The Integrative Potential of Process in a Changing World: Introduction to a special issue on power, performativity and process

This editorial essay introduces a special issue that tackles the seemingly intractable challenge of re-conceptualizing power and performativity as continuously interweaving and co-emergent dynamics in the processes of organizing. It is in these processes, we argue, that new futures may be visibly made through the academic activism of our scholarly communities. We position our argument, and the six papers that comprise this special issue, in relation to Rosi Braidotti’s framing of Humanism, anti-humanism and the posthuman. We also suggest some future lines of inquiry to move studies of organizing forward into a posthuman world.

At the Buzzer: Parting Shots on Communication and Sport

In his final editorial essay, founding Editor-in-Chief Lawrence Wenner speaks to the successes of the Communication & Sport project as a disciplinary endeavor over its first 10 years. In handing over the editor’s baton to Andrew Billings and Marie Hardin, Communication & Sport is in good hands with the continued support of SAGE Publishing, the sponsorship of a set of scholarly societies, and a growing global scholarly community. Still, communication and sport, as an interdisciplinary scholarly endeavor, has been challenged by competing epistemological perspectives from pragmatic to critical. There is much evidence of implicit and explicit endorsement of a “received” view of sport in line with Coakley’s notion of the “Great Sports Myth.” Caution is advised as research from this vantage point often too eagerly receives sport as a naturalized state-of-affairs worthy of supporting and growing in an agenda focused on advancing the effectiveness and reception of sport communication in the marketplace. The essay closes with the need for a reckoning about the objectives of communication and sport as a scholarly space by reiterating reminder that today’s mediated world is ultimately “all about power.”

What Theory Is and Can Be: Forms of Theorizing in Organizational Scholarship

Theory is at the very heart of organizational scholarship and a key criterion for evaluating the quality and contribution of our research. Focusing on conceptual rather than empirical work, this editorial essay highlights the wide range of forms that theorizing might take – and how it, in consequence, materializes in different types of theory papers. Next to the propositional form of theory building, which has so far dominated reflections in the literature, we discuss the particularities of process, configurational, perspectival, and meta-theorizing, as well as various forms of critique. We demonstrate how these forms of theorizing differ in terms of their aims, style of reasoning, their contributions, and the way in which they are written up as papers. In view of the rather different roles that each of these forms of theorizing serve, we propagate, in line with the ethos of Organization Theory, a pluralistic stance when it comes to advancing theory in organization studies.

On Reasoning Nature of Editorial Essay in Indonesian Newspaper

Reasoning ability is fundamental for college students as well as professionals since it reflects their intellectual quality. This paper is aimed at revealing the reasoning nature in the editorial essays in Indonesian prominent newspapers. The study is qualitatively approached, by employing Content Analysis, in which (i) the types of reason and (ii) the soundness of reasons the editorial essays are objectively, systematically, and generally inferred. The data collection was conducted by documentation technique, by which the researchers selected the online editorial essays in Indonesian prominent newspapers. The study revealed that types of reason found in the essay written by IW (Indonesian Writer) are (a) statement of a means to an end, (b) a statement of cause, (c) statement of judgment based upon knowledge, and (d) statement of condition while the most reasonings practiced by IW in their essays are logically sound.

A Five-Year Engagement

In this editorial essay, Abby Kinchy, Shobita Parthasarathy, and Jason Delborne look back at the editorial and publishing practices of the first five-years of the journal Engaging Science, Technology, and Society (ESTS), the open access journal of The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). As three members of the inaugural ESTS Editorial Board, Kinchy, Parthasarathy, and Delborne reflect on what we value in academic practice, including publishing, and consider some of the highlights and accomplishments of ESTS’s first five years (2015-2020).