Reopening the Field: Reading/Writing Robert Cooper Today

Robert Cooper (1931-2013) is well-known in organization studies, especially among scholars with an interest in poststructuralism and process theory. He is especially recognized for his work on ‘organization/disorganization’ and, together with Gibson Burrell, for introducing postmodernism and poststructuralism to the study of organizations in the late 1980s (e.g. Cooper, 1986; Cooper, 1989; Cooper and Burrell, 1988). The broad impact he has had on organization theory is evidenced by ephemera’s early special issue ‘Responding: To Cooper’ (Böhm and Jones, 2001), as well as by two books edited by Robert Chia (1998a; 1998b), a collection of seminal papers (Burrell and Parker, 2016), and a recent special issue of ephemera on disorder and disorganization (Plotnikof et al., 2022). Cooper’s work is interesting not only for its theoretically rich content but also for its dense and poetic style of writing, which often defies contemporary expectations of what a typical journal article ought to look like.