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At the end of the adventure of this book, we would like to conclude by coming back to the implications of posthumanism for the grand challenges of our time. Climate change, geopolitical crisis (with war), nuclear threats, the crumbing of sense at work, surveillance capitalism, and rising inequalities all of these dangers converge in one way or another to an old will of control. They originate in too-humanistic paths in the world. From there, posthumanism can lead to two different approaches: a processual posthumanism and a critical posthumanism. These two complementary approaches are detailed and implications are drawn for management and organization studies.

Humanity and humanism are old topics in social sciences and humanities. These notions are particularly polysemic, and paradoxically, posthumanism both does not mean a specific stance about these debates or a choice about a possible meaning.

This chapter illustrates the contribution that practice theories have offered to the ongoing conversation on critical posthumanism and how this conversation has shaped in its turn a stream of practice theorization. It offers two points of entry: a conception of practice as agencement and the sociomateriality of situated practices and it argues that the main contribution that a posthumanist practice theory offers to posthumanism is a methodological reflection for re-thinking qualitative empirical research once the human subject (and the humanist predicament associated to the Man of reason) has been decentered. It constitutes an experimentation with posthumanist qualitative inquiry, in which research practices do not “represent” reality, rather they explore various knowledge-producing practices and how different ways of producing reality have different social, economic, and political effects.

The conversation that we perform seeks to foreground mentoring as a collegial and distributed practice of reciprocity, care, and support happening in the interstices of academia.We argue that mentoring in academia can be a distributed process by promoting a learning community of doctoral students who participate in the research life and other department or research group activities. Promoting such learning communities also entails encouraging reciprocal kindness and care in any relationship, vertical or horizontal.

This book aims at exploring the reception of critical posthumanist conversations in the context of Management and Organization Studies. It constitutes an invitation to de-center the human subject and thus an invitation to the ongoing deconstruction of humanism. The project is not to deny humans but to position them in relation to other nonhumans, more-than-humans, the non-living world, and all the “missing masses” from organizational inquiry. What is under critique is humanism’s anthropocentrism, essentialism, exceptionalism, and speciesism in the context of the Anthropocene and the contemporary crisis the world experiences. From climate change to the loss of sense at work, to the new geopolitical crisis, to the unknown effects of the diffusion of AI, all these powerful forces have implications for organizations and organizing. A re- imagination of concepts, theories, and methods is needed in organization studies to cope with the challenge of a more-than-human world.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Drawing on affect theory and research on academic capitalism, this book examines the contemporary crisis of universities. With 11 international and comparative case studies, it offers a unique exploration of the contemporary role of affect in academic labour and the organisation of scholarship and explores diverse features of contemporary academic life, from the coloniality of academic capitalism to performance management and the experience of being performance-managed.

In this chapter, by metaphorically extending the meaning of the word "manspreading", on one hand we describe how the term "feminist" in "new feminist materialism" has been placed "under erasure". On the other hand, we show how the feminism has been always already all set for disturbing the discursive male order of new materialism. We foreground three main feminist ethico-onto-epistemological assumptions: decentering the subject, (re)materializing all bodies; intra-acting responsibly. Correspondingly, we articulate three alternative forms of politics - a politics of location, a politics of re-materialization, and an ethical politics of response-ability - which, we deem, embody the generative and affirmative posture of new feminist materialism and pave the way for a different knowledge production practice in Management and Organization Studies.

This chapter provides an overview of the book while introducing the main concepts of a posthumanist epistemology of practice theory. In particular, the Introduction articulates the framework of the entire book which is aimed at raising a series of radical epistemological questions about what research practices entail, how such practices—in their variety—generate knowledge, and what are the ethico-onto-epistemological implications of decentering the human beings as the main actors of the research agencement.

In this paper, we share with the reader our individual and collective experience of a reading circle organised during the pandemic, at a time of social distancing. The collective reading allowed ‘us’ to become-with other humans, non-humans, and more-than-humans with the materiality of different bodies. The reading circle allowed individual vulnerability to be shared in a process of becoming-together a multiple ‘Author’ who authored a ‘Composition’. We thus propose to the reader a Composition, in which we experiment with an embodied process of writing, where a drawing and words are mingled in-between poesy and prose. In their being intertwined, reading- and writing-together enabled a different ‘academicity’, emerging as an alternative to an individualistic experience of the neo-liberal Academia.