From the archive with love: A tribute of memory and hope for the future of Organization

Abstract

Having been an unofficial archivist of Organization over the last 20 years, in this essay I offer a selection of stories from the archive as a tribute to the journal’s 30th anniversary. I draw the stories mainly from the journal’s backstage, hidden archive (comprising old documents, interviews, and observation), but also to a lesser extent from its public (i.e. published) facet (comprising editorials and journal papers). The stories concern the journal’s relationship with Sage, its efforts to internationalise, the evolution of its archive in relation to the journal community, and the preservation of its critical intellectual mission. Altogether, these stories offer insights for the journal’s collective memory and hope for remaking its future.

Prologue: The forgotten archive

Part of Organization lives in my garage. Among collections of DIY tools, pots of paint, ladders, bikes, and emergency, medical, and art supplies, there is a box packed full of plastic A4 folders. Inside each folder, there is a story of a paper submitted to the journal in its early years, complete with the submitted paper typescript and sheets containing reviewer comments, editorial decisions, and even occasional letters of complaint from authors. I first came into possession of this box when one of the founding editors left it behind in his office when he moved to another institution from the one where I was doing my PhD. His office successor did not want the box cluttering up his space and passed it on to me.

‘I hear you are researching academic journals so you might find this interesting’, he said.

‘Fascinating’ would have been a more apt though still understated description. I received the box as if it were a precious mystic artefact containing the fragile soul of our academic field. Upon eagerly examining the contents, I was somewhat disappointed to see that what I actually held in my possession was a box of rejected or withdrawn papers. Yet over time my perspective shifted once again, and now I am firmly back into the mystic artefact camp.

I have now been the keeper of the box for 20 years through getting married, completing my PhD, becoming a mother (twice), taking and leaving several academic jobs, two career breaks, and moving house multiple times. Each time the box moved with me. On several occasions I have asked myself whether I was the right person to be the guardian of something so important and offered to return it to some of the successive editors. These offers were politely declined, one editor memorably telling me that I was among very few people in the world who could possibly find that box, and the journal archive it represented, interesting. Thus began my long journey as an unofficial archivist of Organization, seeking to understand why the journal archive matters and what it says about the journal and our field.

Why the journal archive matters

To emphasise the importance of archives from a critical perspective there is arguably no better field to draw on than critical archival studies (Caswell et al., 2017). Critical archival studies have been heavily influenced by Foucault and Derrida (1995), who in Archive Fever wrote of the archive as a necessary means of weaving together the past, present, and future. In this, archival work acts as a stubborn perennial push against the death drive – a primal urge of aggression and destruction that inflames forgetfulness, amnesia, and the annihilation of memory enabled by the archive. The archive thus embodies a struggle over collective memory, identity, and purpose; it plays a key role in knowledge production and consumption and mediates their relationship with power, transparency, democracy, and responsibility of the present towards the future (Manoff, 2004). Archival work is far from politically or epistemologically neutral, and critical archival studies have shown that archives can serve as tools of both oppression and liberation (Caswell et al., 2017; Schwartz and Cook, 2002). Forgetting or ignoring archives therefore entails an abdication of responsibility for these power dynamics and their effects, creating opportunities for (re)producing elitism, occlusion, inequality, and exclusion, and limiting emancipatory and creative possibilities of ‘archive banditry’ (i.e. disruptive archival work guided by purposeful hospitality towards suppressed voices) (Harris, 2017: 14).

There are extra dimensions to the above considerations applying to academic journals, in that the latter can themselves be understood as perennially growing archives of their respective academic fields and communities, rhythmically cumulating with each new published issue (a feature better captured by the dated term ‘periodicals’), documenting and timestamping what has been deemed a legitimate contribution to knowledge in the field at each particular point in time. Whilst journal editors and reviewers have been called many things over the years, including most notoriously gatekeepers (first popularised by Crane, 1967), they are also archivists (Ostergaard and Nugent, 2019). Understanding journals as archives of their fields exposes their various facets for critical archivist engagement. This includes the public facet of the published volumes, issues, and papers, representing what has been deemed legitimate knowledge in the field, and the backstage, hidden facet of editorial and peer-review work, which documents how the public facet of the archive has been produced. The box in my garage is part of the hidden archive, documenting what has been excluded from the public archive, how, and why. It is precious, because it is also the shadow public-archive-that-never-was, absently present like the dark side of the Moon.

