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date: 17 April 2021

Abstract and Keywords

The ‘desk’ is an assemblage intimately related to organization and organizing. It is a ‘comprehensive architectonic of social order’, both in its material forms and in its mediation of social relations in which particular forms of knowledge and power have become deeply embedded within the modern world. However, the desk reveals not a fixed contribution to modernity but an ever-changing reflection of multiple significances in different times and at different places. So it would be foolish to fully accept the contemporary rhetoric of the death of the desk, an object placed at the very centre of material and epistemological concerns for centuries and still playing its part.

Keywords: desk, organization, bureaucracy, Weber, writing, post-bureaucratic, desktops, technology

Karen Dale

Professor of Organization Studies, Lancaster University Management School, UK

Gibson Burrell

Professor of Organization Theory, School of Business, University of Leicester, UK and University of Manchester, UK

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