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This paper aims to bring to the fore the importance of feminist epistemologies in the history of the organization of management studies since the 1980s by following various intellectual moves in the development of feminist theorizing as they cross over to organization studies, including their analytical possibilities for reclaiming historically the voices of major women scholars, especially in doctoral seminars. The paper narrates these epistemological activities by mobilizing and reconsidering from the past to the present, the notions of “unmuting,” “mutating” and “mutiny.” It ends in a reflection addressing the state of business schools at present and why the field of organization and management studies needs “mutiny” now.

The paper adopts a narrative approach in which the voices of its authors appear to be central as they consider and reconsider over time their understanding of “unmuting,” “mutation” and “mutiny” as notions with analytical potential. This approach is influenced by Foucault’s “history of the present” but with contingencies brought about by feminist interpretations. The application of these notions is demonstrated by reclaiming and clarifying the epistemological underpinning in the works of three major women scholars as included in a doctoral seminar: Mary Parker Follett, Edith Penrose and Rosabeth Moss Kanter. These notions are further redeployed for their potential in institutional applications.

At present, the findings are discursive – if they can be called so, but the main motivation behind this writing is to go beyond discourse in the written sense, and to mobilize other activities, still in the realm of epistemological and scholarly work. These activities would legitimize actual interventions for changing business schools from their current situation as neoliberal entities, which mute understanding of major problems in the world, as well as the voices of most humans and non-humans paying for the foibles of neoliberalism.

The paper demonstrates the necessity of developing approaches for interventions in knowledge producing institutions increasingly limited by neoliberal premises in what can be said and done as legitimate knowledge. In doing this, the paper articulates the importance of keeping history alive to avoid the increasing “forgetfulness” neoliberalization brings about. The paper, in its present form, represents an active act of “remembering”.

Since the late 1980s we’ve been inspired by feminist theorizing to interrogate our field of organization studies, looking critically at the questions it asks, at the underlying premises of the theories allowing for such questions, and by articulating alternative premises as a way of suggesting other theories and thus other questions the field may need to ask. In so doing, our collaborative work has applied insights from feminist theorizing and cultural studies to topics such as leadership, entrepreneurship, globalization, business ethics, issues of work and family, and more recently to sustainability. This text is a retrospective on our attempts at intervening in our field, where we sought to make it more fundamentally responsive to problems in the world we live in and, from this reflective position, considering how and why our field’s conventional theories and practices – despite good intentions – may be unable to do so.

In a paper written for a theory development forum (Calás & Smircich, 1999) we insisted that the postmodern moment, in its association with poststructuralist analyses, brought much of value to organization and management studies. At the time we observed that although such a moment may have already passed, its traces continued to be seen and expressed in several important intellectual developments. In particular, we identified poststructuralist feminist theories, postcolonial theory, actor-network theory, and narrative approaches to theory as productive heirs of the postmodern moment in organization and management studies.

–The paper originated in challenges trying to theorize and research practices and processes of actors engaged in transnational activities for business and everyday life. Key concern was the assumption that actors’ identities remain the same regardless of time/space. While intersectional analysis once seemed a reasonable analytical approach the authors wondered about starting from identity-based categorical schemes in a world where mobility may be ever more the ontological status of everyday experiences and social structuring. Thus, the paper addresses limitations of intersectional analysis in such situations and advances its recasting via mobile conceptualizations, redressing its analytical purchase for contemporary subject formation.

Discusses emergence of intersectionality at a particular point in time, its success and proliferation, and more recent critiques of these ideas. Develops alternative conceptualization – mobile subjectivities – via literatures on mobilities in the context of globalization. Illustrates the value of these arguments with ethnographic examples from a multi-sited ethnographic project and analyses. Concludes by examining implications for new feminist theorizations under neoliberalism and globalization.

Observing the constitution of a “mobile selfhood” in actual transnational business activities is a step toward making sense of complex processes in contemporary subject formation under globalized market neoliberalism.

“Mobile subjectivities” suggest that analyses of oppression and subordination must be ongoing, no matter which “new subjectivities” may appear under “the latest regime.”

Theoretical and empirical analyses facilitated a reconceptualization of intersectionality as a mobile, precarious, and transitory accomplishment of selfhood temporarily fixed by the neoliberal rhetoric of “choice” and “self-empowerment.” This is of particular value for understanding transnational practices and processes of contemporary organizational actors.

This chapter asks: ‘How often do we as social scientists question the validity of our theories and our findings? How often do we reflexively examine the distortions in the lenses we use to analyse organizations? ‘It proceeds to answer these questions by defining reflexivity and presenting six perspectives on reflexive analysis that build on and extend previous analytical treatments of reflexivity, especially that by Alvesson, Hardy, and Harley (2008). Illustrations of the six are drawn from my own experiences as well as those of other scholars. The intention is to stimulate greater interest in reflexivity and provoke other scholars to look more reflexively at their own work.

Stanford contributed significantly to the organizational culture movement that occurred in organization studies from 1970–2000. This chapter traces developments at Stanford and puts the contributions of its researchers and scholars in the context of the many influences that shaped the study of organizational culture during this period. In addition to the historical account, there is speculation about why the culture movement at Stanford more or less ended but might yet be revived, either by those studying institutionalization processes or by those who resist them.