Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary. Explaining why contemporary problematic phenomena require a more expansive understanding than what is allowed in conventional organizational studies scholarship, this forward-looking Research Agenda brings insights from recent feminist new materialisms and critical posthumanist theorizing into the field of organization studies. Marta B. Calas and Linda Smircich have assembled herein an international and transdisciplinary community of scholars, whose research in fertile transnational spaces demonstrates the differences this novel scholarship could make in the domain of organization studies. The book serves as a tool and means for questioning fundamental metatheoretical premises and knowledge production practices, focusing particularly on those which, unwittingly, may be contributing to issues of concern across the globe. Chapters further articulate which premises and practices may help in decentering the 'common sense' nature of the field, facilitating engagement with affirmative possibilities for a world that is straying further from conventions. Coining the phrase 'thinking-saying-doing-otherwise' as an ontological shift and a call to action, the book ultimately highlights the importance of transdisciplinary, transnational research collectivities for accomplishing necessary changes. Providing novel critical approaches by intersecting feminist new materialisms with organization studies, this dynamic Research Agenda will prove invaluable to early and more established scholars interested in future-oriented organization and management research and practices in business studies and the sociology of organizations.

First published in 1997, this volume asks: when was 'The Postmodern' in the History of Management Thought? Marta B. Calas and Linda Smircich have chosen this subtitle as entry point to the collection for several reasons. The first, and most evident, is that it prompts us to reflect on the inclusion of a volume on postmodern organization studies within a series of books on the history of management thought. What does such inclusion signal? Are we saying that we are past the postmodern in organization studies? That we have transcended modernity and, beyond, postmodernity? Similar to other social sciences, organization and management studies in the Anglo-American and European academy became impressed by the styles of 'postmodernism' and their epistemological companions, 'poststructuralisms', during the 1980s. For this collection we have selected twenty two journal articles, published between 1985 and 1996, that we consider emblematic of postmodern endeavours in management thought, as they further our understanding of how 'truth' (of any paradigmatic persuasion), is fashioned through particular discourses and other signifying practices. Taken together, these articles address the following questions: What has the field accomplished through attempts at being postmodern? With what consequences? And, where does the field stand now, if it is still/already (going) after 'the postmodern'? In our view 'the postmodern' cannot transcend modern management thought; it is, rather, part of it. Nevertheless, the mere appearance of efforts towards making the field 'postmodern' makes it important to account for them in the history of the field. Such is the narrative that we are trying to portray in this volume.