Into the archive

In this essay, I will draw on some materials from the public archive of Organization, in the shape of published editorials and other articles. Mainly however, I will draw on my study of the backstage, hidden archive of Organization. As well as the box in my garage, this includes materials from the interviews with journal editors, editorial officers, and publishers, as well as observation (participant and otherwise) that I have conducted over the years. Where appropriate, I will also draw on my study of other journals’ archives to add some contextualisation.

The first main tranche of my empirical study of journals, focusing mainly on Organization, took place in 2004–2005 as part of my PhD. I was fortunate at the time in that some founding editors were still involved with the journal or were otherwise available for an interview, as were some of the more recently joined full and associate editors. Mindful of who was doing most of the archiving of the then paper-based system, I also interviewed the editorial officer, and on learning the importance of the relationship between Organization and Sage, I interviewed several publisher representatives as well. I was also able to observe an editorial meeting. Beyond Organization, I interviewed journal editors and editorial officers of three other management and organisation studies journals.

I continued my journal research post-PhD, conducting follow-up interviews with successive editors of Organization, and in 2018 conducting a second major tranche of 27 interviews with editors, social media editors, and editorial officers of six management and organisation studies journals. Over the years, my opportunities for participant observation have also expanded. For full disclosure, I am an Organization author (both published and rejected), reviewer (with over 30 reviews completed for the journal), and more recently an editorial board member. I am also a past guest co-editor of the journal’s longest-running special paper series on populism (2018–2020, 21 papers published, see Robinson and Bristow, 2020), and a co-founder of CMS InTouch, a global digital platform, launched jointly by Organization and the Academy of Management Critical Management Studies (CMS) Division, to help connect and foster CMS community across the world through free and open online events. All these experiences have facilitated my immersion into the Organization archive and shaped my interpretations of it from multiple positionings and perspectives.

Stories from the archive

It has been difficult to select the stories from the archive for this essay, and there is so much more to say than what the confines of space and time allow. I have settled on the four stories in the sub-sections below because they surface some surprises (or at least aspects that have been surprising to me), do not shy away from past and present challenges, but also capture something of the journal’s spirit, offering insights and hope for the future. The stories concern the journal’s relationship with Sage, its efforts to internationalise, the evolution of its archive in relation to the journal community, and the preservation of its critical intellectual mission.

On a reflexive note, I should say that when I look into the Organization archive, I feel pain as well as joy, yet this essay is a ‘romance of the archive’ (Keen, 2001) in perhaps one of its truest forms. I write this essay with love because I can never stop loving Organization. My roots have grown too deeply into its rhizome, and I can never disentangle myself from what I owe to it. I know I am one of many so affected, which is a testament to the special role it has played in growing and sustaining critical management and organisation studies community. At its 30 years, the journal is so much a part of this community, that it is impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. I hope it will always be thus as they – we – continue to grow together.

Relationship with Sage, an unlikely hero

And so, onto the first story. It could be assumed that Organization, as a critical journal, emerged from a purely intellectual critical endeavour, and that its persisting entanglement with the large commercial publisher Sage has been a necessary compromise due to legal and financial reasons. However, one of the greatest surprises of my research into the history of the journal has been that Organization is not only published and owned by Sage, but also, both intellectually and organisationally, owes its existence to a Sage editor.

The founding editors I interviewed had very warm memories of this particular commissioning editor, a woman who was described by one founding editor as ‘very sparkly, very interested in ideas, and very keen to try and do something different’. This Sage editor attended the conference which subsequently gave rise to the publication of Rethinking Organization (Reed and Hughes, 1992). At the conference, she was, according to another founding editor, ‘particularly taken with the radical and sometimes romantic nature of the contributions’, as well as ‘multi-disciplinary interests of the contributors’ and their close working relationships.

