Organisational Studies

If the digital realm of Word files and PDFs was more analogue, less hermetically sealed off from the surrounding world and thus in palpable touch with its messiness, you would be able to see the soil of the Assistens Cemetery in Copenhagen, its mounds of damp earth, still clinging to our thoughts and words as you read this text. This image would probably look a bit like the smudges and marks on the drawings and the drawn statements found in this special issue. These smudges are traces of the hand that did the drawing, but also remains of the process of drawing itself. As Asbjørn Skou writes in his absent-present commentary to his artwork in this issue: 'The act of drawing always embedded in the drawing as object; processual smudges and marks, called ghosts, of the movements of the hand that holds the pencil'. In our work with this editorial, we studied the Assistens Cemetery, and its various pathways, its plantation, its smells and its many told and untold stories have all left their marks on our thinking about ghostly matters in organizing. We would thus like to start this editorial by inviting our readers to join us on a virtual excursion to the Assistens Cemetery to explore what both the cemetery and our special issue contributors can teach us about the ghostly matters of organizing. We will then turn to the variety of haunting methodologies contained in our contributions, for they address the question of how we might study those ghostly.

Privatisation of public education is becoming more and more common across the world. As much current research presupposes causal links between the degree of privatisation and issues of competition and student's free choice, we see a need for research on other ways of organising the presence of private providers in public education. In this article, we study how two Swedish municipalities use public procurement to contract private providers and organise adult education. Interestingly, we find that competition is more heavily at play in the municipality that outsources half of its adult education, than in the municipality that outsources all adult education. We view these findings as vital for understanding how education is being outsourced to private providers and for furthering the discussion on the consequences of the ongoing privatisation of education.

This dissertation is based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in three London based ICT companies. I explore the complex issue of gender and culture in regards to under representation of women in the ICT industry. I discuss the argument that the ICT industry is meritocratic due to the nature of programming being either 'right or wrong', whether this frees women in the working environment to be 'free from gender'. I argue this is a problematic standpoint through examining the perceptions of gender, and gender performances of the employees, as well as their organisational cultures and how they relate to gender.