"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.

"Inherited Time is simply a brilliant book relevant for anybody interested in preserving the democratic pasts of educational policies and practices which are in danger of being lost or discarded. Taking its reference from a wide range of hauntological studies of time across the arts and humanities, Justine Gronbaek Pors has animated what is at stake, personally and politically, in our increasingly performance-measured educational cultures. Through a fascinating hauntological ethnographic analysis, the book brings to life distant pasts and ghostly figures, that haunt and unsettle the injunction of constant change and renewal, which has become a mantra of neoliberal practices shaping worker subjectivities. This book demands to be read across a wide range of disciplines, and fields, including organisational studies, affect studies, body studies, educational studies, and critical studies of governance and regulation. Through a combination of inventive concepts, affectively charged scenes, methodological innovation, and hauntological storytelling, the author does justice to hauntological social studies of the present that listen, attend to, and can help us to preserve and keep alive democratic pasts as future possibilities", Prof Lisa Blackman, Goldsmiths, University of London.

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