Subsequently, she became, in another founding editor’s words, the driving force behind the founding of the journal. She went to visit an academic who would eventually become one of the five founding full editors and proposed the idea for an organisation studies journal that would do things differently from US-based journals like ASQ and the Academy of Management journals. She also asked that academic to edit the journal. She then played a pivotal role in helping to assemble the team of founding editors, shaping the journal’s character. (E.g. she wanted the journal to be ‘mid-Atlantic’, drawing on European-style alternative and multi-disciplinary perspectives on organisation studies but also having a firm footage in the US, with US academics represented among the team of the founding editors). She also ensured that the journal proposal passed the review process at Sage. Although academic ideas were clearly as important in giving rise to Organization, as were the friendships and networks between the original editors in shaping the journal’s first editorial team and its editorial approach, the founding editors I interviewed were adamant that Organization would not exist without the Sage editor’s initial idea and efforts.

The Sage editor’s role continued to be important beyond the journal’s foundation. For example, she was heavily involved in planning and shaping the journal’s first issue, helping to ensure that it would be ‘a whopper’ (a founding editor’s words – and it was, containing 239 pages and, in addition to the first editorial, 22 articles of various formats) in terms of both quality and quantity of contributions, which she saw as essential to starting to establish the journal’s reputation. She also, unusually, authored an article in the first issue – the journal’s first ever Connexions piece in which she brought together world famine and the study of organisations (Jones, 1994). However, by the time of the first tranche of my empirical research (2004–2005), she had left Sage, mysteriously disappearing without a trace (at the end of my protracted attempts to find her, my most promising lead told me that she did not wish to be found, which persuaded me to drop the search). Most of the rest of the Sage team involved in the founding of Organization had left too, and the relationship between the editors and the publisher had soured. No longer Sage’s sole organisation studies journal (not least the one the publisher had nurtured into being), Organization now had to share the publisher’s attention and resources with several more recent additions. The editors at the time felt this struggle for resources on the one hand, and on the other complete ownership by Sage interfered with their decisions and the journal’s success.

Whilst most of those difficulties have since been overcome, there are lessons that can undoubtedly be drawn from this origin story about the dangers of close entanglements between critical academic journals and commercial publishers (see Beverungen et al., 2012). Yet, on the flipside, I would like to make a different emphasis. Namely, to me the story of the founding of Organization highlights the importance of remembering that allies for critical endeavours can be found in unusual places. That we can owe the very existence of our fundamental critical projects and institutions to such unexpected allies. And also, that something is lost when such allies disappear and are forgotten. This speaks to the debates within critical management and organisation studies about critical performativity (Spicer et al., 2009, 2016) but flips the vector of the latter suggesting that sometimes we benefit from non-academic others acting critically performatively towards us. It also suggests that in seeking allies, we need to avoid stereotyping people into meaningless groups such as ‘publishers’ or, more broadly, ‘managers’, or ‘practitioners’, because individuals rarely fit into neat categories and boundaries, and neither do their intentions and practices.

Internationalisation and its limits

Some of the tensions concerning internationalisation can already be glimpsed from the Sage story above. The Sage commissioning editor envisaged Organization as ‘mid-Atlantic’ and worked with the founding editors to ensure that both sides of the Atlantic were represented as part of the original editorial team. Intellectual and commercial considerations were, according to the founding editors I interviewed, deeply intertwined in this positioning. Europe and particularly the UK were at the time considered to be a key hub of alternative, non-mainstream, interdisciplinary, and critical approaches (see also Üsdiken, 2010). It was also recognised that the US, although dominated by the mainstream, represented the largest and most influential market for management and organisation studies journals and ideas, and that it was therefore essential to engage with US scholars and scholarship. Yet the US market was seen as almost impossible for a non-US journal to enter. If Organization were to stand a chance, it not only had to have US ‘roots’ and ‘grounding’ (in founding editors’ words) but also look completely North American, because it was felt that US academics would not read a journal that looked different from US norms. This apparently resulted in rather meticulously chameleonic adaptations, including, for example, the use of the US spelling in the journal’s title (Organization with a ‘z’ rather than the British ‘s’).

