As we have seen in the context of this rich, edited volume, numerous ways are possible for the exploration of organization as time and the political description of this process as power, emancipation or ethics. A politics of time, at the intersection of critical management studies and process studies, is particularly promising. In this short conclusion, we would like to invite Management and Organization Studies (MOS) researchers to explore five continents: digitality, narrativity, materiality, time-space and subjectivity as five promising ways to think of a politics of organization as time.

Firstly, digitality, in particular digital images (see Barker, 2012 and Chapter 1, this volume, or de Vaujany, 2022a), are more and more central to our ways of working and organizing. Beyond a new visuality, they often settle new temporalities for what is produced through their happening, and these new temporalities also correspond to new forms of power, of agencement, of violences, of state domination.

As Virginia Woolf put it, clocks are machines that strike time. To strike is to hit, but also to found or yield, and in periodically referring to the bell Big Ben marking the hours in her novel Mrs Dalloway, Woolf attends to this intimacy between organization, sound and time passing. As the quarter hours are struck the civic, commercial, ritual and domestic rhythms of London unfold with a distinct yet mutually accommodating order.

Chapter 11 returns to the beginning by revising the arguments on negativity made by Adorno and Agamben, as well as George Spencer Brown’s language of distinctions and of the nothing to help formulate this sense of renewed strategic need for both in-forming and un-informing. It is not much that we offer by way of a way out, but that is the point; it must remain in an uneasy and slightly impoverished space if it is to survive, it is strategy from the shadow.

Chapter 2 turns to the role of language in the context of strategy, specifically investigating how rhetoric and persuasion can open and close spaces for the airing of opinions freely amongst speakers. It is in creating and expressing opinion (and not truth) in the polis – the space of appearances – that the question of who one is receives its full disclosure. We then turn to the appearance of strategy in ancient Greece, first in the figure of Pericles, then Alcibiades, and in particular the latter’s skilful performances in the polis, and a gifted if contested career blighted, we suggest, by a failure to apprehend the distinction between the polis (rhetoric) and oikos (sophistry and instrumentality). The failure of Alcibiades also hints at some of the difficulties of language as the means of self-disclosure and so also for Arendt’s idealized association of action with talk, for it is in Alcibiades’ struggle as a strategos that opinion becomes twisted into event: Things get done, even if the action is consumed by failure and ruin. The case of Alcibiades takes us from talk to the body, and back to the polis in which the everyday is suspended so that action, freed from instrumentality, can occur and recur, each time alive and enlivening.

Introduction: ‘Strategy and as the basic question of organization?’ provides an overview of ideas, themes and concepts that find fuller exploration in subsequent chapters. We set the scene by considering the grounding importance of strategy as an organizational practice: enacting the struggle to see outside the measured orbits by which sight is habitually and theoretically confined to a representation.

Chapter 7 begins the task of unpacking contemporary information technologies. Taking leave from Soshana Zuboff’s critique of surveillance capitalism, we suggest a further step beyond anthropocentric ideas of control. We discuss how organizational forms such as platforms and systems like Enterprise Resource Planning products, have come to ‘run’ organizations, but in ways that also extend, replace and veil human cognition, in often imperceptibly powerful ways. And yet, these widely connected networks, the computational apparatuses, intelligent algorithms and digital media are fundamentally indifferent to what they ‘replace’. They no longer bring anything near, moreover there is no-one to whom such pictures and things can be brought. Agency, not just human agency, but all agency, is dissipated into brief small blips.

Chapter 8 broaches our understanding of communication systems and their intimacy with strategic practice. Beginning with the general (strategist) Napoleon’s forms of communication–technological warfare and the subsequent reliance on innovation in communication devices, especially those of coding and decoding communications in military conflicts, we consider the workings and implications of electronic, digital computing systems for strategy. Via Alan Turing’s Imitation Game, we introduce the debate on the nature of intelligence, consciousness and conscience (self-awareness), setting the scene for an elaboration on the development from cybernetics to contemporary machine-learning algorithms in the subsequent chapter.

Chapter 4 presents the epoch of technē, which is marked by the play of the fickleness of nature, luck (tuchē) and the fragility of early human stratagems. Technē is both a means of controlling the world, as well as one of violence. Indicated by humble and pre-scientific inventions such as the almanack, they allow little gains to be wrest from an otherwise unforgiving surround by knowing when to sow or harvest in accordance with the almanack’s alignment of experiential, mythical and cosmological clues. The epoch of technē is characterized by an intimacy between humans and their surroundings, the term planning itself finding its roots in the way in which seedlings are pushed into the ground by a farmer’s foot. But there is also violence; both imposed on the human body, whose shape is bent and twisted, ground down and severed by the acts of labour and the growing numbers of devices that extend human reach; as well upon nature, which becomes a place in need of taming and cultivating; cutting, slicing, ploughing, killing and using.