Learning is predicated on turning towards new ideas and competences, and thus turning away from previous practices. Thus, with learning comes its necessary twin: forgetting. It is a mixed bag of blessings, for individuals as well as for organizations. On the one hand, it is argued that organizational forgetting helps to prevent further reproduction of old pathologies. On the other, it may signify loss of communal identity and discontinuity. The managerialist turn under neoliberalism brought a dogma of imperative of constant change, which results in erosion and disintegration of structures and communities and undermines resistance. This article is focussed on the idea of learning differently, which incorporates forgetting but with an awareness and reflexivity of what is being lost. The curating of memory helps not just to preserve memories and knowledge but to rediscover the past for the needs of the present. Learning differently requires a thoughtful relationship with the past and may support regeneration, instead of linear change management.

Universities have been with us for centuries if not millennia. The academy is one of the oldest organisational forms still in existence. Throughout their history, universities have evolved, experimenting with various kinds of organisational structure: from student association, through private company, to ecclesiastical, state, or local government institution. They have been continually altering their management structure: from a collective of peers through a centralised hierarchy and a loose federation of faculties to a structure based on deeply democratic collegiality. Currently in Poland, as in many other countries, a series of reforms have put universities under pressure to “marketise.” This paper discusses some of the urgent dilemmas that have arisen after the transformation of the sector and offers some ideas for where sustainable managerial solutions could be sought.

In this article we consider suitcases: ubiquitous objects in museum exhibitions used to signify incarceration as well as involuntary or forced migration. Building on fieldwork from museums and public spaces, we consider how suitcases themselves are consigned to the "attic of memory:" As museum displays or as piles of discarded remnants, offered as vestiges, as witnesses to human loss and suffering at death camps such as Auschwitz. We consider suitcases firstly as aspects of the extended self, as described in Russell Belk's work, and subsequently as symbolic object figuring imprisonment and mobility in museum exhibitions. We present three different such instances: a suitcase full of personal belongings presented to a museum, a set of concrete facsimile suitcases symbolizing forced migration, and a display of suitcases representing individual stories of confinement and migration. Although some of the life stories in the latter exhibition are presented with happy endings, by and large the museum displays featuring suitcases tell of forced movement and forced immobility. This tension animates our analysis, as we explore the double signification of suitcases as markers of mobility, but also of immobility and imprisonment, as well as the intrusive gaze of the state or other voyeur (including the museum visitor). A suitcase is, thus, not just an extension of the self but represents the lost body, for which the museum becomes the final, very public resting place. It becomes and remains an important memory device, even as its very ubiquity threatens to banalize its meaning into a one-dimensional shortcut.

In this article, we adopted the genre of response letter, answering an editorial letter proposing to reject our submission. The rejection letter itself is fictionalized, but collated from various real reviews our texts have received throughout our academic career. Our aim is to both highlight the mechanisms pushing academic writing toward conformity, dullness, and irrelevance and to point toward the possibilities of Writing Differently: of crafting academic texts aligned with feminist sensibilities, conveying meaning as well as feeling, embedded in context, and open to difference. We discuss some texts by authors who have managed to break free from the constraints of the dominant style and published beautiful, meaningful texts, which challenge the orthodoxy of academic journal articles. We argue that the form of writing matters; that the question of style is, at its heart, the question of epistemology, what can be known, how it can be known, and how can such knowledge be shared. In addition, it also concerns the knowing subject and is thus a deeply feminist issue. We end our text by inviting the readers to join the growing ranks of academics crossing the boundaries of traditional journal articles, and to explore how Writing Differently enables new insights to be discovered and communicated.