Internationalisation was therefore built into the journal at its foundation, but so were its limits. The journal’s first editorial on one level cast the net much beyond the confines of the mid-Atlantic, not only defining Organization as ‘international in scope and vision’ (Burrell et al., 1994: 12) but also envisioning it as ‘carrying the hopes of and for a significant number of colleagues across the globe’ (Burrell et al., 1994: 14). The aim, according to a founding editor, was to communicate the ‘intention of being a globalised product – of looking to all the continents and not privileging one over the other, and opening organisation studies up beyond its traditional location in the Anglo-Saxon world, to all sorts of other voices’. However, on another, operational level, the mid-Atlantic focus reasserted itself. To ‘assure that international differences in style and substance [would] be respected’ (Burrell et al., 1994: 12) the founding editors decentralised the submission and review processes, but this decentralisation was limited to three countries: USA (for the Americas), Sweden (for Continental Europe), and the UK. Although progressive at the time, this obviously left much of the globe uncovered, prefiguring the long-lasting struggle of successive editors to grow a more broadly international community. At the time of the first tranche of my empirical research (2004–2005) the editors were still trying to push past the limits. Not only was the engagement of the US ‘market’, despite all the efforts, still proving difficult, but also, they were facing the persistence of ‘an Anglophone hegemony’ (Why Neodisciplinary? Why Now?, 2003: 407) and limited representation from the Global South. As one editor lamented in an interview:

‘Where’s the stuff from Africa? Where’s the stuff from South America? What can you do about that? I mean, there is some amount of stuff from South America, but not very much’.

The narrowness of the original ‘mid-Atlantic’ focus is much more obvious 30 years after the journal’s foundation, and to an extent it still haunts Organization today. Technological developments and intellectual and social shifts have made it both easier and more pertinent to engage more broadly internationally, and in many ways the successive editors of Organization have made use of these opportunities to grow a more truly international and diverse community. The editorial team is now more broadly international, and the editorial processes of the journal are much better set up to facilitate a more global engagement (see the next section). Organization has become an intellectual home for many debates of global urgency and for hearing voices from around the world, including the Global South (e.g. Jammulamadaka et al., 2021; Masood and Nisar, 2020; Misoczky, 2020; Zanoni and Mir, 2022; Zulfiqar, 2022). This is an achievement that can be truly celebrated. However, there are still power/knowledge asymmetries that point to the lingering dominance of the mid-Atlantic in the journal makeup, which are all the more difficult to eradicate in that they embody the broader academic and societal inequalities and injustices. Further internationalising Organization therefore remains an area of much potential for collective intellectual activism and transformation for the journal community.

Evolution of the archive

In the section above I have referred to the technological developments and changes in the editorial processes. When I consider the Organization archive, one of the stories that speaks most clearly to me is the evolution of the archive itself, and how this evolution has enabled both changes and continuities, in constant tension with each other, of the journal and its community.

I opened this essay with an ode to an old box of Organization rejects and withdrawals, consisting of folders of printed documentation tracing the review story of each submitted paper. At the time of the first tranche of my empirical study (2004–2005), this was still the prevailing form of the journal’s hidden, backstage (review process) archive, though its days were numbered. Organization still operated a hard-copy manuscript submission and review system, which required multiple printed copies of the paper and the cover letter to be sent to the editorial officer via ‘snail-mail’. In the UK, where my research was based at the time, decisions were then made collectively at editorial meetings that took place every 6 to 10 weeks.

