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This article coins the term 'scatolic' to suggest a new way for organizations to think about and engage with waste. Scatolic engagement draws on Reno's analogy of waste as scats and of scats as signs for enabling interspecies communication. This analogy stresses the impossibility for waste producers to dissociate themselves from their waste and emphasizes the contingent, multiple, and transient value of waste. Correspondingly, the article suggests that organizations grow a semiotic competence at reading waste and develop a sense of responsibility for materials. Adopting a scatolic approach to waste is featured as a way for organizations to deal with waste in the Anthropocene.

Two observations serve as starting points for this paper. First, conventional risk assessment techniques provide sophisticated ways to identify and estimate hazards, but eschew the fact that there is no risk unless something of value is considered to be at stake. Second, what managers consider as being of value follows from how they organize their managerial practice. Based on a case study of a Swedish public transportation administration, a claim is presented that organizational risk conceptions derive primarily, although not exclusively, from what managers consider being of value both in and for their organizational practice. In particular, it is suggested to begin the risk assessment process with a critical appraisal of what managers hold as being of value and why.

PurposeBraiding organization theory and argumentation theory, the paper seeks to unfold how organizations act as social loci for the production, diffusion and development of arguments.Design/methodology/approachA Swedish association dedicated to the defense and promotion of nuclear power,Miljövänner För Kärnkraft(approximatelyEnvironmentalists for Nuclear Power) serves as a case study, describing the association's argumentative activity with a particular focus on its argument that "nuclear power is environment friendly as it produces no greenhouse gas emissions".FindingsThe manner in which the association contextualizes this key argument illustrates the inter‐relationships that exist between organizing and arguing.Originality/valueOrganizing and arguing belong to each other's conditions of possibility, and it is therefore argued that an understanding of the organized character of argumentation is symmetrical to the argumentative character of organizing.

Whereas management theory and practice tend to adopt an objectifying perspective and regard an organisation's performances literally as what the organisation achieves, I introduce in this paper a distinction between organisational life and the various accounts that are made of this life or its impacts on the organisation's environment. Reminding the reader that what is achieved within an organisation is, with rare exception, accessible to our understanding only through accounts that are made of these achievements, I suggest that it would be more correct to approach an organisation's performances as accounts rather than as objectified acts or results. Having redefined an organisation's performances as accounts, I then explore the structural qualities of performance accounts. I emphasise that they are narratives of achievements and that they are specific enough to constitute a genre. Turning thereafter toward the societal role of performance narratives as a genre, I introduce the conclusive argument of the paper. Taken together, the millions of performance narratives that management produces and consumes daily constitute a vast narrative fresco aimed at reassuring us that late modernity actually manages fulfil its promises of progress. Performance narratives, far from being politically neutral, keep the modernist dream afloat and contribute in a decisive manner to maintain the social order that is attached to it.