Since the mid 1980s, organization theorists have highlighted the emergence of the networked model of organization as a response to global competition and pressures for increased market flexibility. Cultural industries have not been immune from this development. In this paper, we examine the shift from hierarchy to network in the U.K. television industry. We argue that an important result of this disaggregation is the emergence of latent organization, groupings of individuals and teams of individuals that persist through time and are periodically drawn together for recurrent projects by network brokers who either buy in programmes for publisher-broadcasters or who draw together those artists and technicians who actually produce them. In conclusion, we note how latent organizations may become increasingly important for effective cultural industry production, and in particular how they may provide stable points of reference and recurring work projects for those many individuals now working outside of large, vertically integrated producer-broadcasters.

This article uses an examination of the changing nature of organization in the UK television industry to reflect on the impact of liminality on learning. We take as our starting point Garsten's (1999) use of the term 'liminality' (being situated 'betwixt and between') to examine individual and organizational learning in the context of organizational recomposition, where learning increasingly occurs at the limits of organizations within networks and teams that cross organizational divides. Garsten argues that the contractualization of work can be seen to challenge the old boundaries of organization and that it suggests new ways of organizing and experiencing work. By extending liminality to the concept of learning, we suggest that as more industries adopt temporary project teams as a way of organizing work, this not only challenges the concept of organization as an enduring social artefact, but also raises issues about how learning and knowledge development takes place. We examine the effects of liminal episodes on learning, both for organizations and individuals, in a context where the old limits of organization are being redefined while new ways of organizing are throwing up their own learning challenges. We suggest that it is crucial to explore how, in a more transient organizational context arising from the greater use of temporary teams, individualized careers, fashioned out of liminality, impact upon organizational learning.

It is ironic that at a moment in history when the business school seems to be enjoying unparalleled success, the role of the business school is being increasingly questioned by some of its leading professors. We examine the debate about the business school and its evolution. While sympathetic to the criticisms levied against the business school we nevertheless suggest a positive future if the business school can build upon its potentially unique position as knowledge space.

This paper develops an argument that leads to a vision of management research as a form of design science. Such an approach to research requires an inversion of the relationship between rigour and relevance. Giving primacy to the pursuit of rigour, as tends to be the current norm, de-emphasizes the importance of relevance and leads to research that interests very few beyond the community of management scholars. We argue that we should re-imagine relevance as a necessary condition for rigour and that this will lead to new forms of engagement with theory and practice that have the potential to create a new science of management.Where one stands in the rigour-relevance debate depends how one defines both 'rigour' and 'relevance' and how one conceptualizes the relationship between them. Kieser and Leiner (2009) explore a space composed of two areas -the world of research and the world of practice -separated by a gap. The core of their argument is that this gap is unbridgeable and that rigour and relevance are incommensurable. If we were to build bridges, there is the danger that we would sell out to practice, go over to the 'dark side', become consultants and/or get too close to commerce. Those who have striven to create bridges to carry the relevance-inclined into new pastures rich in practice have indeed found that the bridge is either very fragile or that others, some among the leaders in our field, are only too ready to deconstruct attempts at passage (Weick, 2001).Our response to Kieser and Leiner's paper mixes philosophy and politics. In our exploration of the rigour-relevance relationship we address issues of epistemology (the idea of science and of objective knowledge) and political economy (who defines research agendas). We finish our paper by presenting a vision of management research as a design science, the practice of which depends upon reimagining relevance as a necessary condition for rigour. We begin the paper with a critical consideration of rigour and of the idea of science.