The Real

We are witnessing a forceful return of the Real of power. Forms of domination that have always underpinned institutions—state violence, coercive authority, exclusionary sovereignty, racialized capitalism, and extractive political economy—are again no longer concealed behind technocratic rationalities or liberal managerial vocabularies. Instead, they are increasingly openly (and ontologically) claimed, performed, and celebrated through TV lenses and social media apps.

 

This signals a new unmasking that not only surpasses its conventional targets but also becomes legible to communities that had long perceived themselves as observers: a moment in which institutional power sheds its historical pretense of neutrality and reasserts itself as force. Corporations, universities, public agencies, and NGOs are drawn into this visibility by being asked to declare allegiances, enforce borders (material and symbolic), and participate (at times happily and complicitly) in the normalization (or even celebration) of inequality, surveillance, and dispossession. For critical scholars, this invite analyzes how organizational practices render inequality, surveillance, and dispossession ordinary, necessary, or inevitable; revealing how visibility operates not as transparency but as a technology of control and legitimation; and contesting the organizational infrastructures that sustain and normalize these regimes of power.

 

Dialectically, however, this return of visible power is accompanied by real resistance, new or previously hidden old ones. Across the globe, we see occupied people facing unbelievable violence standing up in defiance to settler colonial genocide; unions expanding into sectors historically excluded from collective bargaining and reclaiming the strike as a disruptive weapon; climate movements escalating from protest to disruption; Indigenous struggles reclaiming land and sovereignty; student and academic mobilizations challenging authoritarian governance of universities; feminist, anti-racist, and queer movements refusing erasure; and, grassroots solidarities emerging in zones of war and occupation. These renewed resistances are not symbolic gestures but material, risky, embodied practices of refusal and reorganization. Real struggles over how life is organized, governed, and valued. This invites analyses of existing and emerging alternative forms of organizing, challenging authoritarian governance, capitalist dispossession, and institutionalized exclusion; learning from practices of refusal, care, and reorganization that redefine how life is governed and valued; and, amplifying and supporting marginalized voices, knowledges, and experiences.

 

The Unreal

Alongside the Real, we also invite attending to the Unreal: the ghostly, absent, and half-present spaces of organizing that escape dominant empirical and theoretical frames. These include organizations and social movements that never fully materialize, solidarities that remain fragile or suppressed, futures that are promised but perpetually deferred, and voices that are systematically excluded from what counts as knowledge, evidence, or impact.

 

The Unreal is not simply illusion. It is ontologically constituted by absence, invisibility, strategic ignorance, or even secrecy: the changing past; the shuttered present welfare infrastructures, hollowed-out public institutions, and abandoned regions; the uninhabitable futures; and the lingering presence of alternative possibilities that haunt the present. These are the sites of what is not-yet, where prefigurative practices flicker without stabilization, where hope coexists with exhaustion, and where organizing is oriented less toward success than toward survival, care, and endurance.

 

For critical organization scholars, the Unreal demands conceptual and methodological experimentation. How do we theorize organizing that operates through anticipation, memory, waiting, mourning, or quiet repair? How do we study that which is missing, silenced, ephemeral, or only partially articulated? And how might attention to these ghostly spaces reconnect us to unrealized solidarities in the past and the present?

 

The Surreal

If the Real is about force and the Unreal about absence, the Surreal captures the increasingly carnivalesque character of contemporary organizing. Politics, management, and authority are today performed through spectacle, parody, exaggeration, and inversion. Corporate leaders tweet like provocateurs; authoritarian figures stage themselves as entertainers; institutions oscillate between deadly seriousness and absurd performance.

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This surrealization of power does not weaken domination, it often intensifies it. Carnival suspends norms only to reassert hierarchy in distorted form. Cruelty becomes humorous, misinformation becomes playful, and violence is aestheticized. Organizational life is increasingly saturated with contradiction: deadly policies enacted through memes, precarity managed through ‘wellbeing’ rituals, ecological collapse addressed through greenwashing and techno-fantasies.

