A ghostly encounter and the questions we might learn from it

ABSTRACT

This paper takes a point of departure in a ghost story. Two social workers working in a community house in Copenhagen have both encountered a ghost. The first part of the paper wonders about the kinds of questions that are tempting to ask when listening to a ghost story as well as about how more careful questioning may allow organization studies to learn from ghostly encounters. Listening to what the two social workers have experienced, the paper identifies four sets of questions that the ghostly encounter may offer to organization studies, namely questions about inheritance, what it means to feel at home in an organization, temporality and affect. Thereafter, the paper discusses how organizational inquiries that are attentive to ghostly matters may look like.

KEYWORDS:

• Ghost
• affect
• temporality
• uncanny
• ghostly encounter
• inheritance

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Carolyn Hunter and Lynne Baxter for their subtle, yet caring and courageous manner of making this paper happen. I also want to thank Tim Edensor for the wise guidance he gave me on how to write about ghosts while walking around a cemetery in Copenhagen in pouring rain in the spring of 2016.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).