Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Organizational resistance and alternative forms of organizing are both enabled and constrained by legal systems (Ewick & Silbey, 2003). Yet law itself remains underexamined in organizational scholarship—an omission that is striking given its central role in critical analyses of power, agency, and responsibility (Arendt, 2006; Butler, 1997; Derrida, 1990; Foucault, 2012; Unger, 1983). In this sub-theme, we take seriously the legal and organizational nexus. We examine how law functions not only as a constraint but also as a mode of organizing, a system of meaning, and a potential terrain of contestation.

The Law, Resistance, and Performative Exclusions:

From Franz Kafka’s The Trial to Sara Ahmed’s Complaint, we are reminded of the messy entanglements of law and organization. Efforts to reimagine entrenched ecocidal, patriarchal, and colonial structures rely heavily on supportive legal frameworks (Vijay et al., 2025). Yet the legal is no guarantee of justice; it can reinforce abstract, inaccessible, and depersonalized organizational and institutional systems that both absorb and nullify individual and collective resistance. Contemporary “lawfare” tactics see organizations deploying legal logics to discipline dissent and dismantle alternatives (Kenny et al., 2025; Munro et al., 2025; Pagan, 2023). Against such attacks, critics resort to legal defenses: human rights frameworks, free speech, and whistleblowing protection laws.

Legal frameworks play an ambivalent role: both enabling and foreclosing resistance and imagination (Butler, 2016). Across the world, legal pressures on academics working on politically sensitive issues reveal how hate-speech definitions and institutional procedures can be weaponized to suppress dissent (Butler, 2025). In response, scholars rely on legal and quasi-legal protections such as academic freedom (Täuber, 2026). Such examples illustrate law’s ambivalent role as both a shield and a sword in struggles over whose voices are granted legitimacy and which bodies have the capacity to challenge.

Legal frameworks are contested terrains—sites of performative struggle over whose lives are worthy of justice (Fricker, 2007). Gender, race, and other intersectional dimensions shape whose claims are speakable and what forms of dissent are intelligible within institutional life (Butler & Athanasiou, 2013; Tyler, 2019). In this framing, law is never simply a backdrop; it is an active participant in the production and regulation of organizational and organized life.

Outside the Law: Civil Disobedience and Decolonial Prefigurative Legal Practices Supporting Alternative Organizing.

Civil disobedience within organizations involves actors knowingly violating legal norms to pursue broader ethical or democratic principles. Whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg cited civil disobedience to mobilize networks, disrupt institutional orders, and reframe organizational legitimacy (Munro et al., 2025; Pozen, 2020). Their actions ignited global debates about surveillance, secrecy, and accountability, resulting in concrete change while also challenging the assumption that legality equals legitimacy. How can organization studies better understand such radical “resistance from within,” and what do these actions mean for legal transgression in organizational life?

In Latin America, as elsewhere, decolonial and Indigenous resistance movements use mock tribunals and symbolic quasi-legal processes to challenge dominant organizational and legal orders (Barros & Rose, 2025). Prefigurative events and spaces such as the Tribunal de los Pueblos (People’s Tribunals) mobilize alternative legal imaginaries to “convict” corporations and states for environmental destruction, extractive violence, and human rights abuses (Icaza, 2015). Far from mere performative critique, such grassroots movements enact counter-hegemonic legal orders, while challenging colonial legal systems and the epistemic authority of state law, that fail to protect communities or ecosystems (Daher et al., 2026; de Sousa Santos, 2005). Spaces are created for organizational forms grounded in Indigenous legal traditions, cosmologies, and collective memory (Peredo, 2023). How might organization scholars take these practices and prefigurative spaces seriously as organizing interventions that build alternative legal structures and tools?

Similarly, interdisciplinary legal fields such as Business and Human Rights focus “not [on] the laws but the movements behind them” (Wettstein, 2021). Research on grassroots organizing highlights what makes legal systems possible—or impossible—in a given context (Schrempf-Stirling et al., 2022). These settings in which legal systems are simultaneously valid and suspended are critical to examine. In such environments, legal void zones emerge in which those who implement the laws are, by definition, temporarily exempt from accountability (Agamben, 2008). Such perspectives can illuminate how legality is enacted, contested, and strategically undone in organizational life.

Our Sub-theme Call:

Law is a powerful yet understudied force in organizational life: while it can enable resistance and radical alternatives, it just as often suppresses them. This sub-theme invites scholars to take seriously the legal–organizational nexus, examining law not only as a constraint but as a mode of organizing, a system of meaning, and a vital terrain of contestation. We invite empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions that consider issues such as (but not limited to):

• How people in and around organizations, in adhering to legal frameworks, reproduce structural violence under the guise of procedural legitimacy.

