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This article provides a critical review and re-evaluation of dominant approaches to leadership justice, arguing that they appropriate justice as a rational means to achieve organizational effectiveness. It is shown that in contemporary management thinking justice is a formal rationality rather than a substantive one. This rationalization of justice belies its masculinization and as a result human values such as love and care are sidelined. The ethical theories of Emmanuel Levinas are drawn on to consider how pre-rational affective relations between people form the basis of ethically informed justice. It is proposed that justice is not a particular variety of leadership behaviour but rather that leadership is the practice of justice. Justice is not here regarded as something to be achieved through particular leadership practices, but is an ongoing condition – an unanswerable question whose response defines the ethical quality of leadership.

Building on existing considerations of reflexivity in research writing, this essai seeks to reappraise the concept of responsibility in relation to the ethics of post-representational research methodology in organization studies. Jacques Derrida's discussions of responsibility and undecidability and Emmanuel Lévinas' distinction between the saying and the said are brought to bear on the ethics of the discursive construction of organizational research as a form of representing the Other. The essai argues that responding to reflexivity extends beyond textual practice and self-accounting towards a responsibility for the exercise of academic freedom. This freedom entails a radical openness that is operationalized in an ongoing reinvention that resists the institutionalization of the field of inquiry through a form of transformative knowledge. It is the legacy and promise of reflexivity in organization studies that can invigorate the imagination in research — its poiesis — as an ongoing project of saying the ethical.

This article explores how the relationship between work and utopia has been articulated in rock music. Rock is a cultural discourse that provides insight into the tension between representations of utopian imagination with the often hard realities of the experience of work. The article discusses the value of investigating popular culture in the context of the study of work and organizations and then examines how some samples of rock critically engage with the cultural idealization of work as utopia. Three images of work are delineated in rock music—work as a dystopia to be escaped, the troubled relationship between work and love utopias, and the idea of work as a false, yet culturally potent, utopia.

This paper examines the use of multiple reading strategies as a way to conduct research into organizational life. The paper reviews the role of paradigm thinking as being the dominant approach to understanding research methodology in organization studies. It is argued that paradigm diversity has taken a position of meta-theoretical hegemony where students of organizations are compelled to enter into the paradigm discourse in order to do research. Based on the work of Cleo Cherryholmes, it is further argued that a `reading' rather than `researching' based approach is a way of doing organizational enquiry outside the paradigm framework. An account of organizational life in an autobiographical format is presented and is `read' using three different reading strategies-one feminist, one critical and one deconstructive. The implications of these reading strategies for researching organizational life are then discussed.