Dis/continuity and dis/organizing effects: Exploring absent presences in educational change projects

This article aims to contribute to the understanding of the temporal aspect of dis/organization by focusing on dis/continuity in the context of organizational change projects. Based on an ethnographic study of a local change project in a school reform context, the analysis explores how absent presences and affects emerge, intensify, and create unintended disorganizing effects. Building on a conceptual framework from Barad, which frames change as a reconfiguration of time-space entanglement, we point to the dynamic relation between continuity and discontinuity as key to understanding the complexity of organizational change projects in an educational context.