We have always been modern(ist)

In organisation studies, objects have been analysed as actors that enable sense to be made of organisational reality. We expand on this literature by exploring the times of the modernist design firm through its iconic chairs, using archival and contemporary ethnography to study timeless design. We suggest that studies of organisational times that focus on selectivity in organisational memory or history can be augmented through a detailed study of the folding of pasts, presents and futures into objects. Furthermore, we advocate for the treatment of objects as material semiotic actors that participate in the construction of organisational times, with iconic chairs acting as disruptors of otherwise linear organisational times. As material semiotic actors, these objects do not enable a single organisational time, but instead participate in disrupting time, deny any possibility of a pure and linear form of time, continuing to provoke the organisation and its members

Design, national imaginaries, and the home furnishings commodity chain

This paper introduces the concept of national imaginaries as a means of foregrounding the continuing influence of ideas about the nation on understandings of commodity production and circulation. National imaginaries are of crucial importance to the home furnishings commodity network, flowing across sites of consumption, retailing, design, and production. Drawing upon the findings of a larger cross-national research project, the paper discusses three cases in which the characterisation of distinctive national design identities was particularly prominent. These include the representation of designers in the UK and Canada as "national heroes," and the tendency to measure British and Canadian design against a third national imaginary: that of Italy. A final case considers discursive constructions of national economic trajectories—of "success" or "failure"—within accounts of the British and Canadian furniture industries. It is argued that future work on the differentiating advantages, which may accrue to creative or cultural industries in particular localities, also should be attentive to the ways in which the place of the nation is used to construct imaginative geographies