The need for fresh blood: understanding organizational age inequality through a vampiric lens

YesThis article argues that older age inequality within and across working life is the result of vampiric forms and structures constitutive of contemporary organizing. Rather than assuming ageism occurs against a backdrop of neutral organizational processes and practices, the article denaturalizes (and in the process super-naturalizes) organizational orientations of ageing through three vampiric aspects: (un)dying, regeneration and neophilia. These dimensions are used to illustrate how workplace narratives and logics normalize and perpetuate the systematic denigration of the ageing organizational subject. Through our analysis it is argued that older workers are positioned as inevitable ‘sacrificial objects’ of the all-consuming immortal organization. To challenge this, the article explicitly draws on the vampire and the vampiric in literature and popular culture to consider the possibility of subverting existing notions of the ‘older worker’ in order to confront and challenge the subtle and persistent monstrous discourses that shape organizational life

"Crime and the Sublime"

The fiction of detective fiction is an alibi to conceal the actual impact of the other narrative, the sublime, the underground river of crime fiction. This force pre-existed detective fiction, is in many ways foreclosed, but enduringly remains the dynamo of threat and nxiety that both drives the narrative of crime and insistently demands its euphemisations. The articles assembled in this issue of "La Questione Romantica" ("Crime and the Sublime") explore some facets of the complex relations between crime and the sublime, investigating texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their aim is to reconnect the development of detective fiction to the territory of gothic fiction, showing that this primitive need to represent the fearful and the uncanny actually survived the birth of the detective. The ensuing genre owed its sucess precisely to the tension between the rendering of oneiric 'night fears' and the need for closure that marks the triumph not only of justice over crime but also of rationality over the unconscious