I had an opportunity to observe one of these meetings, huddling with three editors (two full and one associate) and the editorial officer in an editor’s university office. The meeting (which I was told was typical) was non-hierarchical and democratic, as we sat on chairs set in a circle around a box that was very much like the one in my garage except this one contained ‘live’ papers. During the meeting, these papers and their associated documents (e.g. reviewer comments) were passed around the room as part of collective decision-making. Altogether in that one meeting, decisions were made on 31 manuscripts and five special issue proposals. Additionally, plans for 14 forthcoming issues were made and/or progressed, and a number of strategic issues such as journal finances, a change in the management of special issues, and succession planning were discussed.

Interviews with editors flagged up the importance attributed by the editorial team to this practice of collective decision-making. The editors I interviewed felt that this practice part-fulfilled the commitment made at the founding of Organization to minimise the damaging effects of the inevitably disciplinary aspect of the editorial role (see Burrell et al., 1994). Collective decision-making was seen as a means of ‘diffusing’ (editors’ words) the disciplinary role of any one individual editor, bringing more balance and multiple perspectives to each decision.

However, many editors were growing increasingly discontented with the system. So was, apparently, the journal community. The review process was very slow, especially for papers that happened to arrive just after an editorial meeting and had to wait up to 10 weeks to be considered. Not many editors could regularly travel to the editorial meetings, especially internationally, which meant that those in locations further flung from their closest editorial hubs were often excluded from collective decision-making. And, worst of all, despite the best efforts of the part-time editorial officer, the paper-based system meant that papers sometimes fell through the cracks and disappeared into a black hole (if, e.g. a paper was submitted to an individual editor, and they forgot about it). There was a sense that the journal was losing authors and reputation in the community because of these issues.

This was exacerbated by the acknowledgement that the academic journal publishing landscape in management and organisation studies had changed since the foundation of Organization. More journals were now open to the forms of critical work that Organization published (see also Parker and Thomas, 2011), and Organization was at risk of being a victim of its own success, in that it had been crucial in legitimising critical approaches. Furthermore, academic work and careers were also more dominated by neoliberal performance metrics, including publication targets mediated by journal rankings and citation counts. It was felt that the journal could no longer get away with its ‘Heath Robinson’ and ‘cottage industry’ (editors’ words) style of organising just on the strength of its intellectual project. There was too much competition for authors, papers, and reviewers.

Plans were therefore underway to ‘professionalize’ (editors’ words) the journal, thoroughly transforming editorial and review processes. Over the next few years, Organization moved first to electronic submission and then eventually to the ScholarOne Manuscript Central review management system. This was accompanied by other changes, such as the introduction of formal editorial terms of office that put an end to the long era of the founding editors and ensured a regular infusion of fresh perspectives into the running of the journal. The collective manuscript decisions model was replaced with the now more familiar system of decentralised individual decision-making by editors and associate editors. The efforts to minimise the disciplinary aspects of the editorial role switched focus to being spread around the collective in a different way, which involved giving associate editors ‘a more significant role in the reviewing process, taking papers through from initial submission to final decision’ (Calás et al., 2006: 6). The public aspect of the journal archive was also transformed with the moving of the current and past issues of Organization online, enabling much broader engagement and readership.

It is important to note that these changes had been feared as well as desired, and even resisted for a while. There had been tension with Sage over resourcing the professionalisation, and tension within the editorial team and board over what the changes would mean for the spirit and intellectual project of the journal. There had been worries over whether making the running of Organization more professional would also make it more managerial, pitting the process of the journal’s production against the contents of its pages. And efforts to make the journal more downloadable and citable was seen by some as sailing too close to the wind of playing the metrics game. As an observer, I also had some concerns. At the time I was also studying three other journals, which had already completed or were in the process of going through their own programmes of professionalisation. The part-automation and mechanisation that came with the transition had left some editors feeling somewhat dehumanised, and in thrall to the commands of the ScholarOne Manuscript Central system.

