Issue editors: Morten Knudsen, Tore Bakken and Justine Grønbæk Pors
The purpose of this special issue of ephemera is to explore the potential of theorizing and unpacking analytically the role of ignorance in contemporary organizations. We are particularly interested in conceptual development and empirical studies that go beyond an understanding of ignorance as something performed by individuals and explore the practices, techniques, artefacts, affects, infrastructures and different organisational rationalities involved in organized ignorance.
The concept of ignorance may help us conceptualize phenomena that are otherwise difficult to grasp. Simmel talks about trust being an intermediate state between knowledge and non-nonknowledge (1992: 393). This intermediate state is, we claim, also a zone of ignorance. It is a zone of hunches, suspicions and sensations but also of denial, repression and tactful inattention. It is a zone of potential but un-actualised issues, of ambiguity and uncertainty. It is the zone of pretending... more