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At the same time, the Surreal also opens cracks. Carnivalesque organizing has long been a resource for resistance through, for example, satire, joy, mockery, and collective excess. Protest camps, mutual aid networks, queer and feminist organizing, and artistic-political interventions mobilize the Surreal to unsettle common sense, disrupt authority, and experiment with other ways of being together.

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With these three themes, we aim to extend the inaugural conference’s commitment to praxis-oriented critical scholarship—one that not only interprets the world, but reveals its violences, reconnects its fragments, reimagines its futures, rehearses alternatives, and revolts against injustice, across real, unreal, and surreal terrains of organizing.

 

We invite contributors to interpret these dimensions of critical scholarship broadly. We are open to all submissions that are theoretically informed by one or more critical traditions of thought addressing current concerns at planetary, global, societal, organizational, and/or individual levels from a praxis-oriented perspective.

 

By ‘praxis-oriented perspective’ we mean that we are interested in submissions with an explicit intent to create theoretical insights that can inform not only how we think about organizations and organizing sociality, but also how we can change them through various forms of praxes, activism, and solidarity. In line with reimagining praxes, we of course welcome submissions that advance and reflect on alternative methodologies and experiment with novel formats of writing and/or doing other aspects of academic work differently.

 

Conference format

To make the conference as inclusive, accessible, and sustainable as possible, the conference will take place in an online format. It will be structured around 90-minute sessions distributed for 3 days from December 7 to 9 scheduled at times convenient for the different time zones. We hope this will allow colleagues to take part regardless of their geographical location, career stage, or whether their institution is able to provide them with a conference travel budget. We also hope this format will make the conference accessible to colleagues who are unable to travel for health or other reasons or who are refusing air- and other forms of unsustainable travel for reasons of climate justice.

 

There will also be a few plenary moments with an Opening ceremony on the first session of December 7 and a closing on the last one on December 9.

 

We will of course strive to maintain the diversity and inclusivity that is representative of our journal, particularly preserving spaces for doctoral students and early career scholars as well as participants from many geographies.

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Submission formats
Submissions to the conference can take one of the following formats:

• Paper abstracts (up to 1,500 words - exclusive of references, tables, etc.). We ask for extended abstracts presenting core ideas (including the aims of the paper, the theoretical approach, an indication of the empirical material in case of empirical papers, and key contributions). Abstracts are expected to be developed into papers (written in a conventional or alternative format) before the conference. The conference organizers will cluster the papers based on the abstracts into thematic sessions. Authors will be provided with constructive, developmental feedback by the session chairs, other authors and the audience during the conference.

 

• Symposia and round tables proposals (up to 1,500 words). These submissions should include the core topics of the session, why they are relevant to the Organization community, the participants, and a proposal of structure for the session including various roles (e.g., organizers, presenters, panelists, facilitator). Symposia and round tables that are inclusive along geographical, career phase and any other lines of historical subordination will be given priority.

 

• Open-format session proposals (up to 1,500 words). We are open to any other proposal that will make use of this shared online space to advance the Organization community to work around the topics delineated above, and more broadly, to the critical debates that represent our journal. Open-format proposals may also include ideas for innovative social sessions to help our community connect and interact more informally. Please submit your idea, indicating the audience you would like to reach out to, and how you intend to operationalize it. 

 

Our system for uploading your submissions will be open from April 9, 2026 until the deadline, on our official website: www.organization-conference.com

 

Timeline

Submission of abstracts and activities proposal (up to 1,500 words): May 9, 2026

Notification of acceptance: June 9-11, 2026

Deadline for registration: November 1, 2026 

Submission of final papers (up to 10,000 words): November 9, 2026

 

Conference fee

The Organization Conference will maintain its tradition of being free of charge to participants.

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Timeline
Submission of abstracts and activities proposal (up to 1,500 words): May 9, 2026
Notification of acceptance: June 9-11, 2026 
Deadline for registration: November 1, 2026  
Submission of final papers (up to 10,000 words): November 9, 2026

 

Inquiries about the conference
For any inquiry about practical aspects, please contact the conference coordinator Mary Skordia (organization.mgged@gmail.com). If you would like to check with us whether a potential submission falls within the scope of the conference, please contact any of the members of the organizing committee. They will be glad to hear from you.