The worldwide spread of work-related mental unhealth suggests that this is a major problem affecting organizations and employees on a global scale. In this paper, we therefore provide a thematic review of the literatures that address this issue in management and organization studies (MOS) and related fields. While these literatures examine how employee mental health is affected by organizational and occupational structures and managed by organizations and employees, they have paid relatively little attention to the capitalist labour relations which underpin the unhealthy conditions of contemporary working life. They have paid even less attention to how these conditions may be resisted. To help future scholarship in MOS challenge this state of affairs, we draw on some of the most basic but central notions of exploitation, alienation and resistance in classic and current critiques of capitalism, optimistic that this may help strengthen the field's capacity to confront mental unhealth in settings of work and organization.

When inviting contributions to a special issue of this journal titled ‘Management Learning and the Unsettled Humanities’ the guest editors did not simply encourage contributors to explore possibilities ‘for reciprocal integration’ between the two realms. Stressing that ‘the humanities . . . [are] facing a complex crisis on their own’, they stated that ‘the humanities . . . need to be enriched, nuanced, and critiqued through . . . the ideas and perspectives of organisational research’. While we may agree that all is not well in the humanities and share their scepticism towards ‘just prescribing the value of the humanities to ameliorate the ills of management education’, we are less confident that the humanities need management learning as much as we need them. As long as learning and scholarship in management and organisation studies continues to suffer from too much management, we doubt that ‘management education [may help] . . . unsettl[e] . . . the human within the . . . humanistic . . . disciplines’. Rather, students of management and organisation still have plenty to learn from the humanities, not least from its rich portrayal of human lives. It is on this basis we draw the conclusion that the humanities are not our patient.

In this chapter we articulate a concept of affective leadership based on the capacity to increase our collective powers of action. We show how leaderless movements and organizations can foster their participants’ powers of action by cultivating active affects which are independent of individual leaders. Although the effectiveness of leaderless organizations and movements has already been subject to some discussion, the present chapter explains their power in terms of their ethical and affective constitution, revealing the possible intertwining of care and justice without leaders.

In this introductory essay, we outline the relationship between political dissensus and radical democracy, focusing especially on how such a politics might inform the study of business ethics. This politics is located historically in the failure of liberal democracy to live up to its promise, as well as the deleterious response to that from reactionary populism, strong-man authoritarianism, and exploitative capitalism. In the context of these political vicissitudes, we turn to radical democracy as a form of contestation that offers hope in an affirmative, inclusive and sustainable alternative. On this basis we introduce the papers in the special issue as a collective exploration of the ethics and politics of radical democracy as manifesting in dissensus and the subversion of corporate and elite power by alternative democratic practices and realities.

Many western countries are increasingly dependent on the wealth generated by fashion companies while emerging economies such as Bangladesh and Vietnam are dependent on the jobs produced through the manufacturing of garments for fashion companies. And while women in western countries remain the main targets of fashion, its artefacts and images cannot be produced without the labour of underpaid women – whether sweatshop garment workers or under-aged models, many of whom are exploited and exchangeable. This chapter connects the separate worlds of fashion image and the reality of textile and modelling labour by exploring how fashion imagery is imbricated in the organization of its production process.

Mainstream ideas of strategy are aimed at gaining and maintaining power. In contrast, the work of Deleuze and Guattari is directed against the concentration of corporate and state power and capitalist forms of exploitation. Their writings provide us with valuable concepts for understanding the workings of strategy and exploring creative ways through which strategy can be re-evaluated and subverted. This paper develops three of Deleuze and Guattari’s main concepts for understanding the strategic movements within contemporary capitalism: i) nomadic strategy, ii) deterritorialization, and iii) the occupation of smooth space. It then uses these concepts to explain the rise of new strategies in the domains of the news media, the music industry and the Occupy movement, which attempt to subvert corporate forms of exploitation. This radically challenges existing processual notions of strategy that have an underlying conservative bias, as well as other popular conceptions of strategy like Porter’s management of “barriers to entry”.

This article addresses the fundamental question of what is ethical leadership by rearticulating relations between leaders and followers in terms of affective leadership. The article develops a Spinozian conception of ethics which is underpinned by a deep suspicion of ethical systems that hold obedience as a primary virtue. We argue that the existing research into ethical leadership tends to underplay the ethical capacities of followers by presuming that they are in need of direction or care by morally superior leaders. In contrast, affective leadership advocates a profoundly political version of ethics, which involves people in the pursuit of joyful encounters that augment our capacity to affect and be affected by others. Instead of being led by people in leadership positions, we are led by active affections that enhance our capacity for moral action.

Current approaches to the study of affective relations are over-determined in a way that ignores their radicality, yet abstracted to such an extent that the corporeality and differentially lived experience of power and resistance is neglected. To radicalize the potential of everyday affects, this article calls for an intensification of corporeality in affect research. We do this by exploring the affective trajectory of ‘becoming-woman’ introduced by Deleuze and Guattari. Becoming-woman is a process of gendered deterritorialization and a specific variation on becoming-minoritarian. Rather than a reference to empirical women, becoming-woman is a necessary force of critique against the phallogocentric powers that shape and constrain working lives in gendered organizations. While extant research on gendered organizations tends to focus on the overwhelming power of oppressive gender structures, engaging with becoming-woman releases affective flows and possibilities that contest and transgress the increasingly subtle and confusing ways in which gendered organization affects people at work. Through becoming-woman, an affective and affirmative politics capable of resisting the effects of gendered organization becomes possible. This serves to further challenge gendered oppression in organizations and to affirm a life beyond the harsh limits that gender can impose.