Cities and organisation: The information city and urban form

Abstract

What happens when we take ‘the city’ as a site of organization? The implications of posing this question perhaps explain why it has not formed part of the traditional epistemic apparatus of the organization studies community with its disciplinary claim to distinction and expertise. Analysts have a tendency to get lost in the city: the traditional modes of classification and organization that posit an object/subject, or structure/agent, tend to flounder when trying to come to terms with organizational features of the city. This editorial paper sets out a case for treating the city not as another object of attention for organization theorists in that all too familiar additive mode that recites ‘Organization Studies and ….’ (in this case ‘The City’). Rather we want to think about how cities and urban forces could be the site for an ongoing re‐evaluation of the way in which organization theorists can engage with questions of social and cultural transformation. Collectively, these papers challenge us to go beyond seeing cities as simply the outcome of a will to order and the excess that this produces. Instead they ask us to open ourselves up to new forms of organization which, in this special issue, we have just begun to sense and imagine.

Keywords:

• the city
• urban
• information
• Latour
• Kittler

Notes

1. There are of course problems with using this term, evoking, as it does, a genealogy of work in sociology that tends to reify the notion of structure and to oppose structure to the concept of agency. We offer the term ‘structure’ as a tentative characterisation of the form that organisation takes through the practical activities of its members with the proviso that the problem of its reification will be one that is familiar to scholarship in organisation studies.

2. Also see Toulmin (1992) for a thought experiment on what might have happened had Montaigne, and not Descartes, provided the model for the organisation of urban life.