The impact of ScholarOne Manuscript Central on journal work deserves its own paper, probably based on Actor-Network Theory. The system facilitates the circulation of papers, authors, reviewers, and editors in entirely new ways and affects them significantly (consider, for instance, process tracking and time management aspects). It has transformed the backstage archive of Organization and many other journals, ‘really cornering the academic journal market’ (an editor’s words). Its effects are fascinatingly multifaceted. It has standardised and depersonalised the review system, making it perennially effortful for editors and editorial offers to reinsert human touch into the process, continually fighting the tyranny of default settings. It has also made geographical distances less relevant and boundaries more permeable, facilitating internationalisation. It has a complex relationship with memory. For example, it both engineers collective forgetting through the automatic removal of past manuscripts from view and fights the death drive in surprising ways. I still remember finding, as part of my guest editorial work for Organization, a suggested reviewer in the ScholarOne system and upon Googling him discovering that he had passed away some years previously. Yet there he was in the Organization system, eternally ready for his next assignment (though he would always auto-decline them) in some twisted version of an academic afterlife.

The Organization archive still keeps evolving. The growing importance of social media has given rise to the role of the social media editor, of which there are now two at Organization. Social media enable new kinds of public and backstage archives to be constructed, and new ways of engaging with old and new communities both within and beyond academic boundaries. Much of their potential is yet untapped in academic journal publishing (Tomkins, 2020), and this represents an exciting challenge for Organization to explore further in terms of opportunities for more meaningful intellectual activism (Contu, 2018; Prichard and Benschop, 2018; Rhodes et al., 2018) and other ways of making a difference in the world, as well as in terms of political and ethical responsibilities that inevitably accompany engagement with new technologies.

This also applies to other recent technological developments, such as the rapid spread and adoption of videoconferencing technologies such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams during the Covid-19 pandemic. As I wrote elsewhere, in ‘the context in which academic conference time and funding are the preserve of the privileged elite, and the environmental and health impacts of travel are increasingly problematic’, these technologies offer ‘new possibilities for more democratic, inclusive, and sustainable ways for journals to connect and foster their communities’ (Bristow, 2021: 19).

Organization has already started to make use of such possibilities. For example, the journal’s very first online editorial board meeting held during the pandemic had noticeably higher and more geographically diverse attendance and also a far livelier discussion than the preceding pre-pandemic face-to-face meeting held at the Academy of Management. And CMS InTouch, launched through a partnership between Organization and the Academy of Management CMS Division to connect, nurture, and grow the international CMS community through the pandemic and beyond, has already borne fruit in terms of giving rise to new strands of critical conversations, new international collaborations, and new ways of supporting early career colleagues. Importantly, in being run by academic volunteers and keeping all its events free and open to all, it gives Organization a means of reaching beyond its paywall to where the main restrictions for participation are limited to having a decent internet connection (which, in fairness, in not a given everywhere) and navigating the challenges of global time zones (somewhat moderated by the recording function). As with the use of social media, there are opportunities here for Organization, in partnership with CMS InTouch, for a more radical reimagining of what a critical academic journal can be and what kinds of meaningful impact it can have on our world.

The challenge of critique

This leads to the last story from the archive that I would like to highlight in this essay, namely the preservation of the critical intellectual mission of Organization over the years, and some of the challenges associated with critique. Over the 30 years of its history, the commitment of the journal’s editors, and therefore of the journal, to criticality has never wavered. It was set out as a central tenet in the journal’s first manifesto (Burrell et al., 1994), where it was linked to openness, reflexivity, imagination, challenging orthodoxies, and neo-disciplinarity (weaving together a new multidisciplinary field for studying organisations critically), and subsequently reaffirmed and further elaborated in subsequent editorials (e.g. Parker and Thomas, 2011; Why Neodisciplinary? Why Now?, 2003). Shortly into the new millennium, the word ‘critical’ replaced the word ‘interdisciplinary’ in the journal’s subtitle, further highlighting its importance.

