Inherited time: Theorising ghosts in organisations

This talk is part of a broader conversation about how present moments are entangled to pasts and futures as well as about the complex relations between temporality, subjectivity and power in organisations.

Justine will present her work on organisational ghosts, that is, on how people, values, ideas, and practices are forgotten, disappear, or are disavowed from sanctioned language and knowledge but still linger as a strange affective intuition that things could be otherwise.

She will offer the concept of inherited time to theorise the politics of time at work in contemporary organisations. With inspiration from Derrida and Barad, inheritance is here understood as an enigmatic presence in the present of absent pasts and futures. Inheritance evokes the past, troubles its ontological status as over, and opens other possible futures. 

Doing empirical research with a non-linear theory of time requires methodological experimentation. In this talk, Justine therefore also presents a hauntological methodology apt to engage with what has been forgotten or removed from organisational presents, zooming in on how such absences hold agentic powers in relationship to work and subjectivity.

The talk is based on Justine’s recent book, Inherited Time – a hauntological history of work in educational vocations, published by Bristol University Press.