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During an election campaign in Germany international investors were named “locusts” to discredit their behaviour and the effects of their actions. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate the links of this biblical metaphor and the contemporary financial industry, assuming that the common denominator can be seen in risk and the attitudes in dealing with risk. This link, so it is argued here, can be found in the changes of the understanding of risk as developing from punishment over representing evil to a postsocial opportunity to maximise profit in the globalised world of today.

The paper contrasts the origin of a publicly used metaphor about financial industry to describe risk with risk management based on recent research on the financial industry.

Developments of the international financial markets of the past three decades undermine the common understanding of risk and risk management at least from two directions. The methods used in risk management and investment represent a level of abstraction only specialists can deal with. And – more important for the everyday experience – certain forms of investment and risk management have developed in a way which is threatening to many people in companies producing goods or providing services. The development of financial industry into a postsocial reality of its own nevertheless has intense effects on other sectors of economy and society.

The author calls for an ethics of markets.

That which is exchanged in financialised trading extends beyond the moment, being elongated in the rights, responsibilities and liabilities it confers and so liable in nature as to throw into question the very attribute of thingness traditionally associated with exchange. The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of these issues for articulation of what actually takes place at the moment of exchange.

This research paper examines key moments in the oral histories that constitute the “City Lives” archive at the British Library, focussing upon interchanges between interviewers and traders in which the gulf between the two and their modes of articulation is exposed by the interviewers' incomprehension of the work of the trader. Here, not only is the disconnection between trading and more routine transactions revealed, but also that between the narrative resources of traders and others.

Whilst there are various reasons identified for a general inability to convey to an outsider the inside of the practice, particular issues are also at play in financial exchange; primarily the sublime aestheticisation of jeopardy that may be seen to lurk at the heart of the taking of risk.

Financialised trading's disconnection requires attention to situation so that the texture of the disconnection itself can be put into context and a theorisation of the moment of exchange that can mediate between those who engage in it and attempt to describe it and those who seek to understand it from the outside.

Jim Jarmusch’s feature film Dead Man, apparently a Western, exceeds the genre’s traditional boundaries and shows ambivalence, unclear roles in an environment existing between the times of the nation’s founding and the success of civilisation. It shows a world in transformation where change is happening, not managed. The film is a provocation for adherents to traditional Western movies. But a closer look at this world offers a surprising insight into a dynamic involved in change processes that also occur after mergers or take‐overs in contemporary business organisations. The charm in using the film as a metaphor is at least two‐fold. The interpretation with the help of Lyotard and Baudrillard shows a double edged dynamic where the successful new owner after a take‐over is not necessarily in charge of the game. Beyond that the use of a movie from outside the mainstream offers a non‐mainstream argument inside the core of a mainstream management topic.

The purpose of this paper is to pursue the themes of feminine identity, doubling and (in)visibility; first in terms of “signifyin(g)” as a cultural and literary strategy, and second, in terms of quilting seen from the fiction of Alice Walker to the quilting of Gee's Bend. In the background, there plays the relationship between art and commodification.

The paper examines “commodification” and “doubling” in the case of the Gee's Bend quilt makers. The quilts foreshadow the modernist aesthetic and are of the highest aesthetic quality. They were made in a traditional rural society by very poor uneducated black women. The quilts were not made to be sold, but were dedicated to familial remembrance and to immediate aesthetic pleasure.

Commodification doubles self and work, life and object, uniqueness and standardization, art and management. For the artist, the unicity, beauty, inspiration and creativity of art is doubled in the sale, marketing, display, distribution and mass production of “art works.” Making art is intimate, personal and individual; selling art requires public display, pleasing the all‐important customer(s) and dealing with many sorts of in‐betweens. What “commodification” is on the artist/art work level, is “doubling” on the I/me, self/persona, private/public, and in‐group/out‐group level.

The author proposes, from the example of quilt‐making, a wide‐ranging interrogation: “Is escape from commodification possible?”

Commodification doubles self and work, life and object, uniqueness and standardization and art and management. For the artist, the unicity, beauty, inspiration and creativity of art is doubled in the sale, marketing, display, distribution and mass production of “art works”. Making art is intimate, personal and individual; selling art requires public display, pleasing the all important customer(s) and dealing with many sorts of in-betweens. What commodification is on the artist/art work level is doubling on the I/me, self/persona, private/public and in-group/out-group level. This paper aims to examine the commodification and doubling in the case of the Gee’s Bend quilt makers. The quilts foreshadowed the modernist aesthetic and are of the highest aesthetic quality. But, they were made in a traditional rural society by very poor, uneducated black women. The quilts were not made to be sold but were dedicated to familial remembrance and to immediate aesthetic pleasure. But now that they are on display: is escape from commodification possible?

Reprint for special issue.

Doubling, in the original article below, was tendentious but artistically and politically to be overcome; doubling currently seems much more ominous, omnipresent and out of control. Signifyin(g) has become bomb throwing. Present day doubling apparently produces terror and not just commodification.

Invited for publication.

The author is revisiting the body of his papers on Herman Melville's Moby Dick, which he began writing some 15 years ago. Though these writings have remained an “unwritten book”, Melville's works had a lasting impact on his thinking and writing up to the present. The purpose of this paper is to reveal some of the experiences and emotions concomitant with academic writing that remain more often than not hidden from the reader.

This paper is a personal reminiscence on the experience of academic writing for about four decades. It is a story of how an academic becomes acquainted with and then influenced/inspired by a piece of literature and discovers how many organisational topics may be illuminated by works of literature.

Even an unwritten book does not necessarily lead to completely neglecting what had been written. This may be a relief and an encouragement to others, who realize they are not alone in this respect.

The paper adds some further insight into the not‐so‐obvious and broadly hidden experience of the “production process” of academic writing and illustrates the relevance and importance of literature for further thinking on such topics as management and organization.

To elaborate the nature of infotainment as a mediating concept between information and entertainment by analysing how the concept of infotainment is approached in diverse domains such as communication research.

Conceptual analysis was conducted by focussing on 41 key studies on the topic. First, it was examined how researchers have approached the relationships between informational and entertaining elements of infotainment. Thereafter, attention was directed to the ways in which people make use of infotainment. The conceptual analysis is based on the comparison of the similarities and differences between the characterizations of the above issues.

Early studies characterized infotainment in terms of soft news which is distinct from hard news offering factual information. Later investigations offer a more nuanced picture by approaching infotainment as phenomenon with diverse dimensions depicting the topics, focus and presentation style. Studies on the use of infotainment offer contradictory evidence of the extent to which infotaining programmes can increase people's interest in social, political and health issues, for example.

As the study concentrates on the analysis of an individual concept, that is, infotainment, the findings cannot be generalized to concern the ways in which informational and entertaining phenomena are related as a whole.

By elaborating the conceptual nature of infotainment, the study contributes to information behaviour research by refining the picture of the relationships between information and entertainment.