationship between technological and organizational
change. Illustrates the argument using material drawn from research on
the implementation of a hospital information system and an R&D project to
develop a knowledge‐based system to assist the implementation of
strategic change.

War, the organized destruction of human beings, of human lifeworlds and modes of livelihood, has long been regarded as outside the usual preoccupations of organization studies. And yet, as the various on-going "asymmetric wars" increasingly become the taken for granted background noise of contemporary life, this aloofness becomes difficult to maintain. This special issue then is an initial contribution to a long overdue conversation. By way of introduction to the articles that comprise the special issue this essay seeks to highlight some of the key connections between organization theory, forms of organized destruction and their ongoing mutations in the still young, but already quite bloody, 21st century.

Borrowed from ecological psychology, the concept of affordances is often said to offer the social study of technology a means of re-framing the question of what is, and what is not, 'social' about technological artefacts. The concept, many argue, enables us to chart a safe course between the perils of technological determinism and social constructivism. This article questions the sociological adequacy of the concept as conventionally deployed. Drawing on ethnographic work on the ways technological artefacts engage, and are engaged by, disabled bodies, we propose that the 'affordances' of technological objects are not reducible to their material constitution but are inextricably bound up with specific, historically situated modes of engagement and ways of life.