Zarządzanie – to branie odpowiedzialności, w szczególności za zarządzaną organizację, jej dobro i przyszłość (Mintzberg, 2019). Jest to działalność zapewniająca przede wszystkim przetrwanie organizacji i to jest podstawa zarządzania strategicznego (Obłój, 1987). Zgadzamy się z głosami krytykującymi (np. Parker, 2018) zarządzanie za to, że w ostatnich dekadach oderwało się od tych swoich kluczowych zadań i uległo degradacji, poniekąd samo podważyło swój sens istnienia. Z drugiej strony, Lech Witkowski (2018) pisze o kryzysie humanistyki. Humanistyka także oderwała się od sensu swego istnienia poprzez bezrefleksyjne tkwienie w polaryzujących definicjach i samo-określeniach. Autor przekonuje, że potrzebna jest humanistyka stosowana, gotowa do tego, by zmierzyć się z wyzwaniami złożonej współczesności. Jest to obecność w życiu społecznym humanistyki dojrzałej, rozumiana jako głęboka refleksja kulturowa, zdolna do wyzwolenia przyszłości z roli zakładniczki teraźniejszości. Humanistyki, która „z podniesioną głową”, bez kompleksów wobec innych dziedzin realizuje, przy pomocy specyficznych dla siebie metod, cele poznawcze ważne dla ludzkości, zgodnie ze swymi najlepszymi tradycjami (Rens 2013; 2017). Taka humanistyka polega zatem także na podejmowaniu odpowiedzialności za przyszłość (Witkowski, 2018). W tym tekście proponujemy mocny humanistyczny program dla praktyki i refleksji nad zarządzaniem.

For almost ten years, Jerzy Kociatkiewicz and Elizabeth Carnegie have studied museums and statue parks dedicated to the recent history in Central and Eastern Europe. But they never questioned why their accounts took the form they took. They critically examine and differentiate their roles in this chapter in relation to this question. Their account is partly auto-ethnographic and partly duo-ethnographic. The tale of accountability is necessarily confessional. Despite venturing into personal narratives, they finish in a shared voice of coherence constructing.

The following text is a play co-written as a response to, and a remembrance of, the experiences during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is based on writing during lockdown that was meant to make sense of our own experiences as academic labourers and those gained from informal conversations with colleagues. Following the conventions and the sensibilities of theatre, the text demands and offers a (re-)embodiment of voices and affectivities that connected those bodies in a situation in which bodies were absent, yet highly present in their vulnerability. We thus invite the readers to treat the text primarily as a stageable drama rather than an academic paper given unusual form. An introduction that belongs to a more classical academic genre expresses our inspirations and relevant points of reference. A short prose coda hints towards some of the insights we have gained by crafting the play.

Whether a harbinger of a new era or an anomaly, the year 2020 confronted students and teachers alike with the necessity of reassessing and reformulating teaching and learning possibilities and practicalities. In this very subjective text, we examine some of our own experiences of higher education under lockdown and physical distancing conditions. In an apparent paradox, the changed conditions simultaneously added more stress and uncertainty to the students' learning process while also providing the learners with more confidence to question the established norms. Against the background of ongoing systemic collapse, we explore our own and our students' stories and poems chronicling learning in a time of crisis and constraint. Drawing on critiques of modern consumer capitalism underpinning management education, we use the experience of a ruptured semester to propose a reinterpretation of management learning as rooted in the paradoxes of desire and longing: for success, career, but also for enlightenment, revelation, social change and togetherness. We ask the reader to embrace the poetic and libidinal aspects of desire and longing as central to the transformative potential of the learning encounter and propose to reconstitute the basis for education as rooted in desire and longing: for contact, for learning, for revelation.

In times of liquid modernity, when human lifespan often exceeds that of grand political structures, monumental statues continue to be built and celebrated as symbols of enduring ideological triumphs. In their apparent permanence, these statues often outlive the political systems they were designed to glorify, creating a dilemma of how to exhibit their ambiguous or disgraced presence. In this article, we argue that the heritagization of political figures and pasts is central to the reframing of such narratives and that tourists have a key, if sometimes unwitting, role to play in the shaping of the emerging political imaginaries. Focusing on statue parks in Central and Eastern Europe showcasing communist-era sculptures, we examine strategies of exhibition and tourist responses to the multivalent presence of the monuments of past regimes. We identify four approaches of destruction, delegitimization, decontextualization, and depoliticization, each tied to a particular political moment and rhetorical goal. Examining these shifting modes of preservation, presentation and interpretation, we query the tourists' role as participants in the processes of stabilization and peace-building, proposing that in times of global re-evaluation of the symbolism of past monuments, these sites can serve to guide much needed analysis and reflection.