The critical focus of Organization has survived and flourished through the rise of journal rankings, citation indices, altmetrics, and other technologies that have acted to pull management and organisation studies towards the mainstream (see Grey, 2010; Üsdiken, 2010) in pursuit of narrowly defined ‘excellence’ (Butler and Spoelstra, 2012). The critical focus has also survived and flourished through the journal’s programme of professionalisation and associated changes to editorial processes, the transition to ManuscriptCentral, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the persecution of critical scholarship in academic departments and universities (such as recently at the University of Leicester, UK). I would like to emphasise that this needs to be seen as an achievement. In my many years of researching journals, I have seen several lose their way, their distinctive focus, through similar changes. The making of a journal’s identity is continuously and collectively effortful, and therefore the persistence of Organization as a critical journal requires both a celebration and an ongoing commitment and determination to sustain it into the future.

It also requires an ongoing, attentive examination of the many ways in which forms of critique shape the journal and its community. Many of these forms of critique are not unique to Organization (Parker and Thomas, 2011) and some have been part-and-parcel of academic journal publishing for centuries. All forms of critique, however otherwise desirable, have a sinister side, and none perhaps more so than ‘critique-as-censure’ (Bristow, 2021), which has become deeply embedded in the review processes of academic journals, contributing to symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1976) and ‘micro-terror’ in contemporary academic work (Ratle et al., 2020; see also Brewis, 2018).

Thirty years ago, the founding editors of Organization set out to establish ‘a nurturing rather than adversarial relationship’ between reviewers and authors (Burrell et al., 1994: 13), aiming to do the manuscript review process differently from established disciplinary norms. Subsequently, in my study of the journal, I have witnessed ongoing and concerted efforts by the successive editors to run the journal according to these intentions and in the best spirit of what Gabriel (2010) describes as editorial ethic of care. Despite this, Organization has not yet been able to entirely escape the damaging side of critique-as-censure. Reviewer comments in the box of rejects in my garage are an emotionally challenging read, and not just because of the outcomes for those papers. Several reviews stand out for their haunting cruelty to authors. It is important to note that not all of them have been sent out to authors (representing acts of caring censure by the editors), yet they are not just relics of the past, either. I have come across similar reviews in my recent work with the journal.

So, living up to the task of taming critique-as-censure to ensure a fully nurturing review process remains an ongoing challenge, formidable not least because it requires a commitment from the broader journal community at a time when voluntary reviewer labour is particularly scarce and precious. Yet in my view it is one of the most meaningful and worthwhile ways in which Organization can impact and sustain critical management and organisation studies community at a time when it, and academic work in general, seem to be under attack from so many directions. In this context, as well as continuing to foster editorial and reviewer acts of care and kindness, it may be worth considering experimenting with alternative forms of peer review, such as single-blind, or open review processes. Whilst such alternative forms have their own disadvantages, shaking things up once in a while could help jolt reviewers out of default practices that come with hiding behind anonymity. An open peer review experiment may also help the journal community experience more collective and collaborative forms of writing and publishing, pushing against the norms of individualism, isolation, and competition in academic knowledge production. Hopefully, this will open up new horizons.

Epilogue: What the archive gives us

And that is what I find when I look into the Organization archive: I find hope. I see stories that are full of challenges and imperfect decisions, but also plenty of love, determination, and courage to shape something special. I see allies coming together, some through old friendships and some from unlikely places, and making a joyful mockery of purists’ divides. I see the importance of critical ideas beyond the confines of critical scholarship and disciplinary boundaries. Against the background of global inequalities and exclusion, I see sustained efforts of inclusion and connection, doggedly chipping away at injustice. I see willingness and courage to reinvent the journal, whilst keeping the spirit of critical and reflexive scholarship, and growing and nurturing the international critical management and organisational studies community, through whatever crises it is facing. And through this change and growth, I see courage and determination to face up to our own demons.

I hope these stories from the archive help others find hope too, looking back at the journey we have already walked together as a community, and sparking ideas for new adventures.

As for you, Organization, happy anniversary. I hope you continue to grow. I hope you continue to be brave, pushing against stale orthodoxies, established conventions, and your own boundaries. I hope you continue to change yet keep your heart through it all. And I hope that we can engage in some serious ‘archive banditry’ (Harris, 2017: 14) together, surfacing forgotten and untold stories of the past so that we can remake the future.