This book offers a fresh perspective on work showing how past events, ideas, practices and values haunt organizations.
In a contemporary context where organizations are ever more obsessed with growth and transformation, the book discovers a politics of time at the heart of questions about power and ethics. It develops a non-linear approach to the history of education showing what it means to inherit from previous generations and how encounters with ghosts can open possibilities of other, alternative futures.
For academics and students across management, education, and sociology, the book is a crucial resource for understanding contemporary organizations. It invites you to find new ways to care for the future of work.
Price: $119.95
Pages: 150
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Imprint: Bristol University Press
Series: Feminist Perspectives on Work and Organization
Publication Date:
25 November 2025
ISBN: 9781529233742
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Organizational Behavior, Organizational theory and behaviour, BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Management, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Feminism & Feminist Theory, Business ethics and social responsibility, Cultural studies, Sociology: work and labour, Feminism and feminist theory
"This is a book written by a truly innovative thinker who reveals how the past is never ‘the past’ but is always part of ‘the present’. She shows that time is always out of joint because local ‘histories’ reverberate in the everyday doing of work, in unsuspected and almost unnoticed ways, so past and present collide. Written in a very accessible style, this book is invaluable for understanding what goes on beneath the surface of workplace interactions", Professor Nancy Harding, University of Bath.
Justine Grønbæk Pors is Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School. Her work concerns changes to public policy and to the welfare state. She is particularly interested in questions about temporality, work subjectivity, affect and ghosts.
1. Introduction
2. The Archive
3. Policy Erasures
4. The Haunted Worker
5. A Cold Shiver
6. Ghostly Figures
7. Conclusion: Inherited Time