The aim of this article is both a pronouncement of doom and an offer of hope for the Western business school. Both come from the recognition that business schools are haunted and that the haunting spectre is none other than the capitalist ideology. We ground our thinking in the established rich ‘ghostly’ academic literature where the metaphor of the ghost is used to reveal the powerful agency of the unspoken-of and the unseen. Using three fictional ghostly tales as interpretive lenses, we make three arguments. First, we argue that capitalism is a ghost in the walls of the business school. Second, we suggest that capitalism’s ghostly nature prevents the business school from offering a curriculum that serves more than the growth of financial capital. Third, we propose that naming of capitalism is integral to the exorcism of its ghost and the creation of curriculum that engages with the social and environmental challenges of our times.

Mamy coraz wiecej dowodow, ze obecny model pracy sie nie sprawdza. Brakuje nam mechanizmow powstrzymania dewastacji dobra wspolnego, lącznie z tym najcenniejszym: biosferą naszej planety umozliwiającą nam wszystkim przezycie. Jednakze nasz destruktywny wplyw na planete nie jest skutkiem naszego czlowieczenstwa, ale globalnego systemu spolecznego, w ktorym wszyscy zyjemy. Zaś nierowna relacja pomiedzy kapitalem a pracą stanowi istote tego systemu.

Mamy coraz wiecej dowodow, ze obecny model pracy sie nie sprawdza. Brakuje nam mechanizmow powstrzymania dewastacji dobra wspolnego, lącznie z tym najcenniejszym: biosferą naszej planety umozliwiającą nam wszystkim przezycie. Jednakze nasz destruktywny wplyw na planete nie jest skutkiem naszego czlowieczenstwa, ale globalnego systemu spolecznego, w ktorym wszyscy zyjemy. Zaś nierowna relacja pomiedzy kapitalem a pracą stanowi istote tego systemu.

Work organizations have long employed various management techniques in order to maximize workers’ engagement, which in itself implies that ‘alienation’ at work is common. One of the central descriptions of alienation in classic writings is the idea of not being ‘at home’ while at work. In this article, however, we explore its obverse, which we term ‘disalienation’ – a relationship to work based on assumptions concerning control and agency, aided by collective participatory mechanisms for identity construction and dialogical building of social relationships. We suggest that the concept and experience can be productively explored in the context of organizations which are owned and controlled by workers. Using ethnographic case studies from two Polish co-operatives, we discuss the potential characteristics of a disalienating relation to a work organization and suggest that co-operatives can provide a way for workers to be ‘at home’ while they are at work.

Mamy coraz wiecej dowodow, ze obecny model pracy sie nie sprawdza. Brakuje nam mechanizmow powstrzymania dewastacji dobra wspolnego, lącznie z tym najcenniejszym: biosferą naszej planety umozliwiającą nam wszystkim przezycie. Jednakze nasz destruktywny wplyw na planete nie jest skutkiem naszego czlowieczenstwa, ale globalnego systemu spolecznego, w ktorym wszyscy zyjemy. Zaś nierowna relacja pomiedzy kapitalem a pracą stanowi istote tego systemu.

Ruch oporu w naszym kraju jest znany i szanowany przez rozne środowiska, od konserwatywnej prawicy, szczegolnie pod postacią bohaterskiego Powstania Warszawskiego, po lewice, oddającą cześc nieustraszonym antyfaszystowskim partyzantom. Dlaczegbo wiec opor wobec zmian stale jest spolecznym imaginarium straszakiem i przejawem karygodnego wstecznictwa? Skąd treści kursow promujące liderow transformacyjnych umiejących pokonac opor? Skąd medialny obraz szkodliwego i ciemnego oporu?