Through the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement, the idea of horizontal, leaderless organization has come to the attention of the mass media. In this article we explore radical, participative-democratic alternatives to leadership through an empirical study of four Social Movement Organizations (SMOs). Whilst there has been some writing on leadership within SMOs, it has mirrored the ‘mainstream’ assumption that leadership is the product of individual leaders possessing certain traits, styles and/or behaviours. In contrast, critical leadership studies (CLS) recognize that leadership is a relational, socially constructed phenomenon rather than the result of a stable set of leadership attributes that inhere in ‘the leaders’. We utilize this framing to analyse how leadership is understood and performed in anarchist SMOs by examining how actors manage meaning and define reality without compromising the ideological commitments of their organizations. Furthermore, we also pay attention to the organizational practices and processes developed to: (a) prohibit individuals from permanently assuming a leadership role; (b) distribute leadership skills and roles; and (c) encourage other actors to participate and take-up these roles in the future. We conclude by suggesting that just because an organization is leaderless, it does not necessarily mean that it is also leadershipless.

This paper reframes the notion of work/life balance through analysis of branding and the immaterial labour process in a "new age capitalist" organization. The company does not manufacture material products; rather, value is produced through branding imported goods to promote "alternative" ways of living. This is achieved through incorporation of leisure activities and lifestyles of key employees, effectively putting their "lives" to "work" in the creation of value for the company. For employees, therefore, much work actually takes place notionally outside or on the margins of their formally employed space and time. We argue that this qualitatively transforms the conceptions of, and relations between, work and life that underpin the concept of work/life balance. We conclude by exploring the tensions generated by organizational incorporation of employee autonomy in the pursuit of aspirational branding. KEY WORDSauthenticity / branding / identity / New Age capitalism / work/life balance

In this paper we develop a particular way of understanding literature and organization with the aim of drawing on and extending the relationship between the two. Hence our subtitle: exploring the seam. Although the use of literary concepts and theories within our discipline is now well established, the way in which such ideas are taken up often neglects debate and contestation by treating 'literature' as a relatively homogeneous field. By following some of the ardent debates relating to issues of representation, the relation between text and extra-textual reality, and literature's disclosure of its status as fiction, we find a discussion of (social) organization at the heart of contemporary literary theory. It is the oscillation between literature and organization that structures this paper and gives us our argument: that 'organization' and 'literature' are mutually co-articulating and interdependent concepts and fields of enquiry.

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In this paper we explore how so-called 'social media' such as Facebook challenge Marxist organization studies. We argue that understanding the role of user activity in web 2.0 business models requires a focus on 'work', understood as value productive activity, that takes place beyond waged labour in the firm. A reading of Marx on the socialization of labour highlights the emerging figure of 'free labour', which is both unpaid and uncoerced. Marxist work on the production of the 'audience commodity' provides one avenue for understanding the production of content and data by users as free labour, but this raises questions concerning the distinction between productive and unproductive labour which is central to Marx's labour theory of value. The Marxist literature on 'the becoming rent of profit' allows for a partial understanding of how the value produced by free labour is captured, thereby developing the understanding of the economic dimension of 'free labour' as unpaid. It overstates, however, the 'uncontrolled' side of 'free labour', and neglects the ways in which this work is managed so as to ensure that it is productive. We therefore call for a return to Marxist labour process analysis, albeit with an expanded focus on labour and a revised understanding of control associated with digital protocols. On this basis, a Marxist organization studies can contribute to an understanding of the political economy of digital capitalism.