• Individual and organizational resistance to dominant and oppressive legal structures, including actors working within organizations and outside the legal system through civil disobedience, and non-violent extra-legal activism.

• The alternatives emerging when the law is simply unworkable, such as non-traditional justice frameworks that welcome and sustain different procedures and perspectives on justice, including international frameworks (human rights, Indigenous sovereignty), and People’s Law.

• Global South and North perspectives on law and resistance—how do these differ, and what does this reveal about the geopolitics of legal legitimacy and organizational voice? How do transnational institutional and organizational legal systems silence, repress, or enable local frameworks?

• Which groups are most vulnerable to exclusion by formal legal systems, and how is this exclusion normalized or occluded as well as resisted in organizational life?

• Law as a form of organizing—how do legal practices, frameworks, and imaginaries themselves constitute organizational forms and logics?
   

Sub-theme Format and Engagement

This sub-theme will be held in an in-person format and structured to foster critical dialogue, cross-disciplinary engagement, and collaborative inquiry. We especially encourage contributions from scholars working in feminist studies, critical legal studies, political theory, social movement studies, postcolonial studies, and decolonial thought, alongside those in organization studies. We welcome empirical case studies, theoretical interventions, methodological innovations, and reflective pieces.
 

• Agamben, G. (2008). State of exception. University of Chicago Press.
• Arendt, H. (2006). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. Penguin.
• Barros, M., & Rose, J. (2025). Decolonial social movements as translators: Converting prefigurative initiatives into political and legal change tools. Organization, 32(3), 434–463. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084231213201
• Butler, J. (1997). Excitable speech. Routledge.
• Butler, J. (2016). Frames of war: When is life grievable? Verso.
• Butler, J. (2025, September 13). When universities become informants: A practice from the McCarthy era makes an ugly return. The Chronicle of Higher Education.
• Butler, J., & Athanasiou, A. (2013). Dispossession: The performative in the political. Polity.
• Daher, S., Koziclã-Patté, L., & Tupari, M. L. (2026). ‘The mother of all struggles’: Indigenous womens’ development of the BHR framework. In J. Pirini, S. Cummings, & A. M. Peredo (Eds.) Indigenous management knowledges & frameworks (. Sage.
• Derrida, J. (1990). Force of Law : The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”. Cardozo Law Review, 11(5-6), Article 2.
• de Sousa Santos, B. (2005). The counter-hegemonic use of law in the struggle for a globalization from below. Anales de la Cátedra Francisco Suárez, 39, 421–474.
• Ewick, P., & Silbey, S. (2003). Narrating social structure: Stories of resistance to legal authority. American Journal of Sociology, 108(6), 1328–1372.
• Foucault, M. (2012). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage.
• Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press.
• Icaza, R. (2015). The Permanent People’s Tribunals and indigenous people’s struggles in Mexico: Between coloniality and epistemic justice? Palgrave Communications, 1, Article 15020. https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2015.20
• Kenny, K., Smolović Jones, N., Guschke, L., & Vachhani, S. (2025). ‘You can’t buy my silence’: Five lessons on resistance and organizational silence amidst the expanding use of non-disclosure agreements. Organization. Advance online publication.
• Munro, I., Kenny, K., & Fotaki, M. (2025). Perspectives on whistleblowing. Bristol University Press.
• Pagan, V. (2023). 21st century bridling: Non-disclosure agreements in cases of organizational misconduct. Human Relations, 76(11), 1827–1851.
• Peredo, A. M. (2023). The unsettling potential of Indigenous organizing. Organization, 30(6), 1211–1221.
• Pozen, D. (2020). Coda: Edward Snowden, national security whistleblowing and civil disobedience. In K. Mistry & H. Gurman (Eds.), Whistleblowing nation: The history of national security disclosure and the cult of state secrecy (pp. 327–348). Columbia University Press.
• Schrempf-Stirling, J., Van Buren, H. J., III, & Wettstein, F. (2022). Human rights: A promising perspective for business and society. Business & Society, 61(5), 1282–1321.
• Täuber, S. (2026). Erasing critical scholarship: How attacks on academic freedom undermine democracy. Organization. Advance online publication.
• Tyler, M. (2019). Judith Butler and organization theory. Routledge.
• Unger, R. M. (1983). The critical legal studies movement. Harvard Law Review, 96(3), 561–675.
• Vijay, D., Berkowitz, H., Huybrechts, B., Audebrand, L., Barros, M., & Fotaki, M. (2025). Another world is possible, it’s already here: A review and research agenda on alternative organizing. Academy of Management Annals. Advance online publication.
• Wettstein, F. (2021). Betting on the wrong (Trojan) horse: CSR and the implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Business and Human Rights Journal, 6(2), 312–325.