Organizations seem to be ever more obsessed with renewal and transformation. In public and private organizations alike, change has become the key imperative. People must work in new, innovative, and flexible ways, and even renew and develop themselves, identifying with and embodying the desire for constant change. However, what happens to the ideas, values, roles, and practices that become superfluous when organizations move on to the new? Perhaps we can understand organizations as a dense site where layers of meaning, struggle, and affect accumulate? Despite attempts to change, improve, and renovate, organizations might be inhabited by remnants of former purposes, outdated working routines, long- gone ideals, and ways of knowing no longer in use. In this book, I raise questions about how those things that are discarded, submerged, or repressed might linger as a sort of ghostly memory of an organization, institution, or vocation. I am interested in what it means to inherit from previous generations of workers and in exploring how encounters with ghostly remnants open possibilities of other, alternative futures.

The book is about vocational work, specifically work in education. Educational institutions have a long and rich history of pedagogical thinking, knowledge, and practice, yet in recent decades one reform has hastily replaced the other. As many studies have shown, during the last decades, several comprehensive reforms have been formulated and implemented as education has been cast as a means to achieve a competitive labour market; this has taken place in the context of an emerging international policy field led by actors such as the Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development (OECD; see, for example, Ozga et al, 2011; Lawn and Grek, 2012;